Drug Smuggling Nicaragua

The crack epidemic in Los Angeles followed no blueprint or master plan. It was not orchestrated by the Contras or the CIA or any single drug ring. No one trafficker, even the kingpins who sold thousands of kilos and pocketed millions of dollars, ever came close to monopolizing the trade.

A federal judge on Friday kept open the possibility that jailed drug dealer "Freeway" Ricky Ross could be granted a new trial, saying that a U.S. Justice Department probe into the ex-kingpin's 1996 conviction raised enough questions to merit further review. U.S.

An FBI forensics expert testified Tuesday in Los Angeles federal court that hair fibers found in the house where U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena was murdered matched hair samples taken from defendant Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros' head after his arrest. Matta is one of four men being tried in Camarena's abduction and murder. Matta, 45, contends that he was not at the house in Guadalajara, Mexico, where the agent was interrogated and killed in February, 1985.

The Central Intelligence Agency had indications that about 50 members of Nicaraguan rebel organizations may have been involved in narcotics trafficking during the 1980s, but CIA personnel continued working with almost two dozen of the suspected figures, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.

In 1986, when federal and local anti-drug agents raided his Mission Viejo home, cocaine trafficking suspect Ronald J. Lister met officers in his bathrobe and warned that they were making a mistake, that he "worked with the CIA, and . . . his friends in Washington weren't going to like what was going on." According to a Los Angeles County sheriff's report on the incident, when deputies dismissed Lister's claim, he threatened to report them to his contact at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

An attorney pressing a suit in Miami accusing Contras and U.S officials of running a guns-for-drugs smuggling ring accused some of the defendants of "running covert operations for Bush" when he was CIA director in 1976. Daniel Sheehan, an attorney for the Washington-based Christic Institute, said Friday that some potential witnesses feared retribution if they testified about the operations.

The chairman of the House select committee on narcotics said Thursday that he is trying to learn whether there is a link between contra supply flights and drug smuggling but contended the Justice Department and CIA are stonewalling his panel. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), the chairman, commented after Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III refused to allow Drug Enforcement Agency officials to participate in a private briefing for his committee.

A federal drug agent testified he was told that a White House aide leaked details of one of the government's most sensitive cocaine investigations--thus ending it prematurely--in order to expose drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan government. Ernest Jacobsen, an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said that following the leak in July, 1984: "I heard from my superiors the leak came from an aide in the White House."

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno says a preliminary inquiry by the Department of Justice does not substantiate published allegations that the CIA acted in support of a Northern California drug ring that smuggled cocaine from Latin America to South-Central Los Angeles. Last month, the San Jose Mercury News published a series of articles saying the CIA blocked efforts by other agencies to stem the drug ring in the mid-1980s.

About 1,000 demonstrators and community leaders participated in a protest Thursday night to attack reports that the CIA may have eased the way for the U.S.-backed Contras to distribute crack cocaine in South-Central Los Angeles. The candlelight vigil was held outside Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, where speakers described the devastating effects of crack cocaine on the black community, including homelessness, joblessness, violence and drug-addicted babies. Rep.

A former leader of the Nicaraguan rebel movement in the 1980s told senators Tuesday that he received a small amount of money from a major Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in Southern California, as well as larger sums from other drug traffickers in Miami. But the former Contra leader, Eden Pastora, insisted in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he did not know at the time that his donors were involved in illegal activities.

The Central Intelligence Agency said Tuesday that it has no record of any CIA relationship with the principal members of a Nicaraguan-American cocaine trafficking ring that operated in California during the 1980s. In a legal declaration filed in federal court in San Diego and released in Washington, the CIA said it knew as early as 1984 that cocaine smuggler Norvin Meneses was a major drug trafficker.

The chief in-house investigator at the Central Intelligence Agency told a Senate committee Wednesday that he will need more time than first expected to complete his inquiry into whether the CIA was connected with the introduction of crack cocaine to the United States. "The size of the information base that must be thoroughly reviewed . . . is enormous," CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz said at a packed hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The controversy that began with the San Jose Mercury News' publication of a series on cocaine and the Nicaraguan Contra rebels has become a case study in how information caroms around the country at whiplash speed in the digital age. In its printed version, as the paper's editor has pointed out, the stories were careful never to claim that the Central Intelligence Agency condoned or abetted drug dealing to support the Contra movement.

"Bad Blood." "The Big White Lie." "American Apartheid." "Two Nations." "The Assassination of the Black Male Image." These books and dozens of others with similar themes cry out from the shelves of Eso Won, a black-oriented bookstore in southwest Los Angeles. They recall a shameful national legacy of racial injustice that many whites consider past, but most blacks see as a pattern that still rings true.

Adolfo Calero, the burly, back-slapping political leader of the Nicaraguan rebel movement known as the Contras, was in an ebullient mood. It was June 1984, and Calero was in San Francisco to rally American support for his cause--and to look for financial donors. After a speech at the elegant St. Francis Yacht Club, where well-heeled conservatives cheered his calls of "Viva Reagan! Viva Nicaragua libre!"

In an outpouring of anger over a controversy rapidly gaining velocity in Los Angeles' African American community, about 2,000 people converged on the Crenshaw district Saturday to demand that U.S. government officials be held accountable for alleged complicity in the city's deadly scourge of crack cocaine. The emotional crowd was drawn to the event, co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus and black-owned radio station KJLH-FM (102.

A judge deciding the fate of onetime Los Angeles crack kingpin "Freeway" Ricky Ross ordered prosecutors Friday to rebut his lawyer's contention that Ross was an unwitting dupe of the CIA. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff asked prosecutors to provide proof that the Central Intelligence Agency never "participated in or condoned" drug dealings by Nicaraguan rebels, including the smuggling of tons of cocaine into Los Angeles during the 1980s.

In 1986, when federal and local anti-drug agents raided his Mission Viejo home, cocaine trafficking suspect Ronald J. Lister met officers in his bathrobe and warned that they were making a mistake, that he "worked with the CIA, and . . . his friends in Washington weren't going to like what was going on." According to a Los Angeles County sheriff's report on the incident, when deputies dismissed Lister's claim, he threatened to report them to his contact at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Conflicting strands of evidence emerged Saturday at a congressional inquiry into allegations of Central Intelligence Ageny culpability in the crack cocaine epidemic that has ravaged South-Central Los Angeles and other urban areas.