Message #42176

[Firefly]

Trio created mass market in U.S. for crack ****

by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News


If they'd been in a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes and "Freeway Rick" Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.


This odd trio - a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a ghetto teenager - made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill to get it: "crack" ****.


Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east as Cincinnati. Tomorrow, they hope, Freeway Rick will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.


But those same officials won't say a word about the two men who turned Rick Ross into L.A.'s first king of crack, the men who, for at least five years, supplied him with enough Colombian **** to help spawn crack markets in major cities nationwide. Their critical role in the country's crack explosion has been a strictly guarded secret.


To understand how crack came to curse black America, you have to go into the volcanic hills overlooking Managua, the capital of the Republic of Nicaragua.

Biggest military upset


During June 1979, those hills teemed with triumphant guerrillas called Sandinistas - Cuban-assisted revolutionaries who had just pulled off one of the biggest military upsets in Central American history. In a bloody civil war, they'd destroyed the U.S.-trained army of Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio Somoza.


In the dictator's doomed capital, a minor member of Somoza's government decided to skip the war's obvious ending. On June 19, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes gathered his wife and young daughter and flew into exile in California.


Today, Blandon is a well-paid and highly trusted operative for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Federal officials say he is one of the DEA's top informants in Latin America, collecting intelligence on Colombian and Mexican drug lords and setting up stings.


In March, he was the DEA's star witness at a drug trial in San Diego, where, for the first time, he testified publicly about his strange interlude between government jobs: the years he sold **** to the street gangs of black Los Angeles.


Blandon swore that he didn't plan on becoming a dope dealer when he landed in the United States with $100 in his pocket, seeking political asylum. He did it, he insisted, out of patriotism.


When duty called in late 1981, he was working as a car salesman in East Los Angeles. In his spare time, he said, he and a few fellow exiles were working to rebuild Somoza's defeated army, the Nicaraguan national guard, in hopes of one day returning to Managua in triumph.


But the rallies and cocktail parties the exiles hosted raised little money. "At this point, he became committed to raising money for humanitarian and political reasons via illegal activity (**** trafficking for profit)," said a heavily censored parole report, which surfaced during the March trial.


That venture began, Blandon testified, with a phone call from a wealthy college friend in Miami.


Blandon said his college chum, who also was working in the resistance movement, dispatched him to Los Angeles International Airport to pick up another exile, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Though their families were related, Blandon said, he'd never met Meneses until that day.


"I picked him up, and he started telling me that we had to (raise) some money and to send to Honduras," Blandon testified. He said he flew with Meneses to a camp there and met one of his new companion's old friends, Col. Enrique Bermudez.


Bermudez - who'd been Somoza's Washington liaison to the American military - was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency in mid-1980 to pull together the remnants of Somoza's vanquished national guard, records show. In August 1981, Bermudez's efforts were unveiled at a news conference as the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN) - in English, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force. It was the largest and best-organized of the handful of guerrilla groups known as the contras.


Bermudez was the FDN's military chief and, according to congressional records and newspaper reports, received regular CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped shortly before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991.