Miami Jury Convicts Caribbean Drug Lord on Narcotics Charges

After six days of gripping testimony and four hours of deliberation, a Miami jury Tuesday convicted former U.S. federal witness Charles “Little Nut” Miller on narcotics charges, ending one of the most bizarre and long-running tales in America’s war on drugs.

The 12-member federal jury found Miller guilty of conspiring to send hundreds of pounds of Colombian cocaine from his native island of St. Kitts to the United States in the 1990s. His court-appointed defense attorney, John Howes, said he will appeal the verdict, which ends the reign of a wily drug lord turned informant turned drug lord who became U.S. law enforcement’s worst nightmare.

Miller spent hours on the witness stand trying to navigate loopholes in U.S. drug laws. He said he was merely a businessman--the “tax man,” he called himself--who took millions of dollars in “fees” from Colombian drug cartels for safeguarding cocaine shipments as they passed through tiny St. Kitts.

But Miller also claimed that the drugs were destined for Europe, not America, and that he thus violated no U.S. law. Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Killinger told the jury that Miller’s entire testimony was “absurd.”

Miller’s trial came nearly 11 years after he took the stand in a Miami federal court as the star witness against a vicious Jamaican drug gang blamed for nearly 1,000 murders from California to New York in the 1980s. He received broad protections and a new identity but left the country for St. Kitts in 1991 and returned to what prosecutors described as a life of mayhem. U.S. law enforcement officials said his intimate knowledge of the American justice system made him all the more dangerous.

In testimony last week, Clifford Henry, one of four men indicted in the 1994 conspiracy case, testified that Miller handcuffed, blindfolded and interrogated Vincent “Seko” Morris, the son of a former St. Kitts deputy prime minister, before fatally shooting him because “ ‘the boy knows too much.’ ” Miller flatly denied the accusation, suggesting that it was Henry who killed Morris.

“I cried. I pleaded with Mr. Miller. I begged Mr. Miller,” said Henry, who was convicted in an earlier trial and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“Mr. Miller pulled out his gun, and he shot Seko,” added Henry, who told the jury he decided to speak out for the first time in six years to clear his conscience. “He shot him in the head. And Iboo [Miller’s lieutenant, Kirk Hendrikson] shot the girl.”

The Oct. 2, 1994, slayings of Morris and his girlfriend, Joan Welch, were among more than half a dozen unsolved murders on St. Kitts that prosecutors claim were linked to Miller; local murder charges against Miller were dropped when the island’s prosecutors failed to show up at a preliminary inquiry in 1995.

Taken together, the U.S. prosecutors’ nine witnesses and 27 exhibits here cast the eastern Caribbean island, the larger part of St. Kitts and Nevis, as a land that Miller had corrupted and endangered while transforming it into his private drug fiefdom.

The testimony also sharply underscored concerns among some federal agencies that U.S. taxpayers paid and protected a man such as Miller, who a federal judge in the 1989 trial suggested was “worse than the people on trial.”

From the witness stand Monday, Miller, 40, confirmed much of his checkered past. After leaving St. Kitts for Jamaica at age 14, he said, he served as a political enforcer for then-U.S.-backed Jamaican Labor Party leader Edward Seaga in the 1970s, working for an armed street gang that intimidated voters and stuffed ballot boxes.

“We were trying to bring about a change of government,” said Miller, confirming that he also served time in Jamaica for armed robbery and assault with the intent to kill.

He testified that, with the help of the Labor Party, he escaped from prison and came to New York in the mid-1980s. He ran drug operations as a high-ranking member of the Shower Posse gang, known for spraying its victims with bullets in slayings that terrorized many American cities. The gang broke up after the 1989 Miami trial of its leaders, which featured Miller as the chief prosecution witness under his original name, Cecil Connor.

As a reward for his testimony, federal prosecutors gave Miller--who had spent two years in prison for a cocaine distribution conviction in New York--immunity, protection and a new identity as manager of a Domino’s Pizza parlor in Maine, Miller testified Monday.

Miller asserted that he left Maine in 1991 only after a group of Jamaicans recognized him; he claimed he fled for safety. But he conceded that he quickly went to work for St. Kitts’ biggest cocaine dealer, ultimately taking over his business.

In 1994, U.S. officials learned that cocaine was coming from St. Kitts into Miami via the air freight company Amerijet, U.S. Customs Service agent Rob Catterton testified last week, and again focused their attention on the witness who got away.

Miller consistently denied that he was the “boss” of a conspiracy to ship the cocaine through Amerijet to Miami, and spent years fighting a U.S. extradition effort.

At one point, Miller reportedly threatened to kill American medical students at a local college if the U.S. continued to pursue him.

Commenting on the case after Tuesday’s verdict, Frank Figueroa, chief of the Customs Service’s Miami office, praised the St. Kitts police for pursuing the case through extradition and trial.

As for the federal witness-protection program, Figueroa said: “In this case, it may not have worked out as well as it should have. You never have a crystal ball.

“But the important thing is Miller is no longer in a position to do anyone any harm.”

Miller’s sentencing is set for Feb. 13; he faces a term of life without parole. Glenroy Matthew, the last defendant in the case, remains free on the island--and on the Clinton administration’s list of 10 most wanted international drug dealers.