Trial Opens in Miami of Alleged Drug Lord

In the days before accused drug lord Charles “Little Nut” Miller surrendered to U.S. authorities last month in his native St. Kitts, he opened fire on a rival, threatened to drop a hand grenade down the pants of a local businessman and was caught by local police with an Uzi submachine gun and half a dozen fake or blank passports, prosecutors charged in Miami federal court Friday.

U.S. Magistrate Andrea Simonton then ordered the former federal star witness held without bail on drug charges. Miller, in his first formal hearing here since he testified against a vicious Jamaican drug gang and took shelter in the U.S. witness protection program a decade ago, said nothing before the judge’s decision.

Defense attorney Roy Black, who took over the case last month after the flamboyant Miller unsuccessfully tried to defend himself, asserted that the former soft-drink and chicken distributor should be released pending trial because he had come to the U.S. voluntarily Feb. 19.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Killinger countered: “Mr. Miller fought extradition for more than four years, and all of a sudden, unexpectedly, he waived extradition.” Miller, he added, probably “felt he had a better chance in the United States than he had in St. Kitts.”

Miller, in his previous identity as Cecil Connor, became what several U.S. officials called their worst nightmare: an ingenious witness-turned-fugitive with intimate knowledge of U.S. drug enforcement. After leaving America’s witness-protection program, U.S. prosecutors assert, he returned to the cocaine trade in the Caribbean resort nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

During the costly and prolonged U.S. extradition effort to get him back, Miller was acquitted in separate trials in St. Kitts on murder and jury-tampering charges, cases that involved the slaying of the son of a former deputy prime minister and the killing of the nation’s police superintendent.

Killinger quoted from one of the St. Kitts cases in U.S. District Court here Friday. He stated that on Oct. 12, 1994, Miller was overheard telling Jude Matthew, St. Kitts’ police superintendent, “Jude Matthew, you is a dead man tomorrow morning.”

The following morning, Killinger said, Matthew was shot nine times on his way to work.

The U.S. federal case against Miller alleges that he and three others conspired to use St. Kitts as a staging ground to smuggle half a ton of cocaine into Miami in 1994 using a commercial air-freight company.

One of the men indicted along with Miller was tried and convicted in the case in a 1996 trial that delved deeply into the St. Kitts slayings. Testimony here showed that the former official’s son was killed after he stole from Miller 1,000 pounds of the cocaine destined for the U.S.

Court records here indicate that the convicted co-defendant, Clifford Henry, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997, may be a key witness against Miller--a role that Miller himself used to avoid a lengthy jail term after he pleaded guilty to cocaine charges in 1986.

As Connor, Miller’s 1989 testimony helped convict several members of Jamaica’s notorious Shower Posse, a drug gang so named because it sprayed its victims with gunfire. U.S. authorities blamed the posse for as many as 1,000 killings throughout the United States in the 1980s.

But, in a case already rife with irony, one of the posse leaders who was extradited to the United States from Jamaica last year is now expected to be a witness against Miller.

Posse leader Vivian Blake, who pleaded guilty to drug charges in Miami federal court last month, has agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities in future drug prosecutions.