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Capturing The Butterfly

New York Times

Magazine

April 4, 1993

In one of the most successful undercover operations in history, American agents cast their net around an elusive, Sorbonne-educated Colombian beauty-the chief financial officer of a multimillion-dollar drug cartel.

BY DAVID McCLINTICK[1]

THE NEW VENEZUELAN PASSPORT identified the woman as Nora Es­trella Ramirez, but most people in Caracas knew her by a Hebrew name, Mihal Kourany. She had turned up in Caracas in late 1984, and moved into a small apartment in Al­tamira, an affluent neighborhood at the foot of the mountains a few blocks above the American Embassy. She had begun working as a foreign-ex­change money broker, doing business with a num­ber of major banks. She had clients and friends in Brazil and planned to move to Sao Paulo eventually.

A twice-divorced woman who appeared to be around 40, Mihal Kourany enjoyed life in Caracas. Driving around town in a sporty pink Fiat, she dated a number of men in government and busi­ness, frequented diplomatic cocktail parties, dined in the smart restaurants in Las Mercedes, the restaurant row of Caracas, and attended Eu­ropean movies at the Cinemateque.

At a human rights conference in Caracas in 1985, Mihal Kourany met Rene de Sola, a Justice of the supreme court of Venezuela and soon to become the court's president. A distinguished-looking man of 65, Rene de Sola was a genuine elder statesman of Venezuela; he had held top Government positions over several decades, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Justice, president of the Venezu­elan delegation to the United Nations and diplomatic posts in Europe De Sola was also an intellectual - the author of scholarly articles on law and govern­ment, and a translator of French poetry and plays into Spanish. He had a wife, four children and several grandchildren.

Rene de Sola and Mihal Kourany became friends. They spoke on the telephone several times a week, always in French, and discussed politics, literature (he gave her a book of Moliere he had translated) and food (he was a gourmet cook). They found that they shared a deep knowledge and love of Paris. He had lived there as the Venezuelan ambassador to Unesco. She had lived there as a young woman and had attended the Sorbonne.

A few weeks after they met Mihal and Rene began an affair. He spent every Wednesday afternoon at her apartment. She kept his photograph on her night stand. They dined together frequently in various secluded restaurants around the city. On her birthday in 1985, de Sola, who traveled a lot, wired her flowers from Europe.

"I am going to take you to Paris." de Sole told her when he returned from one trip. "You are going to show me Paris differently from the way I have always known it."

"I can't go to Paris," Mihal said "I can't leave here."

DURING THE FIRST PART OF FEBRUARY 1986, special agents of the United States Drug Enforce­ment Administration in Miami were told by a Central Intelligence Agency source that a woman in Caracas, whose passport identified her as Nora Estrella Ramirez, and who went by the name Mihal Kourany, might in fact be one of the United States Government's most wanted international fugitives - Marlene Navarro. The chief North American operative for one of the largest syndi­cates of the Colombian narcotics mafia, Navarro had quietly fled the United States three and a half years earlier just before being indicted by a Federal grand jury in Miami.

Since Navarro's disappearance, the D.E.A. had received a number of reports that Navarro had been sighted - in Bogota, Rome, Madrid, Rio de Janiero and Germany. But pursuing agents had been unable to apprehend her, and the trail had grown stale. Once he received the report from the C.I.A., Frank Chellino, the D.E.A.'s intelligence chief in Miami, alerted Special Agent Robert Candelaria, the D.E.A.'s attaché in Caracas, and sent Candelaria a packet of photographs and other material that might aid in identifying Marlene Navarro. The photographs included a shot of Navarro nude that the D.E.A. had found in her home near the Doral Country Club in Miami.

"The source says she lives somewhere close to the American Embassy," Chellino told Cande­laria, "That's all we know. It's probably another wild-goose chase."

"Well, we can at least have a look," said Cande­laria, an urbane Mexican who had been stationed in Caracas for two years, after a long tour with the D.E.A in Mexico. After reviewing the material, Candelaria called the Venezuelan Minister of Jus­tice, Jose Manzo Gonzalez, and asked to see him. Candelaria had cultivated the relationship with Manzo. Once, when the Minister's life had been threatened in Miami, it was Candelaria who had arranged for a D.E.A. plane to fly him back to Caracas.

Within hours, Candelaria had a private audience with Manzo in the offices of the Ministry of Justice. Candelaria and Manzo recognized an immediate problem in the C.I.A. report about the fugitive: Even if the woman in question could be located, and turned out to be Marlene Na­varro, there was a complex extradi­tion treaty between the United States and Venezuela. Complying with the treaty would take a lot of time, and the proceeding would probably become public. It could open Minister Manzo and the Government to charges from opposition politicians that they were too friendly with the Americans - al­ways a sensitive issue.

The question of extradi­tion was academic, howev­er, unless they located the woman in question. At Can­delaria's urging, the Minis­ter decided to proceed in ut­most secrecy. He assigned the investigation to the nar­cotics branch of the Policia Tecnica Judicial, or P.T.J., a Venezuelan counterpart of the D.E.A. and F.B.I. The Venezuelan agents' investi­gation took several days. Immigration records showed that a Colombian woman named Nora Es­trella Ramirez had been granted a Venezuelan pass­port two years earlier; she apparently held dual citizen­ship in Colombia and Vene­zuela. And the doormen at the building in Altamira where the Ramirez woman lived identified her tenta­tively as the woman in one of the photographs of Marlene Navarro.

A Venezuelan surveil­lance team began watching the building and secretly photographing the woman as she came and went. They made a startling discovery, whatever her real name, the woman was keeping compa­ny with an eminent figure of the Venezuelan Govern­ment, a household name and face in Caracas.

"We've got to talk," the di­rector of the Venezuelan po­lice agency told Robert Can­delaria by telephone. They met with Minister of Justice Manzo at Manza's residence. "This is bigger than we thought," the director said "She's dating Rene de Sola."

Candelaria had the D.E.A. run De Sola's name through its computers on the off chance that he might be linked to Marlene Navarro's drug-trafficking and money-laundering activities. The in­quiry, conducted in Miami and Washington, came back negative. It appeared that the relationship was strictly personal.

Nevertheless, Robert Can­delaria would not have been surprised if Minister Manzo had terminated the investiga­tion at that point. Some ele­ments of the Policia were nervous. "Rene de Sola might use his influence with the Presi­dent, or go to the newspapers and say, "Look what a foreign government is trying to do in our country," a Venezuelan agent said. "He takes over as president of the supreme court next month."

Minister Manzo, however, instructed the Policia to pro­ceed as quickly as possible. The ministry and the Policia Tecnica Judicial devised a plan to detain the woman on a ruse that would not arouse her suspicion. If the D.E.A. could then positively identi­fy her as Marlene Navarro, the status of her Venezuelan citizenship and passport would be reviewed, and there might be a way to ex­pel her secretly from Vene­zuela as "an undesirable person" under a procedure that would avoid the time consuming complexities of the extradition treaty.

ON FRIDAY AFTER, noon Feb. 21, the woman in Apart­ment 611 of the luxu­ry high-rise building in Altamira was leaving for her kung fu class when a tall, dark-complexioned man ac­costed her in the hallway, showed credentials of the Policia Tecnica Judicial and insisted that she go back into her apartment

She was terrified "What is this"

"There is nothing to fear." the agent said. He told her that the Policia needed her help in identifying the body of a man who had been a well-known hairdresser in Cara­cas and apparently had been murdered. The agent claimed that a slip of paper bearing Mihal Kourany's name, address and phone number had been found on the body. She began to cry and asked that she be given time to change out of her kung fu costume. A second agent promptly ar­rived at the apartment, and they asked to see the woman's passport.

"I don't know where it is," she said, now in jeans and a black tank top, putting on a jacket. The agents searched the apartment and found two passports, Colombian and Venezuelan, both in the name of Nora Estrella Ra­mirez. They also examined photographs on her night stand; including a picture of Rene de Sola and a calling card from his tour as the Venezuelan ambassador to Unesco in Paris.

Suspicious now of the agents' true mission, but feel­ing she had no choice, the woman accompanied them to the Policia Tecnica Judicial headquarters, a shabby eight-story converted parking ga­rage on the fringe of down­town Caracas. She was es­corted into a windowless of­fice whose walls bore photo­graphs of the Minister of Jus­tice and the President.

The agents told her that they had been asked to check her teeth.

"Absolutely not, that's ri­diculous," she said. She start­ed to resist, but one of the agents held her arms while the other forced her mouth open and examined her teeth one by one, checking for evi­dence of the extensive dental surgery that Marlene Na­varro had undergone in 1981 and 1982, on which the D.E.A. had briefed the Venezuelans. The agents then asked her to remove her clothing so they could compare her body to that of a woman in a photograph posing nude on a beach.

Again she tried to refuse. "I would rather be killed than raped," she declared. Deny­ing any intent to rape her, the agents began forcibly disrob­ing her when a comisario for the Policia Tecnica Judicial entered the morn and ordered them to desist.

"What are you doing to me" the woman demanded of the comisario "What about the hairdresser you want me to identify"

"Yes, you must fly with us to Maracaibo, he said, re­ferring to Venezuela's sec­ond-largest city "That is where he was killed."

The telephone rang. An agent answered it, paused for a moment, looked at the woman and then said into the phone. "Yes, it's her."

The woman asked permis­sion to make a phone call The agents declined, and locked her in a holding cell.

THAT SAME Fri­day afternoon, the D.E.A intelligence supervisor, Frank Chenille, and a spe­cial agent, Carol Cooper, caught a Pan Am flight from Miami to Caracas. They had been summoned by Robert Candelaria Chellino and Cooper had been among a small group of D.EA. agents and free-lance spies whose undercover work in 1981 and 1982 had identified Marlene Navarro as the chief North American financial officer for a padrino, or godfather, of the Colombian drug ma­fia, Carlos Jader Alvaraez.

Nicknamed "El Muneco" (the doll) because of his de­mure stature and baby face. the elusive, secretive Alva­rez ran a criminal organiza­tion of "enormous propor­tions," according to an offi­cial United States intelli­gence report, importing hun­dreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine into the United States. Alvarez and Navarro headed a list of 76 people who had been indict­ed in Miami at the conclu­sion of Operation Swordfish, the first successful under­cover effort by the United States Government to pene­trate the highest levels of the Latin American drug mafia and confiscate its as­sets. Alvarez, Navarro and a number of associates had been implicated after be­coming clients of a Miami investment management firm known as Dean Inter­national Investments Inc. Unknown to them, Dean In­ternational was a bogus company created by the D.E.A. for the purpose of snaring drug barons who needed to launder, or con­ceal, their vast sums of cash by investing it in securities under assumed names or by depositing it in anonymous bank accounts. Frank Chel­lino had posed as Dean's president, Frank Dean, Car­ol Cooper had served as its secretary, Carol Collins.

After spending the night at the Caracas Hilton, Chellino and Cooper were driven to Policia Tecnica Judicial headquarters by Robert Candelaria. Escorted to the narcotics section, they were introduced to the comisario who ushered them into an office and showed them, through a one-way-mir­rored, soundproof window, the woman believed to be Marlene Navarro.

Barely controlling their excitement, Chellino and Cooper stared at the woman, and asked the agents if they could get her to smile, with­out revealing she was being observed. The comisario left, and then could be seen wandering casually into the room where the woman was being displayed. He said something that was inaudi­ble to the D.E.A. agents through the glass. She smiled - a dazzling, unmis­takable smile. The small, vo­luptuous, vibrant woman on the opposite side of the one-way glass was Marlene Na­varro, the most wanted fugi­tive of Operation Swordfish

Chellino and Cooper had not seen her since the spring of 1982 in their undercover roles in Miami. Barely five feet fall, Marlene Navarro was nicknamed "Hummingbird" and "Butterfly" by her friends, labels that captured her size and personality but belied her intelligence, tough­ness and guile. She had lived in Paris, Bogota, Israel and Miami, where - from an of­fice on fashionable Brickell Avenue and a condominium town house near the Dora! Country Club - she had se­cretly run Carlos Alvarez's North American drug and money network behind a le­gitimate front business called Marlene Import and Export.

Born in Colombia, Navarro had attended schools in Paris and Miami and earned a de­gree from the University of Miami, specializing in inter­national business, economics and art. She spoke five lan­guages and owned an apart­ment in Paris. She had been married twice - to an Israeli in Tel Aviv and to an Ameri­can in Miami - and had a son who lived in Europe. By the time she settled in Miami, she had reduced the age on her passport by five years. In­stead of her real age of 37, she had claimed she was 32 in 1980, the year Carlos Jader Alvarez hired her to help run his North American drug or­ganization.

CHELLINO AND COOPER were driven back to the Cara­cas Hilton late that morning, and over the course of the day - as they waited in their rooms staring at television with no indication of what would happen next, or when - their euphoria gradually turned to frustration. Since the secret effort to expel Na­varro from Venezuela was compartmentalized, the agents were not immediately privy to the activities of Rob­ert Candelaria, who was clos­eted with the Minister of Jus­tice and an American Embassy legal expert, negotiating the conditions under which the Government might turn Marlene Navarro over to the Americans.

The group focused on Mar­lene Navarro's status as a Venezuelan citizen holding a Venezuelan passport. There was an inclination to believe that her credentials might be invalid, that she might have obtained the passport under questionable circumstances on the Colombian border, where it was not difficult for a Colombian to buy a Venezuelan passport but resolving such issues with certainty would take time and might become public.

"If this goes public, we'll have to use legal channels," someone asserted.

In the end it was decided to cut legal corners. On the assumption that Marlene Navarro's papers probably were phony, her Venezuelan passport was secretly de­stroyed, and all indications that she had ever been a Venezuelan citizen were ex­punged from the Govern­ment's records. That pre­sumably left the Govern­ment free to expel her from the country forthwith on the grounds that she had been residing in Venezuela under false pretenses.

The meeting at the Minis­try of Justice did not break up until late Saturday evening. Meanwhile, Minister Manzo had given informal clearance to allow an unmarked D.E.A. aircraft from Miami to land at the Caracas airport and park in the sector used by private planes. There was no acknowledgment to Venezue­lan customs and immigration that the plane was a United States Government aircraft on official business. The pi­lots, who were from the D.E.A.'s air wing, were picked up by Candelaria's driver and brought to Cara­cas, where they joined Chellino and Cooper at the Hilton.

The authorities had con­sidered having Navarro flown out of the country in the middle of the night, but concluded that such a maneuver might attract more attention at the airport than a daylight departure. In­stead the word was passed quietly to customs and im­migration personnel that if "something strange" oc­curred at the airport on Sun­day, they should ignore it.

AT THE PRIVATE SECTOR of the airport Sunday morning, Cooper, Chellino and the D.E.A pilots were checked through immigra­tion and their passports stamped. They were identi­fied as private American cit­izens, not as D.E.A. agents. The pilots filed a flight plan for Miami.

At Policia Tecnica Judicial headquarters, Marlene Na­varro's guards told her that she was going to the airport to be flown to Maracaibo in con­nection with the murder of the hairdresser, a story she was convinced was false. She suspected a D.E.A. opera­tion after catching a glimpse of the nude photograph the agents displayed two days earlier. She had recognized it as one she had kept in her house in Miami. The Venezuelans could have obtained it only from the D.E.A, which had seized the house and its contents.

Navarro was taken to a van at the entrance to the Policia building. To conceal her arrival at the airport, the Venezuelan agents gagged her and forced her to lie under a blanket in the rear of the van. She was not released until the van had come to a stop next to the D.E.A. plane.

Robert Candelaria, whom Navarro took to be another Venezuelan agent, quickly took her aboard the plane and strapped her in.

A few minutes later Frank Chellino and Carol Cooper, who had been waiting in a private room in the immi­gration office, boarded the plane. They were both armed.

"Hello, Miss Navarro, wel­come to Miami," Chellino said with a smile. He and Cooper flashed their D.E.A credentials.

Navarro recognized Chel­lino as the man she had known as Frank Dean of Dean International Invest­ments, which, she had since learned, was a D.E.A. under­cover operation. She did not recognize Carol Cooper. "I know you are going to kill me," Navarro said starting to cry.

"We aren't going to kill you,- Chellino said "C'mon. Marlene, if we were going to kill you, we wouldn't have flown a D.E.A. plane all the way down here."

At Chellino's signal, the pi­lot started taxiing. The plane reached the head of the run­way, and then suddenly stopped. The pilot turned to Chellino and shouted over the noise of the engines "We've got a problem. They're denying us takeoff."

"What?" Chellino said, en­raged.

"The tower is denying us takeoff, Frank. They won't let us go. We've got to turn around."

"[Expletive.] Can't we just go?"

"We can't go. They'll scramble the air force."

"This can't be happening.' Somebody [expletive] up.' Somebody has been paid off.' [Expletive.]"

Back at the terminal the plane was surrounded by the immigration police, who or­dered everybody off.

"Nobody is getting off this plane until you tell me what the problem is," Chellino de­clared.

Robert Candelaria, who had seen the plane returning and rushed to the flight apron, said: "They want ev­erybody off, Frank. They claim we didn't declare ev­erybody. They see the pilots plus three passenger's instead of two."

"No, nobody's leaving," Chellino insisted, his hand on his gun.

"No, no, Frank," Cande­laria said. "Calm down. We'll get it straightened out."

This can't be happening," Chellino said, as the immi­gration police took him and Cooper off the plane. The Po­licia Tecnica Judicial agents, who had remained at the airport to make sure the flight left, put Marlene Na­varro back in their van and drove away. Candelaria, who had never met Chellino before that weekend and was surprised at his volatili­ty, implored him to be calm.

"If you make a scene, you'll get us all arrested by the immigration police. It could hit the papers, and you can forget taking Marlene to Miami. Forget it."

While Candelaria raced back to Caracas to find the Minister of Justice and try to resolve the matter. Chellino and Cooper found themselves in the custody of the immi­gration police. The two agents were forced to sit for six hours in a corner of the immi­gration office under the eye of an armed, uniformed officer. At 8 that evening the immigration supervisor re­appeared and released them with profuse apologies. It turned out he had failed to receive word from the Minis­try of Justice about the possi­bility that "something strange" might happen at the airport on Sunday.

By evening, Minister of Justice Manzo had hastily and quietly conferred with other officials of the Govern­ment, and assured Cande­laria that the plane would be allowed to leave the next morning.

MARLENE NAVARRO WAS kept in the same holding cell overnight. On Monday morning, the Venezuelan agents appeared with a large cage bearing the label U.S. Training Dogs." They forced Navarro inside, locked it, wheeled it to the van and returned to the airport, where a different im­migration supervisor logged the passengers on the D.E.A. plane as four people and a shipment of dogs.

There would be no record of Marlene Navarro's hav­ing been expelled from Ven­ezuela, or ever having been in Venezuela, much less a citizen with a passport.

In the plane, Chellino or­dered the pilot, "Get this thing going."

"We've got a small oil leak," the pilot said. "[Expletive], I've got an oil leak in my car," Chellino said. "How bad is this one."

"Not that bad. We can make it."

When they were airborne and over international wa­ters, Carol Cooper formally placed Marlene Navarro un­der arrest. Then they tried to relax for the four-hour flight.

"Hey, how is Roberto, Mr. Darias?" Marlene asked.

Robert Darias. whom Na­varro had known as her banker at Dean internation­al in Miami, had actually been a D.E.A. spy infiltrat­ing her organization.

"Oh. he's good," Cooper said "He'll be at the court­house tomorrow."

"I've never understood why he did what he did what he did."

"Your friend Jader Alva­rez is with us too." Carlos Jader Alvarez had been ar­rested in Bogota and extra­dited to the United States the previous year.

"I know."

"He's going to cooperate."

"What's he got to cooperate with?" Navarro asked.

"We know a lot about him."

"Tell me, do you think that because you have Jader and me you are going to stop drugs in America?

"Our job is simply to ar­rest you and bring you back to face an indictment," Chellino said.

"You are going to be charged with laundering $5 million of drug money."

"Where is my Commis­sion?" Navarro asked. They all laughed.

"You will face 200 years in prison if you don't cooperate," Chellino said.

"My fate will be decided by the U.S justice system, not by you," Navarro replied.

Eight D.E.A agents and four cars were waiting in Miami at Opa-Locka Airport, best known as a staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Navarro was signed through customs and taken to the D.E.A.'s Miami field office, where she was booked, photographed, fin­gerprinted and allowed to make a single phone call.

She dialed a private num­ber at the headquarters of the supreme court of Venezuela. It was after 7 P.M. in Cara­cas, an hour later than in Mi­ami. There was no answer.

MARLENE Na­varro was held at the women's sec­tion of the North Dade Detention Center, a com­pact jail on a snake-infested, pine-shaded pond half a mile west of I-95 in scruffy north­ern Miami. Navarro was de­nied bail and began inter­viewing various lawyers who wanted to represent her. She had always made it her business to know an ar­ray of lawyers; in her purse when she had fled the United States were the business cards of more than a dozen Miami attorneys.

Navarro asked an ac­quaintance for subscriptions to The Economist, The Miami Herald and The New York Times. She also requested a book of Emily Dickinson po­ems, a volume that contained "Indian Summer."

These are the days when birds come back.

A very few, a bird or two.

To take a parting look

These are the days when skies put on

The old. old sophistries of June -

A blue and gold mistake

The Government was un­able to try Navarro with Car­los Jader Alvarez because his trial had already begun when she was arrested. She re­buffed prosecution overtures about pleading guilty and testifying against Alvarez. She would go to trial and for the first time since September 1982, she would encounter the man who would be the star witness against her. Robert Darias, the D.E.A. Spy she had asked about on the flight from Caracas.

Far more than Carol Coo­per and Frank Chellino, Robert Darias had been the pivotal figure in Operation Swordfish. The agents them­selves, Americans who did not speak Spanish and knew little of Latin cultures, could never have penetrated the ultra secret, exclusively Colombian Alvarez organization, no matter how skillfully they played their undercover roles. They had needed a savvy Latin spy fluent in Spanish who could convince Marlene Navarro that he was a kindred drug banker worthy of her trust. Darias had succeeded beyond the D.E.A.'s most optimistic ex­pectations. A 47-year-old Cu­ban emigre, he had been a Bay of Pigs officer -trained by the C.I.A. in espio­nage, infiltration and guer­rilla warfare.

Darias had volunteered his services to the D.E.A. partly in the hope that, if he succeed­ed, the agency would help ex­tricate him from a financial and legal quagmire: two years before, he had served a brief prison term for finan­cial misdeeds in the real-es­tate business and now faced a $200,000 tax bill from the In­ternal Revenue Service. On a deeper level, he hoped that productive work for the Unit­ed States Government might somehow redeem him from the shame he felt for having gone to prison. He was the first to admit he had made mistakes, and the D.E.A. rec­ognized that he was not a criminal.

Besides laundering mil­lions of drug dollars for Mar­lene Navarro over a 13-month period, Robert Darias had gradually managed to ingra­tiate himself with her as an all-purpose adviser on busi­ness and personal matters. He had counseled Navarro on the purchase of real estate, VCR's, firearms, burglar alarms and bulletproof vests. He had referred her to a plas­tic surgeon and bought her ballet tickets and perfume. And, as she had grown to trust him, over countless meals in Miami restaurants and Champagne toasts at her town house, Marlene Navarro had told him more and more about her central position in the narcotics mafia. Over tea at her country club, she had confided that her boss was one of the top drug barons of Colombia, Carlos Jader Alvarez. In the first-class cabins of airliners on the way to and from Denver to pick up drug cash, she had implicated her­self and several other major smugglers in shipments of co­caine worth 1 billion retail on he streets of North America. Then she had fallen asleep on his shoulder.

FRIENDS BRIEFED Navarro daily via a coin telephone in the jail on the progress of her boss's trial, which was being conducted by one of the most controversial judges in America, Alcee Lamar Hastings. Alcee Hastings, a frisky 49 years old was less famous for his judi­cial work, which was aver­age, than for his activity off the bench, which was notable. The first black ever to serve as a Federal judge in Florida, Hastings was also one of the few Federal judges in the his­tory of the United States to have been prosecuted by the Department of Justice for criminal conduct while in of­fice. Although a jury had ac­quitted Hastings of bribery charges in 1983, some of his fellow judges, believing that the accusations were true and that Hastings had perjured himself, had begun proceed­ings to try to have him im­peached. He had remained on the bench, while his legal problems, together with his provocative personality, kept his name in the headlines.

Unusual tension gripped the Alvarez trial. There was extra security in and around the courthouse because of the Colombian mafia's reputa­tion for bold attempts to es­cape United States custody. There was extra pressure on both the prosecution and de­fense to win the case because of the prominence of Carlos Jader Alvarez. And there was spontaneous tension as well; friction developed early in the trial between Judge Hastings and the Government's princi­pal witness, Robert Darias. It became clear that there was a visceral, cut-of-the-gib animus between Hastings and Darias - a proud. smart, streetwise black and a proud, smart, streetwise Cuban, meeting on a public stage against a background of a quarter-century of tension be­tween blacks and Hispanic people in Miami.

The Alvarez jury, however, seemed to have no difficulty accepting Robert Darias and his testimony. Although the trial took 14 weeks, the jury took only an hour and a half to convict Carlos Jader Alvarez on May 9,1986. Since the main count against him was oper­ating "a continuing criminal enterprise," carrying a possi­ble life term, Judge Hastings sentenced him to 95 years in prison.

AS ARDUOUS AS THE Al­varez trial had been for all concerned, the participants sensed that it had been only a warm-up for the trial of Marlene Navarro. The at­mosphere of the Navarro trial, which promised to be the last of the major criminal trials spawned by Opera­tion Swordfish, evoked the finals of an international athletic competition.

For Robert Darias, the Navarro trial was the true climax of his work in Opera­tion Swordfish. Though he had infiltrated and then tes­tified against several impor­tant targets, Darias had nev­er had the personal relation­ship with them that he had formed with Navarro. His courtroom confrontation with her - they would be sitting only a few feet apart when he was on the witness stand - promised to be emotional and dramatic.

The lawyers for Navarro and her co-defendant, Bertha Paez - a certified public ac­countant from Bogota who was accused of being a mon­ey handler for the drug mafia - were primed to destroy Darias as a witness. Bertha Paez's lawyer, Raymond Ta­kiff, had cross-examined Dar­ias at length at an earlier Swordfish trial. As Takiff put it to associates, he had not "eviscerated" Darias on that occasion and relished a sec­ond opportunity. The Navarro trial also placed Darias again in potential conflict with Judge Alcee Hastings.

Hastings convened the trial and began selecting ju­rors on a steamy Monday morning, Sept. 15, 1986, sev­en months after Navarro's removal from Caracas. Just the previous evening, the President of the United States and the First Lady, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, had made a rare joint televi­sion address to the nation about the deepening drug crisis in America.

"Drugs are menacing our society, threatening our val­ues, undercutting our insti­tutions and killing our chil­dren," the President had as­serted.

Reports of the speech ap­peared on the front pages of The Miami Herald and other newspapers nationwide on Monday morning. In the courtroom, Marlene Navar­ro's lawyer, Michael Brodsky, asked Judge Has­tings to determine whether the speech had tainted the objectivity of any of the pro­spective jurors.

Hastings scoffed "What about it?" he said. "I wasn't impressed. Were you?"

"I wasn't impressed ei­ther," Brodsky said. "But there may be a lot of jurors ..."

"But what is Reagan going to do about drugs?" the Judge asked. "We're going to 'Just Say No?' Give me a break ''

ROBERT DARIAS took the witness stand in a dark Pierre Cardin suit, looking as usual like a Castilian gen­tleman. Darias was always tense at the beginning of a trial because of his less-than-perfect Eng­lish and because of slight dif­ficulty hearing, a legacy of combat at the Bay of Pigs. He knew the defense law­yers would take every ad­vantage of his handicaps, and he was wary of Judge Hastings as well.

Myles Malman, the prose­cutor for the Department of Justice and the United States Attorney's office in Miami, had Darias explain how Marlene Navarro first had delivered drug cash to Dean International, and how he had first met Navarro's attorney and friend, Lester Rogers (The Government had indicted Rogers but failed to convict him.) From her seat at the defense table Navarro suddenly shouted: "Lester never met Roberto, Roberto never met - that is not true, Your Honor,"

Judge Hastings quickly dispatched the jury to the jury room_

"That's not true!" Na­varro shouted, her brown eyes flashing. "He never met Roberto, he never did!"

Hastings sent Darias from the courtroom.

"Bastard! Dirty bas­tard!" Navarro screamed as Darias passed in front of the defense table. "Somebody as clean as Mr. Lester Rogers. You're a rat, that's what you are! A rat!"

Darias found himself shak­en by Navarro's outburst as he took a seat in the foyer. It had been the most emotional moment yet in all of the Swordfish trials. Darias still felt too much affection for Navarro to enjoy watching her suffer. Sometimes it was difficult to remember that she was a rapacious drug profiteer, destroying lives in the pursuit of money.

Since Raymond Takiff had experience cross-examining Darias, it was agreed that he would lead the defense ques­tioning. In view of the over­whelming evidence against Marlene Navarro and Bertha Paez. the defense lawyers only chance of winning acquittal was destroying the credibility of Darias's testi­mony about the evidence and sullying the jury's view of his character. Toward that goal, Takiff tried to nur­ture doubts in the jurors' minds about Darias's use of deception in spying on Na­varro and her associates. "Mr. Darias, during the course of your employment with the Drug Enforcement Administration, is it not a fact that it was necessary for you to convince various people of various things that were untrue?" Takiff began.

"Yes."

"And in doing that, natu­rally, it was necessary for you to lie, correct?"

"Did you speak truthfully at all times?"

"It was a cover. I wouldn't call it a lie,"

"A cover?"

"A cover. It was the story that I was told to use by the Government. But it was not, in my concept, a lie. It was a cover for the operation."

It was not surprising that Darias had difficulty an­swering Takiff's questions with perfect candor. Takiff had struck at the heart of the spy's dilemma, about which Darias had privately vented his frustration to the D.E.A. agents more than once during Operation Swordfish. "It is getting harder for me to talk to these people," he had told Carol Cooper late one night. "You can lie and lie and lie. ... You are imitating some­body that you're not." To an­other agent he had said, "You start talking to people you don't like and start selling them ideas that are not your own and there's a breaking point in your character where you cannot take anymore."

Judge Hastings grew im­patient with Takiff's cross-examination and began ad­monishing him for raising questions that were irrele­vant to the guilt or innocence of the defendants.

"If Darias was a [exple­tive] to the 20th degree, raised to the 30th power," the judge wondered, out of the jury's presence, "how does that detract from the evi­dence against your clients?"

ALCEE HASTINGS'S pro­pensity for landing on the front page of The Miami Herald intruded on the Na­varro trial.

"Did Hastings lie at his bribery trial?" bannered The Herald. "14 judges say yes, embattled jurist says no." The article, the first of a series, set forth the findings of a special "judicial coun­cil" conducting the latest in­vestigation of Hastings. The article spanned two full pages inside the newspaper, each page headed "The Case Against Judge Has­tings."

In court, Raymond Takiff and Michael Brodsky ques­tioned the effect the articles might have on the Navarro jurors.

"This article tends to imply that you may have commi­tted the crime for which you were charged," Brodsky ar­gued to the judge "If the ju­rors read that. I think my client has certainly not an un­reasonable thought of why should she sit in a trial where a juror thinks that a judge has committed a crime which he had not committed." Hastings retorted, "Quite frankly, I don't care what they think. I don't care what you think; I don't care what your client thinks, I don't care what the judicial coun­cil thinks; I don't give a damn what the Congress thinks. A jury has spoken and ultimately Congress will. However, I do think you're entitled to your ques­tions concerning whether or not there is anyone on this jury who doubts or questions my presiding in this case."

Hastings called in the jury and asked whether they had seen the Herald article. Four jurors acknowledged having noticed the article to­gether with photographs of Hastings but assured the judge that they had not read the story.

FIVE MONTHS INTO THE trial, Special Agent Carol Cooper began her presenta­tion of about 300 telephone conversations, out of the more than 2,000 recorded during a wiretap on Navar­ro's telephones. The jury was riveted as it heard Na­varro deploying the couriers of Carlos Jader Alvarez across the United States -giving coded orders to move millions of dollars and to track missing money, plead­ing for help when she feared being shot. Navarro, sitting at the defense table, was sto­ic through the playing of the telephone tapes and several videotapes. By that time, the Navarro trial had become the longest Federal trial in the history of the southern judicial district of Florida.

Marlene Navarro spent a month on the witness stand in her own defense. Looking surprisingly vibrant after more than a year in jail, she was dressed and coiffed con­servatively, and seemed far less threatening than she had appeared in a photo­graph as one of the "world's deadliest criminals" in The Miami Herald

Michael Brodsky asked Navarro how she had devel­oped a relationship of trust with Robert Darias.

"Roberto was, for me, a very special person," Na­varro testified. "He knew how to treat me. Hey, I thought, this is the first time somebody take care of me. So I started to depend on him for everything. I also looked for protection in men. And Roberto did everything that my grandfather did. He talk very soft to me. He was very attentive. And, unfortu­nately, he's got certain phys­ical features that my grand­father had - the color of his eyes, and maybe his nose. So for me, Roberto was the best thing that I thought could happen in my life."

Brodsky asked Navarro if she had ever slept with Dar­ias.

"Never, Michael, never. As a matter of fact, he was a married man. He was a fa­ther. He was a good husband. For me, he was the most hon­est, the most good father. I never was attracted to him sexually. It was a special kind of relationship, as I had with my grandfather"

Though she told the truth about her personal relation­ship with Darias, Navarro used most of her testimony to weave an elaborate web of lies about her role as the chief North American operative for Carlos Jader Alvarez. She denied knowing that Al­varez was a godfather of the narcotics mafia. She claimed that he was a legitimate busi­ness man, and that the mil­lions of dollars in cash that she had marshaled for him were the revenues of cattle transactions, real-estate transactions, diamond and emerald transactions and farm equipment transac­tions. She denied ever having discussed cocaine shipments with Robert Darias.

THE PROSECUTOR, Myles Malman, be­gan his cross-ex­amination gently. "Tell us what de­grees you have," he asked Marlene Na­varro.

"Well, my first degree was in France, the baccalaure­ate. Then I got a fine arts degree. Then I have a course in European politics from the College of Economics and Politics in France. Then I came to this country and I went to the Miami-Dade Col­lege here. I did my two years of college."

"What did you study?

"Languages, humanities, computers, accounting. I al­ways liked to study."

"And eventually you achieved a degree at the University of Miami, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did. Not only one, I was in several."

"Well, let's talk about the first one, your Bachelor of Arts. What degree was that in, ma'am?"

"It was major in econom­ics, minor in art."

"And you went on to the M.B.A., the Master of Busi­ness Administration program at the University of Miami, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Did you study interna­tional economics?"

"Yes, that was my major."

Having established Navar­ro's impeccable educational credentials, particularly her expertise and sophistication in international finance, Mal­man then questioned her about her money-manage­ment business, culminating in her handling of money for Carlos Jader Alvarez.

"How much money do you say that you caused, either personally or through other folks, to be delivered to Rob­ert Darias? What is the round, ball-park figure?"

"I don't recall, sir, I don't have figures in my mind. I have my anguish, that is what I have. No figures."

"From whatever you have, Ms. Navarro. Approxi­mately how much - in cash?"

"I don't recall, sir."

"More than a million?"

"I think so. sir."

"Was it more than $2 mil­lion?"

"Yes."

"Was it more than $3 mil­lion?"

"That I cannot tell you, sir- I don't recall."

"Would your best recollec­tion be that it's somewhere between $2 million and $3 million?"

"Yes. To the best of my recollection, yes."

The actual figure was well in excess of $5 million, which excluded many millions more that Navarro had sent to Colombia by other means. She testified that virtually all the money had been need­ed to meet the ransom de­mands of left-wing guerril­las, who had kidnapped three of Carlos Alvarez's children and held them for several months in the high mountain jungles outside Bogota.

Malman accelerated, piling up Navarro's lies, providing the Government an opportunity to prosecute her later for perjury if it chose to.

"Of course, you had no contact with anyone that was in the cocaine business at all, correct?"

"Correct, sir."

"MARLENE NAVARRO has claimed that she was basically a legitimate busi­nesswoman," Myles Malman asserted in his closing argument to the jury, "han­dling some money, handling all these different business­es, helping Mr. Carlos Jader Alvarez. And that she was misguided, misled, led around by Robert Darias. Relied on Robert Darias. And Robert Darias is the one who basically led her astray.... Well, I submit to you that Marlene Navarro was handling this organiza­tion for Carlos Jader Alva­rez, Do you really think that a man like Alvarez, a man so powerful - power that reaches to the top of the Co­lombian Government - do you think that a man so in­tertwined in this cocaine business, do you think people like that would trust some fluff brain to handle millions and millions of dollars in cash? Do you really think that?"

The jury took three days to sift nine and a half months of evidence and return ver­dicts of guilty against Mar­lene Navarro and Bertha Paez.

NAVARRO appeared for her sentencing on the last Thursday in July 1987, in a blue two‑piece suit, a white blouse and six-inch heels. The court­room was full. A number of D.E.A. agents were present, including Carol Cooper, who was now based in Washing­ton, and Frank Chellino who was still chief of intelligence in Miami.

"Ms. Navarro, is there anything you wish to say?" asked Judge Hastings, chewing on a coffee stirrer.

A defiant Marlene Na­varro strode to the podium.

"I say, Your Honor, that Ms. Cooper and Mr. Chellino came to my funeral, and that is nice of them. But I don't intend to bury myself today. Your Honor. I will fight as I have been since five years ago. My tears are not tears of defeat. They are tears of anger. When I was kidnapped in Venezuela, Your Honor, the undercover police knew that I couldn't let another person go down with me. That person was ready to be the chief of the supreme court in Venezuela. The undercover police told me that if I don't go in the dog cage, they will bring that matter to the public, and he will be accused of being the lover of the biggest drug dealer in the world.

"I don't blame you, Your Honor," Navarro continued. "I know that they chose the hardest time of your life to be in the middle of my trial, wish you the best. I wish you to have better conditions than I do."

Hastings was taken aback. Navarro was addressing him as if he were on the verge of going to prison.

"I did love those children, Your Honor," she went on, referring to Alvarez's kid­napped children. "Mr. Dar­ias has money, freedom and his family. Ms. Cooper is in Washington. Mr. Chellino is the chief of intelligence. Mr. Bush is still the Vice Presi­dent of the United States. So what is the result of this?"

Navarro's lawyer, Mi­chael Brodsky, asked Has­tings to impose the mini­mum sentence the law al­lowed - 10 years in prison "Any sentence above the minimum would only fur­ther destroy her," Brodsky pleaded "it would be like breaking a wild horse."

Myles Malman took the podium and attacked Na­varro without the subtlety that had characterized his cross-examination.

"Ms. Navarro is educated She is cultured. She is manip­ulative. She is cajoling. She, in reality, has great disdain for this country. Her testimony was filled with lies and the Jury so found. She is unwilling to face the reality of her acts. She is very bright. She is ex­tremely articulate, and then she comes before this court and says that it" - the money - "was all for the children. She comes into this court ask­ing for compassion and mer­cy, and crying."

"Judge, the most perni­cious thing that I can con­ceive of is hiding behind chil­dren who are kidnapped, and saying that this case is about kidnapping, It is not about kidnapping. It is about drugs and the money that is gener­ated from drugs. And it is about the way that this drug money corrupts and pollutes the moral fiber of people, and Ms. Navarro must be held accountable, and I think the focus should be on the damage that the organiza­tion of Carlos Jader Alvarez brought to this country. The organization could never have flourished, could never have made one single penny, if it was not for the conduct of Marlene Navarro."

It was time for Alcee Hastings to have his say.

"Ms. Navarro, concerning your personal reference to me about it being the most difficult time of my life: Wrong. It was not the most difficult time of my life. The most difficult time of my life is yet to come, and that is the day that I die. Even though I am going through some per­sonal travail, it has no bear­ing on any of my rulings in this case whatsoever.

"I listened very carefully to all of the things you said," Hastings continued "I didn't hear a single moment of con­trition."

"I don't know how to say the word." Navarro said plaintively.

"You don't know how to say, 'I am guilty.' You don't know how to look, as all of us did in this courtroom, at the videotapes with piles of money. It would not have mattered had it been Carol Cooper and Frank Chellino or Mickey Mouse and Don­ald Duck, that was sitting there. Nobody - nobody -takes piles - suitcases - of money to a storefront opera­tion - Dean International - "to do legitimate busi­ness. Your mouth ran off all over those tapes, and all that was talk about laundering money, and those profits came from drugs. Make no mistake about it.

"And so for that reason, you see, if you stood there and told me, 'Say, hey. Judge, you know, these peo­ple used me, and this jury found me guilty, and I was involved,' then I would tell you I would be thinking en­tirely differently about your sentence. But, no, you do not do that. Still you accuse. You accuse the Government. You accuse the functionar­ies of the Government".

"Your Honor ... "

"Let me tell you." Has­tings snapped, "what is in your best interest right now is not to interrupt me. You are going to have to live with this particular sentence. And so as we don't have any misunderstanding, I think you were guilty, and I think that the jury was correct in their assessment."

Hastings toted up Navar­ro's sentence on the various counts, including operating a continuing criminal enter­prise.

"You are committed to the custody of the Attorney Gen­eral of the United States or his authorized representa­tive for imprisonment for a term of 32 years."

ROBERT DARIAS stared at the ocean from the balcony of a small apartment near a lonely, weedy beach north of Miami. He and his wife, Amelia, had rented the place under an assumed name. Sparsely furnished, it had few com­fortable chairs and no car­pets. The rent was paid by relatives.

The same United States Government that had aban­doned Darias and his com­rades at the Bay of Pigs a quarter-century earlier ap­peared to have abandoned him again. After the convic­tion and sentencing of Mar­lene Navarro, he had not heard from any of the D.E.A agents or Justice Depart­ment lawyers: nothing had been said, not even a phone call, about his crucial role in the trial.

The agents and lawyers had toasted each other after the Navarro verdict at a cel­ebratory dinner to which Darias had not been invited. Nor had he been included when the Department of Justice and the D.E.A showered the agents and supervisors of Operation Swordfish with promotions, salary raises, awards, plaques and certificates of commenda­tion. In all, some 90 people inside and outside the U S Government had received recognition for their role in the operation.

It wasn't the lack of a let­ter, plaque or dinner invita­tion that upset Danes the most. It was broken prom­ises. While the D.E.A. had never put its commitments to Darias in writing, it had allowed him to believe that if his espionage against the drug mafia was effective, the agency would pay him a salary throughout the opera­tion and the ensuing trials, supplement those funds with a bonus of at least $100,000 and intercede on his behalf with the I.R.S. - the kind of compensation package Fed­eral law-enforcement agen­cies often offer to their free­lance undercover opera­tives. The D.E.A. as an insti­tution had reneged on all three promises. It had halved Darias's salary mid­way through the Swordfish trials, and then stopped it entirely before the Alvarez and Navarro trials. It had used part of his promised $100,000 bonus to pay ex­penses during the trials, thus reducing the bonus to about $73,000. And the D.E.A. had failed to pay him the balance of the bonus.

The broken financial promises were only part of the betrayals Darias felt. He had grown close to the agents controlling him, es­pecially Carol Cooper, a gre­garious young woman from a small Midwestern town who had encouraged Darias to consider her an equal, a colleague, a personal friend. "You're one of us," Cooper told him on more than one occasion. Darias and the agents drank together in the evenings and socialized at gatherings to which spouses were invited. The Swordfish operatives were bonded by the shared intimacy of life-threatening pressure. They had all risked their lives, but Darias had been the most exposed For almost two years, he had ventured many times alone and with­out protection to meet armed drug smugglers who would have killed him in­stantly if they had guessed his true mission. Anony­mous callers had threatened to kill him and his family. Once he had barely escaped death when a man with a MAC-10 submachine gun had accosted him.

Though Darias was deeply disappointed by the D.E.A. betrayals, he was not entire­ly surprised. Even before he joined Operation Swordfish, he had heard stories about how intelligence agencies sometimes mistreated spies - how agents made com­mitments and then cast the spy adrift when he was no longer needed, how they dis­claimed all knowledge of him and his activities if something went wrong. Darias's concerns had been born out: things had gone wrong during Opera­tion Swordfish. Almost sin­gle-handedly, Darias had held Swordfish together af­ter a destructive power struggle had erupted between two factions of agents over control of Darias and the Marlene Navarro investigation. There had been allegations of misconduct. Maintaining his loyalty to the agents, Darias had re­vealed nothing of those prob­lems at the trials.

Through desultory days and fretful nights in his small apartment north of Miami, Darias came to doubt that the infiltration of Navarro had been worth the cost to him. He kept recalling the encour­aging words of the D.E.A. agents during Operation Swordfish. "You're basically the operation - I think you know that. . What you're giving us is obviously the basis for the vast majority of what we're doing ... We swear by you - as far as we're concerned, you're a gold mine.... All of us consider you a very close friend, and we want you to be aware of that."

On the question of interced­ing on Darias's behalf with the I.R.S., the D.E.A. agents had been equally reassuring: "It will be taken care of -there's no problem.... We're gonna do our best to take care of you at the end .... We're gonna be backing you up, don't worry about that. .. We're not gonna leave you out there hanging."

What seemed to Darias the most cynical comment of all had come from Carol Cooper at the height of the bureaucratic battle for con­trol of Swordfish - the piv­otal months when Darias himself effectively ran the operation while Cooper and Chellino were in exile, hoping that Danes would inter­cede with their D.E.A bosses to save their careers.

"Hopefully, at the end. we can take care of your we problem, No. 1. No 2, you should get enough" - money - "at the end that - I can't give you a figure, but you're gonna be able to live very. very comfortably. And No 3, we'll take care of you through the trials. I don't see any problem with any of that."

As callously as the D.E.A had treated Darias, the I.R.S. was worse.

"I think we can come to some understanding on this matter," said a polite, conde­scending lawyer in the I.R.S Southeast District Office in Jacksonville, Fla. "But I think it's important for you to understand, Mr. Darias, that it will require good faith - a childlike good faith - on your part. You have to say 'I will tell you everything, I have nothing to hide I am going to pay to the Govern­ment everything I can pay.' We're not here to bargain."

A childlike good faith. Rob­ert smiled ruefully to himself. It seemed to him that he had invested "a childlike good faith" in the United States Government on repeated oc­casions from the Bay of Pigs to Operation Swordfish. And where had it got him?

AFTER THE Na­varro trial, in the summer of 1987, Darias and his wife, Amelia, had the worst fight of their marriage over the I.R.S. impasse. She harangued him for not "acting more deci­sively," He shouted that he was "doing all I can!"

"The only thing you did by making this great sacrifice was to have a group of D.E.A. agents promoted!" she screamed, vowing that if he ever testified again she would leave him. She stormed out of the house.

Amelia drafted two letters for her husband's signature, one to Myles Malman at the United States Attorney's of­fice, the other to Carol Coo­per and Frank Chellino at the D.E.A. There were no threats or accusations, Just cries for help.

"Amelia and I both feel so let down, so totally used, abused and discarded that there is no future as long as my tax problems exist.... " said the letter to Cooper and Chellino. "It is not just or humane that the Govern­ment of the United States is doing this to someone who has cooperated and put his life on the line for them ... I am slowly dying and nobody gives a damn "

To Myles Malman, Darias wrote, "My life is in sham­bles. My wife is ill and we are experiencing very seri­ous personal conflicts caused entirely by my co­operation with the D.E.A.... My tax case is lost in the endless maze of cruelty that is the I.R.S. for me."

IT WAS MYLES MALMAN in the end who broke the deadlock He had always felt that Darias's problem lay not so much with the I.R.S. as with the D.E.A., with the bu­reaucratically cautious Carol Cooper and Frank Chellino.

Malman told Darias that the I.R.S. was refusing to settle with him until the D.E.A. paid him his now reduced bonus. The D.E.A in turn was refusing to pay the $73,000 until Darias had settled with the I.R.S.

Malman fount himself dealing with a personable I.R.S. lawyer based in Ft. Lauderdale who'd come origi­nally from working-class Boston, an environment with a certain similarity to Malman's home ground in the Bronx and Manhattan. Malman appealed to the Boston man's common sense, a quali­ty rare in the I.R.S. "If you don't want your agency to wind up on '60 Minutes' look­ing like a bunch of idiots, you'd better deal with this matter," Malman warned.

It took two more years. To settle Darias's disputed tax obligation, the I.R.S de­manded all of his bonus.

On April 14. 1989, six and a half years after Operation Swordfish ended, a meeting was held at the Miami field headquarters of the D.E.A. It was attended by Robert Dar­ias, a D.E.A. agent and an I.R.S. representative. The agent presented Darias with a D.E.A. cashier's check for approximately $73.000. Dar­ias endorsed the check over to the I.R.S. in full settlement of his tax debt - an out-of­-court compromise compara­ble to those the I.R.S. makes with individuals and corpora­tions every day.

SINCE DARIAS HAD testified in open court so many times, he was no longer useful as an undercover agent. The D.E.A. of­fered to put him, Amelia and their daughter, Laura, into the Witness Security Program. Often the witness never sees his relatives and friends again. The Dariases de­clined they wanted to maintain their ties to the Cuban community of South Florida.

But those crucial personal relationships were severely strained by Operation Swordfish and its aftermath. Few people knew the truth of what Darias had done for the United States Govern­ment, and he did not feel free to discuss it with anyone ex­cept his most intimate rela­tives. A number of people in Miami's Cuban community chose to believe rumors that Darias had been caught traf­ficking in drugs and forced to become an informer.

The Dariases were in limbo. Amelia Darias was distraught and undergoing psychiatric care. Laura Darias, now a teen-anger and fully aware of the crisis in her family, was bitterly unhappy attending a mediocre public school where she know no one and was afraid to form close friendships. She missed her regular visits with her grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.

It was difficult for Darias to look for work. The family had to live under the constant threat that Carlos Jader Alvarez, Marlene Navarro and the rest of the Colombian mafia would take any opportunity for revenge. The drug mafia had assassinated Ameri­can spies far less important than Robert Darias, and they often slaughtered the spies' families as well. The Dariases had no choice but to continue to lie low,. They sank into a life of isolation and continuing fear.

In a night stand next to their bed. Robert and Amelia kept an Uzi submachine gun, a Remington 870 shotgun with a pistol grip, three .357 Magnum revolv­ers, a Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter pistol and a Colt .38 special police revolver. All were loaded.

The only door into their apartment was triple-locked and was wired with an alarm that was activated by touching the outside knob without first unlocking the door with keys. When it was time for Laura to leave for school, Robert and Amelia together took her to the front door of the building. Amelia and Laura waited inside the locked lobby while Robert, fully armed, went for the car, checked it for explosives and then brought it around. When Robert went to the nearby beach, either alone or with the family, he took a concealed stainless steel .357 Magnum and a cordless telephone with which to sum­mon help if necessary.

The telephone in the Dariases' apartment seldom rang. And when it did ring, it startled - resonating through the carpetless surfaces like a burglar alarm, sending chills down the spine. Robert Darias had achieved the inner redemption he sought. But it was a lonely redemption. He was in from the cold and out in the cold at the same time.

Epilogue: United States District Judge William M. Hoeveler recently ordered a new trial for Marlene Navarro. The Judge determined that faulty work by a court stenographer during Navarro's trial rendered the record inaccurate and therefore unusable by Navarro and her lawyers in their appeal of the verdict. Pretrial hearings are expected in the next several weeks Na­varro remains incarcerated. Robert Darias is averse to helping the Government convict her again.

 

[1] David McClinrick, a former investigative report­er for The Wait Street Journal, is the author of the best-selling book "Indecent Exposure, A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street." This article is adapted from his book "Swordfish A True Story of Ambition, Savagery and Betrayal," which will be published by Pantheon Later this month. Copyright 1993 by David McClintick.