The moment Randy Beasley walked in, Barry Seal’s life started to unravel. Beasley had been tipped off that this was the place to find the smartest drug smuggler in Baton Rouge. Barry Seal, a skilled pilot and adrenaline junkie, perked up when Beasley mentioned needing help flying 1,200 pounds of Quaaludes out of South America. He was always a guy who didn’t think the rules applied to him.
He thought he was smarter than everybody else, and he had that arrogance that he could master any situation. Seal boasted about running a million-dollar drug smuggling operation, flying cocaine from Colombia to the US. He told Randy the routes he flew, the airplane he used, and why he was successful. “We have routes no one has caught on to yet,” he bragged, giving away a lot of good information.
He even fed false rumors that he worked for the CIA and was protected by the government. “I’m protected by the CIA,” he claimed. The story gave him an air of invincibility, and he started believing he was untouchable. But Seal didn’t know that Randy Beasley was an undercover DEA agent working on Operation Screamer, a massive sting targeting drug pilots.
Seal had just spilled his secrets to the wrong person, and he could face up to 10 years in jail. “I got the whole thing on tape,” Beasley said. Seal’s career had started in his twenties, flying for Trans World Airlines. He was the youngest TWA captain they ever had, a testament to his skill as a pilot.
But he grew bored with the routine. When a new acquaintance presented him with an opportunity to smuggle explosives, he jumped at the chance to make an extra buck. His first foray into smuggling was a failure when he was busted in a customs sting. Although the case was dismissed in court, his career as an airline pilot was over.
He couldn’t get a job with an airline again. Back in those days, he was pretty well paid. When he lost his job, his lifestyle had to remain the same. He had a wife and kids, and he needed to support his family.
Theirs was a very strong and powerful love affair. She worshipped Barry and thought the world of him. He wanted to make sure his family was cared for, so he went to the next best thing: smuggling. He came along at a time when the drug trade in South Florida was really taking off, and there were a lot of people coming into the trade just for the fun of it.
After cutting his teeth smuggling marijuana, Seal quickly graduated to cocaine. Cocaine, just by volume, was so much more lucrative than marijuana. Three hundred kilos of marijuana was not bad, but 300 kilos of cocaine was millions of dollars. That’s why these gifted pilots all ended up moving from marijuana to cocaine.
The money was just too great. In just three years, Seal built up a first-class smuggling operation with a fleet of planes on a private airstrip 20 miles southeast of Baton Rouge. He could have run an airline, probably. Well, he was running an airline.
Seal figured out ingenious routes to get cocaine into the United States from Colombia by flying over the Gulf of Mexico and along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. He brilliantly perfected the smuggling business using all the tricks of the trade: flying in the dark with lights off and night vision goggles, passing low and slow to avoid detection. Across the Gulf, his planes were often mistaken for helicopters because there were a lot of drilling rigs and helicopter traffic between the rigs and shore. Seal was careful not to get caught with the drugs he trafficked.
He used swamp air drops, bribed officials, and covertly exchanged the drugs for a cash delivery fee. But in 1979, the Honduran authorities found a firearm on board his plane, and he got locked up in Central America. He turned it to his advantage and made a contact that connected him to the Medellín drug cartel in Colombia. He was perfect for what the Medellín cartel needed: skilled pilots who were willing and able to go into some very rough territory.
When Seal started smuggling for the biggest cartel in Colombia, he hit the big time, making his family very comfortable. He was the kind of man who had come up in a period where you could be a smuggler and a family man. He viewed it as being a provider. On his son’s 15th birthday, he gave him $10,000 in cash in 20s.
You have to be a bit of a family man to be that generous, but also he had the money. And the money just kept rolling in, despite the continuing US war on drugs. Barry’s view of smuggling was, you know, how much worse is marijuana and cocaine than alcohol and tobacco. He had that kind of viewpoint, and he felt like he was providing very well for his family.
To protect himself and his family, Seal kept his identity secret. He had no direct contact with the drug cartel bosses, and the Colombians knew him only as El Gordo, the fat man. He made all his communication through payphones. You always knew when Barry was coming because you could hear all these beepers going off when he hit the door.
He had a pager, and whenever anybody would call his answering service, he would get a page and go to the nearest payphone to return the calls. He made sure his employees didn’t know each other. People on the ground didn’t know who the pilot was, allegedly. The pilot didn’t know who the people on the ground were.
Nobody knew when the load was coming in except the pilot and Barry. By cutting down on the number of people involved and knowing what he was doing, he had a good chance of not getting caught. Seal thought he had outsmarted them all. All the police knew this guy was up to something bad, but they couldn’t ever really catch him.
He had the brains, the guts, the will. He loved the game with the cops. He knew they were watching him, and he loved the fact that he could do this and they couldn’t catch him. “Officer, arrest me,” he’d taunt.
But he wasn’t as smart as he thought. Seal had been under surveillance by the DEA and the FBI for years. They had 10 payphones being monitored, which was a lot. That’s why special DEA agent Randy Beasley had been called in to sting Barry Seal once and for all.
Now Beasley had solid evidence of Seal telling him all about his drug smuggling operation. The DEA had him exactly where they wanted him. The sting resulted in a federal grand jury in Florida returning an indictment against Seal, and he was ordered to appear in court. After spilling the secrets of his well-honed drug smuggling operation to an undercover DEA agent, he was charged with conspiring to possess and distribute Quaaludes.
In court, the charges against him were laid bare. But Seal thought he was indestructible and wouldn’t take the bond hearing seriously. He told ridiculous lies. “I’m not a smuggler,” he claimed.
“So I had to come up with something and maybe start accounting for some money. Oil and shrimp dealer. ” He claimed he was an oil and shrimp dealer with annual earnings of just $250,000. But in truth, in 1982 and 1983, Seal imported 5,000 kilos of cocaine and grossed $25 million.
Seal was confident there was no way he was going down. But the jury found him guilty. It was a bullet between the eyes. Seal was staring at a 10-year sentence.
A family man at heart, Seal couldn’t bear his wife Deborah seeing him locked up as a criminal. He didn’t want to go to jail at all, and most people don’t. But he was looking at substantial time. He didn’t see his kids.
I mean, it’s like he was some ogre that didn’t love his kids and wife. So, I’m sure that bothered him, too. He made a last-ditch plea and offered to become an informant for the DEA. But Seal was dismissed as a consummate liar.
However, Bob Jurado, new to the DEA’s Miami division, was willing to take a chance. Jurado and his partner, Ernst “Jake” Jacobson, decided to question Seal about what he could actually offer. “What do you want, Barry? ” they asked.
“I’ve got a lot to trade,” Seal said. Bob Jurado was a very experienced agent, very professional. Jake Jacobson had been in US Customs. He had a little bit of a temper, but he was a really good guy.
He had the ability, as a fellow Southerner, to relate to Barry Seal and make him feel comfortable. Seal looked like a hot mess. He was fat, seemed undisciplined in the way he conducted himself, and he did some crazy things, or at least he said he did. The classic Barry Seal kicked into operation: “I can find a way out of this.
I’m going to be the best informant they’ve ever had, and I’m going to be such a good informant that I’m not going to have to spend a day in jail. ” So that’s when the gears started working. “Hey, I’ve got a lot to trade here. I have a lot of information, and I can give them a case that they’ve never seen.
I can outsmart everybody once again. ”
Just when Seal was out of time, he took one last desperate gambit and said he could deliver the DEA’s most wanted. “I can get you Pablo Escobar. ” Seal told a lot of stories.
The most enticing and ridiculous was that he could get Pablo Escobar, get him on a plane, and take him someplace where the DEA could arrest him. Escobar was notoriously slippery, surrounded by his own large army. So the idea that Pablo Escobar would get on an airplane with Barry Seal and fly away was pretty crazy. The agents were intrigued by Seal’s claim.
If true, this could be the opportunity they’d been looking for. “You have to try and verify,” they thought. “You can’t take him just for their word. You have an obligation to find out if they are telling the truth and if they can do what they claim they can do.
Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. ” But in the end, they looked at his actual record and found it credible that he wasn’t using drugs. They had to weigh things. Is it worth taking a chance with this guy and sending him back down to Latin America?
They had many debates about it and ended up saying, “Well, let’s give it a try. What else we got? ”
As Seal talked and talked, the agents gradually became more convinced. Things that he said checked out.
He could be corroborated. They started to see Seal as a man who could produce hard evidence. They were staring at the kind of case that would change their career. And I think they knew it.
“Put your money where your mouth is,” they told him. The agents told Seal to call up the Ochoa family direct. But in truth, Seal had never had any direct contact with the big dogs. He was lying again.
The DEA wanted to see if he could produce his promises. It sounded unbelievable. Seal called his contact for the Medellín Cartel and introduced himself under a fake name, Ellis McKenzie. He picked up the phone and said, “I want to talk.
I want to go to the top. I want more and more and more. We got the big one. ” Seal said he wanted to start flying more than 300 kilos of cocaine in one go.
He knew he was dealing with people who needed somebody like him. He knew that he offered them something that was very valuable. They needed money. They needed their cocaine to be moved.
The contact was interested and agreed to set up a face-to-face meeting with the cartel bosses. Against all odds, Seal had pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Seal was going to try to get the heads of the Medellín Cartel in a place where they could be arrested. While the DEA agents made Seal no promises, they agreed that if he could deliver, his sentence would be significantly reduced.
The idea was if you made the biggest drug case ever, he probably wouldn’t have to do much, if any, time. And that was his goal. He was staring at a 10-year sentence. Seal had successfully bought himself more time, and his sentencing was withheld to see what he could do for the government.
Now officially a DEA informant, Seal went out on a limb to prove himself. He went from a very successful bad guy to a very successful good guy. He put the same amount of energy into trying to atone for his sins and get himself out of trouble that he’d put into getting himself into trouble. If he was the best and smartest smuggler, he was going to be the best and smartest informant.
He was entirely professional. He also knew his life was on the line, but he still took incredible risks. Seal’s enthusiasm for his new role knew no bounds. He self-funded his missions, used his own planes, and bought his own fuel.
All these guys are adventure junkies. Everybody wants to be a pirate. We’re all little boys. When they’re little, they want to be a cowboy, they want to be a pirate.
Adult pirates. Nothing else changes. But flying into the Ochoa estate, into the heartland of cocaine country, was just fabulous. It was a coup.
He was flying incredibly dangerous missions into the heart of the cartel and their estates. He went there. He went into the belly of the beast. Going down there to meet with them in person, he didn’t know that he wouldn’t be compromised.
He didn’t know that he could be stepping into a death sentence. Under the alias Ellis McKenzie, Seal was introduced to the heads of the cartel, Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar. The Medellín Cartel were known as the most ruthless criminals perhaps in the history of the world. Ochoa told Seal they’d been stocking up to supply crowds attending the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
They knew there would be a great demand for cocaine. So their plan was to get 3,300 pounds into Miami and then get that west to Los Angeles and make a fortune. This would have been a very big score. It was more than Seal had ever trafficked in one go, but he agreed willingly.
It was a sign of his desperation, his willingness to do this, their desperation, their willingness to take this risk because they needed to move these loads of cocaine. They needed Barry Seal, and he needed them. It was clearly now on the knife edge of life and death for him. And the stakes were about to get even higher for Seal.
The Colombian government had declared war on drug traffickers, and the cartel was desperate for a new location. The Sandinista government in Nicaragua had come to the aid of the Medellín Cartel and offered a protected hub for its drugs. They had a new base and a new partner, a new ally in their smuggling, and it was the Sandinista government. Their plan was to essentially use a Sandinista military base as a transshipment point for their cocaine, which would allow a much better refueling situation and provide them security at a time in 1984 when they really needed it.
It would also provide the Sandinistas with funds they could have used. The cartel bosses wanted Seal to fly their drugs via this Nicaragua base. It was a dangerous demand because the new Sandinista government was officially a communist enemy of the United States. In an effort to overthrow the Sandinistas, the US was funding a local militia, the Contras.
But it was highly controversial. By promising the cartel he’d fly into Nicaragua, Seal would put himself in the middle of a brewing and potentially deadly conflict between his own country and a Soviet-backed revolution in Central America. But the operation was put on hold while Seal attended court to be sentenced on his drug smuggling charges. He was confident his status as an informant would keep him out of jail.
Until the judge shocked everyone. “10 years minimum. ” The judge and officials weren’t aware that he was involved in a live DEA operation. His DEA handlers feared they’d lost a highly connected informant in the midst of pulling off the biggest US case of its kind.
It was a frantic period because this incredibly intense undercover operation was going on. Jurado and Jacobson pulled out all the stops to get Seal released on an appeal bond. His unexpected release was sure to raise suspicions that Barry Seal had flipped. But Seal was still bound to continue his undercover work.
His next mission to Colombia could be his last. If you break one rule and you’re a DEA informant, all bets are off. The whole deal crashes. So he took it very seriously because that was his one ticket to a lighter sentence and freedom soon.
As Ellis McKenzie, Seal continued smuggling for the cartel alongside his trusted long-time co-pilot, Emil Camp. Neither Camp nor the cartel had any idea Seal was really working for the DEA. They knew Ellis McKenzie. They knew who El Gordo and the Fat Man were, but by keeping the names separate, it was hard for them to know that Barry Seal was the person they were dealing with.
But the Colombian drug cartel’s demands just kept getting bigger. Weight is everything when you’re smuggling any drug, and Seal was always very cognizant of that. Barry apparently told them, “No, we can’t do that. The plane’s overloaded.
” But supposedly they were waving a machine gun and said, “This flight’s going to go. ” So Barry, against his better judgment, tried to take off. As I understand it, he was on a dirt strip. It was sloppy, muddy.
The plane could not get up the speed to take off, and it crashed. Luckily Seal and his co-pilot escaped without injury. A chopper provided a second plane, but it fared better with the extra load. However, their flight hadn’t been cleared with the Nicaraguan authorities.
They were fired on by an anti-aircraft battery. The fixer apparently neglected to tell the army that Seal would be taking off with a load of dope. He didn’t get killed, but it probably scared him a bit even though he’s a good pilot. Seal was forced to make an emergency landing and yet again ended up in jail.
This time in Nicaragua. Back in Florida, Seal’s DEA handlers reached out to the CIA for help tracking him down. It was a mistake that would cost them their mission. The DEA didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.
So they went to the CIA and said, “You got connections down there. Find out if this guy named Barry Seal is dead or alive or in jail. ” That’s when the CIA first heard about him. The CIA was fascinated to hear there was a cocaine operation in Nicaragua.
If Seal could prove it, there was an opportunity to discredit the Sandinistas. The National Security team of the Reagan White House was looking for every opportunity to get damaging evidence against the Sandinistas. So any chance to show that the Sandinistas were not only murderous but corrupt would be excellent. To do that, the CIA desperately wanted photographs because corroboration is terribly important.
Having some fat guy come back from Nicaragua and say, “Hey, I met with the Sandinistas,” wouldn’t carry any water. It would not influence American opinion. But people were terribly upset about cocaine, and this was an opportunity to influence the American public. This would have been a very important part of the propaganda war.
See, not only are they communists, but they’re communist drug smugglers, which made them even worse. So it would have been a giant propaganda coup. After spending the night in a Nicaraguan jail, Seal eventually got released. But not by the CIA, by Federico Vaughn, a Sandinista official and friend of the Medellín Cartel.
Seal flew back to the US in one of Escobar’s planes. When Seal returned to the US, the CIA had hatched a plan to get proof linking the Sandinistas to illegal drugs. Barry Seal played into this policy by being on the ground and possibly able to provide evidence of the Sandinista corruption, particularly photographic evidence. So that’s why the CIA proposed that it attach a camera to the plane that Seal was flying.
Despite Seal’s protests, cameras were attached to his new bigger plane, the Fat Lady. This was the only direct involvement the CIA ever had with Barry Seal. If this risky mission went wrong and the drug lords figured out what Seal was up to, it was game over. He would have ended up without a head, disemboweled, hung from a tree, God knows what, and it would have happened very slowly.
He knew how the Ochoas deal with informers. But the drug cartel was now the least of his problems. Seal was on the front line in the US war against communism. With no alternative but a prison sentence, Seal set out on his mission to double-cross one of the most dangerous regimes in the world.
With no protection and accompanied by his long-term employee, Emil Camp, Seal landed their new bigger plane, the Fat Lady. It was capable of transporting 24,000 pounds of cargo. The men were surrounded by Sandinista military on an isolated jungle airbase. There was no way of knowing they wouldn’t end up shot dead on the spot.
But it couldn’t have turned out better when Federico Vaughn appeared with Pablo Escobar. Lo and behold, there was everything that he hoped for. The Sandinista officials, Sandinista soldiers, and Pablo Escobar. They got 1,500 pounds of cocaine, which they loaded onto the airplane.
And he got photos. At any moment, the cameras could be discovered. The tension was unbearable. You can imagine, here you are in the middle of the jungle with a bunch of dedicated killers and illegal government officials, and you’re taking pictures of them.
It had to be a very high adrenaline situation. Astonishingly, Federico Vaughn and Pablo Escobar helped load the plane. Why would Pablo Escobar load a duffel bag of cocaine on a plane? He had to have been caught up in the moment.
It had to have been viewed as kind of a ceremonial thing, like a dignitary hitting a ship with a champagne bottle. Same with Federico Vaughn. They could have had soldiers do that. Escobar and Vaughn were both caught red-handed on camera along with Seal.
They trusted Seal. They thought they were 100% safe. The photos would cement Seal as the DEA’s number one informant. But they would also signal his end.
When the DEA agents saw the photos, they celebrated. It was proof their man Seal had delivered. And it was only a matter of time before he led Escobar to somewhere they could arrest him. But events were about to overtake them.
When Washington saw the pictures of Federico Vaughn loading drugs bound for the US, excitement levels hit the roof. It was just what the government needed to discredit the Sandinistas. It was a little too much for everybody. It was the most sterling evidence you can get of drug smuggling.
Here’s the drug smuggler loading the plane. Here’s a picture of it. Here is the Sandinista official next to him loading the plane. It was too good to be true.
It ended up burning a hole in the investigation. Seal was enjoying his success as the DEA’s top informant when he got the worst news of his life. Details of the mission had been leaked to the press, and Barry Seal was outed as a DEA informant. There was a great deal of anger about that.
Certain people in the government disclosed it against the knowledge and against the promises to Barry that it wouldn’t be disclosed. The DEA was furious. The story had blown the cover of a mid-operation informant positioned to make one of the most significant criminal drug cases in American history. Barry Seal almost brought them the cartel on a silver platter.
If there had not been a leak of his mission in that Washington Times article, they might have captured all of them in 1984. That would have changed history. But for Seal, it was game over. His mission with the DEA was dead in the water.
And the CIA left him high and dry. The CIA often burns assets. The intelligence gathering mission is considered far more important than individuals. Worst of all, the cartel now knew Seal’s identity and put a bounty on his head.
$500,000 dead or a million dollars alive. The Medellín Cartel was very violent. It didn’t matter who you were. You crossed them, you got in your way, you were dead.
Seal’s roller coaster ride as an informer had put his family in grave danger. When Seal realized that he was a target, and he would have known that immediately because he knew the cartel, he put his family into hiding. But Seal couldn’t go into hiding with them because he was due to appear in court. There was no way to hide in the packed Louisiana courtroom.
And it was clear the judge was unhappy with Seal’s plea deal. When we got to court that morning, the courtroom was full, and it was full of policemen. Louisiana high ranking policemen. State police, FBI, DEA, and US attorneys.
They’re not all coming down to court to watch Barry Seal be told he’s going to be on probation. Even Seal’s Florida DEA handlers couldn’t get him off the hook. Barry had said these two guys are the guys I’m working for and they’ll help me, and then they got sent home. They didn’t get to testify.
But because of Seal’s plea agreement, Judge Polozola was unable to incarcerate the drug smuggler. The judge did not like the deal. But after vigorous arguments by the federal prosecutor, they grudgingly accepted it. Instead, the judge gave Seal the toughest sentence he could.
Six months probation in Baton Rouge, with no guns and no bodyguards with guns. But even worse than that, he ordered Seal to reside at a Salvation Army Community Treatment Center. The final nail in the coffin came when the judge read out the address to the open court. “The Salvation Army Community Treatment Center on Airline Highway, Baton Rouge.
” He said where the community service was going to be. And that would identify where Barry Seal was each and every day. And that was a terrible, terrible error. The cartel had representatives there.
So you can only call it a death sentence because once the cartel has your address, where you’re staying, that’s it. It in fact was a death sentence. Seal had no choice but to stick to the terms of his probation. It took just three weeks for the inevitable moment to come.
Barry Seal died instantly when . 45 caliber bullets hit his head, chest, and neck. The Medellín Cartel successfully took revenge for what it considered the ultimate betrayal. The disgraced airline pilot who turned to smuggling to provide for his family, made a fortune trafficking cocaine before cutting a deal with the government to escape jail, was now dead.
When he died, he died basically broke. Supposedly, he used a lot of his funds to do the things that he did for the government. I don’t think they could get money to pay for him to do the stuff that he was allowed to do. It’s believed Seal’s family were left to survive on his life insurance.
The IRS seized everything. I mean, down to the water in the refrigerator, I believe. They took everything that was. But he did get his life insurance.
It turns out that even for taxes, they can’t take your life insurance. So he had a pretty good life insurance policy, and I think that’s what has sustained his family since then. Although Seal never took down Pablo Escobar, he died the DEA’s number one informant. He was really the first informant who penetrated the cartel inner sanctum, and he brought them the biggest case they’d ever had.
These were unprecedented feats of daring-do and law enforcement ingenuity that the DEA had never seen. So clearly up until his death, he was the best informant they ever had. A month after Seal’s murder, President Reagan displayed the photos on national television as ammunition in the US struggle against communism. “The Sandinistas have even involved themselves in the international drug trade.
I know every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking. This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States. No, there seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop. This is an outlaw regime.
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