BASSETERRE, St. Kitts and Nevis — Back in the heady '70s, when alleged drug baron Charles "Little Nut" Miller was living in Jamaica's slums, he was Cecil Connor, a political enforcer.
That was more than a decade before the U.S. government indicted him, then protected him as a key federal witness who helped put two gang leaders in prison for life, only to have him emerge nearly a decade later as one of Washington's worst nightmares.
Today, Miller is the target of one of the U.S. Justice Department's most intensive and frustrating extradition efforts--a two-year court battle in this tiny Caribbean island nation that is made all the more confounding for U.S. law enforcement officials because, they acknowledge, Miller was once one of theirs.
Now an influential local soft-drink and chicken distributor, Miller is cast by U.S. official sources as an ingenious former federal witness-turned-fugitive who has learned the inner workings of U.S. anti-drug intelligence, law enforcement and judiciary.
It was a crash course that climaxed on the witness stand in January 1989 when, at age 28 and testifying for the U.S. government as Connor, he told a Miami federal jury his life's story.
Working for what he called "the underworld section" of Jamaica's Labor Party in Kingston, he stated, he stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated voters, shot and wounded a clerk during a robbery and spent years in prison.
He also testified, according to court records and documents, that he escaped the Jamaican prison using political connections in 1983 and came to the United States, where he became a trusted member of a brutal Jamaican drug gang known as the Shower Posse. The gang's trademark was spraying victims--from California to Miami to New York--with machine-gun fire, often killing and maiming bystanders.
As Connor, he told the jury, he smuggled marijuana and cocaine, attended gangland executions and laundered drug money.
"The only reason he stopped . . . was because he was put in jail in Jamaica. Then he escapes," defense attorney Seymour Gaer declared in the Miami courtroom as Connor testified that day for the prosecution. "And guess what happens? He follows the same criminal pattern."
Nine years later, in a criminal case filed in Miami, U.S. prosecutors and anti-drug agents accused Miller of following the same pattern.
