Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on Murder in Miami. So it's the fall of nineteen eighty four and basically, you agree to go to Georgia to help Lamar Chester, who you fully believe is a drug smuggler and who fully believes that you were in the CIA, create a gray mail defense.
Pretty much. Yeah.
Operation Lone Star was a sprawling federal investigation of money laundering. Lamar Chester's involvement with a Nasau trust company and ownership of islands became the focus.
There's over ten thousand coal cases in Miami Dade, which is a staggering number. The eighties were a very large part of the ten thousand cases.
The star witness, in fact, the whole point of the hearings was this tall, slim woman in her thirties, Leslie Bickerton, who the newspapers were building as Lamar's bookkeeper and mistress.
The government had been implying, if not outright stating with witnesses fed to alligators, the portrayal that they were doing of Lamar Chester.
Chester had told her that he quote got rid of a man and fed him to the alligators. And she says that he mentioned the man's name as Ed Clayton. Hey, Lauren, Hey, Phil, So I think I actually found Leslie Bickerton. Definitely the right one.
Are you sure you spoke to her?
Not exactly so I've been texting the correct number, but it wasn't until I connected with her brother that she responded to me.
And what'd you say?
That's a little complicated. So she's not willing to speak with me yet, but she is willing to communicate via an encrypted service so nobody can intercept our communication.
I guess, well, why all the secrecy.
Because Phil, after all these years, she's still afraid for her life. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murder in Miami. When Leslie Bickerton and I first connected in April of twenty twenty two, she insisted that going forward, we only do so in an absolutely secure way as an end to end encryption. Once we settled on a means, it still took her over an hour to respond to my initial explanation of who I was and why I was reaching out. She was extremely guarded and acious as
to exactly why I was searching for her. After stressing she was extremely private and extremely careful as to who she let into her life, she offered me this ominous warning quote, you have no idea, she typed, what you are stepping into. Trust me, she continued, I know this
as a fact, unquote. The Leslie Bickerton I would grow to know bit by bit and over months of encrypted texting was a woman who still very much bore the scars of the experience of crossing paths with many of the names you've now heard, especially Bob Adams and Lamar Chester.
It became obvious that, unlike Phil who has an interesting tendency to look back on even the more troubling aspects of his experience with intercept with a bit of a bemused chuckle, Leslie finds nothing amusing about having been drawn into a federal investigation. In fact, she still lives in fear of the individual she became intertwined with, even the
one she still hasn't identified. Our early communications were halting, sporadic, and somewhat cryptic, as I sought to give her a level of comfort and trust while dealing with the limitations of texting. What became very clear, though, was her significant trepidation over revisiting the lone star period of her life at all, and her belief that sinister forces beyond her control at the time were still at work. Today. Like Phil, she seemed to be struggling to put together the pieces
of that period of her life. But unlike Phil, she very much felt to be a target of violent threats. Quote. There was a contract out on me, and I know much more than I should, she texted, But I was too naive and stupid not to realize what I was involved with and had to find out a lot more after the fact. Unquote. She went on to offer this warning if I decided to proceed, quote, be very careful. When I updated Phil, it was with a much greater sense of concern about the story we were tackling.
So are you still texting?
Yeah, just texting. But you know, I have to say she is extremely concerned about her safety and honestly very convinced that I'm putting myself in harm's way by even revisiting any of this.
Oh come on, now, I've been poking around this the last ten to fifteen years, and the heat is off. I can understand she would have been worried back then, for sure, bodies turning up all over the place, but it's been forty years now.
Yeah, but you weren't even indicted. She was a witness, and she believed at the time she was told there was a contract out on her life, and she's still afraid. I think part of the reason why it was so hard to find her was because she went to great lengths not to be found.
It's been hiding for forty years. That's no, it's no way to live.
I don't know. I mean, it's easy for us to say, but she was told her life was in danger and that people were incentivized to kill her for payment. And even if that's no longer the case, it's not like she ever got some kind of formal update that her nightmare was over.
You know.
It's like they've been playing a capture the Flag game and it moved on and ended, but she's still in hiding. Nobody told her it was over.
Well, maybe if she talked to me, I could assure of something or other. I mean, I understand that she was scared at one time. Once upon a time, there was certainly something to be scared of, and I'm still trying to figure it out myself. So maybe we have that in common.
Leslie and I would continue communicating via encrypted texts for several months, bonding over our shared love for all things canine, eventually swapping photos of our dogs and piecing together. Are still evolving grasp of what happened during the Low Star investigation. She also shared she found Chester's claims to have been
involved with CIA operations plausible. The CIA, she wrote, has a long involvement with a drug trade since Vietnam, Heroin and cocaine ongoing in Latin America, the Bahamas, Africa, Middle East, especially Afghanistan. It's a Pandora's box unquote for anyone not familiar. Pandora's box basically means opening an endless source of troubles. It springs from a Greek myth about the world's first woman, Pandora, whose curiosity led to the unleashing of evil upon mankind.
Leslie eventually agreed to speak with me over the phone, but it would be another several months before she would consent to taping our conversations. By the time I heard her voice, I very much felt I knew the woman it belonged to.
Going back forty one years, I never saw it coming, had no idea, but then I didn't grow up with those kinds of people. I understand it now. I was just so trusting and naive, really naive. I've realized this over the years. What happened to me from forty one years ago has been with me my entire life.
I mean, it stole my life and I stole my voice.
And she's internalized that loss for forty years.
I've never told anybody what I've told you.
In the course of our extensive exchanges, Bickerton, who had been reduced to almost a cliche in the articles I'd read covering Chester and Lone Star, would reveal herself to be a complicated and fiercely intelligent woman with a wry sense of humor and a rather fascinating unorthodox upbringing.
Part of my life, I grew up in New England, camping and hiking and sailing. My father always had us out in the middle of nowhere, all of us, and I'm the oldest in my family. My mother always said she never know if he'd come back from a hurricane. My father was like, let's go watch the hurricanes come in the tide, the water everything.
Her father was the pioneering venture capitalist John Bickerton, as legendary in the field of finance for his innovative influence, as he was for his eclectic personality, despite his considerable career accomplishments and belonging to a rarefied social realm that
included Rockefellers. According to his obituary quote, he was happiest walking along the Marblehead Causeway during the height of a hurricane with his eager children in tow, waiting for the next rogue wave to hit the causeway wall and drench them all. Unquote.
I grew up that way my whole life. It was a sense of adventure. We knew the people who started outward bound, where you go on remote islands as kids and you learn how to survive on your own. This is not one of these all inclusive resort.
This wasn't club med.
It was not club med. No, no, no no. And I know how to hunt, and I know how to fish. And because I grew up part of my life in the Hawaiian Islands, I knew how to fish what they call a Hawaiian sling. Are you familiar with that?
Okay? So this is all.
With indigenous in the Hawaiians. So a Hawaiian sling is basically a spear.
We would take a.
Piece of wood, hollow it out in the middle and take surgical tubing and wrap it so it adhere's to that wooden tube. It's like a bow and arrow, okay, except that the stainless steel shaft is probably maybe like five feet long with a barb on it. So with the Hawaiian sling, you hold your breath and you go snorkel and you dive underneath the water to catch your food. I mean we all free dived. We didn't have tanks.
And in addition to mastering outdoor survival techniques, sailing was also a huge part of a Bickerton upbringing and remains a particular passion for Leslie.
Being a New Englander, we look down on people with motor boats, just like, if you're going to be a sailor, you better learn how to sail, You better know how to read the sky, how to read the water, all of it.
By the time Leslie Bickerton, who also dabbled in modeling while living in Hawaii, crossed paths with Lamar Chester, she was barely thirty years old and fully putting her upbringing around finance and formal training and taxation and accounting to work in an environment she knew very well the Cayman Islands.
The beginning of nineteen eighty one, I was over in the Cayman Islands before I had even heard of Lamar Chester. I was working in the Caymans because I have a CPA background and an international tax background. In the Caymans, a person named Stephen Greenberg.
Greenburg was the Miami based tax attorney who started working with Chester after Lance Eisenberg was indicted.
Who was there vacationing with his family. I met him to the Christian that I was working with working for, and Stephen asked, you know if I be interested in meeting Lamar Chester over in the state side. This man owned some islands in the Bahamas, was looking for somebody to do offshore work, and that he might be interested in the work that we do with offshore accounts.
Offshore accounts are utilized for what purpose?
To utilize for both legitimate and illegitimate people, banks, trust companies, people with a tremendous amount of money, So Hollywood people, wealthy people in the States, wealthy people from other countries, religious organizations such as the Mormon Church.
We met.
Yes, you'd be very surprised at what people where they put their money, and businesses and corporations who have sub corporations, insurance companies. Illegitimate people like the mob, you know, mafia, drugs, smuggling, guns, smuggling, trying to where they so called wash their money to make it look legitimate coming into the Cayman Islands setting
up a bank. So you could actually set up a bank, a legitimate bank, a trust company and put your illegal money in there if it's illegitimate money or you don't want to pay the taxes to the IRS right instead of being paid directly by another company for your work, you have that money then deposited directly into what they call an offshore account. Thereby it never touches directly the state site where the IRS can get a hold of it and legitimately say, hey, you know, you owe x
amount of money based on your earnings that year. And then you can use that money then to set up another bank. You can get pretty detailed and involved. But then you can have a subsidiary in the US. So all this money gets washed almost like the tides coming in and out, and it's been there for a long time, it hasn't changed. So that's what offshore does literally physically, you're not having your funds come directly into the United States, So.
It's a gray area.
Very great.
Yeah, it's not necessarily legal, but it's not necessarily illegal exactly, which is exactly why the very rich, whether by illicit means or not, are very fond of offshore accounts as a means of hiding their assets. Those islands have always been known as tax havens for the rich and famous.
Yes, absolutely, there are a lot of loopholes that these big tax lawyers confine that are so buried, very sophisticated individual loopholes.
Apparently Lamar Chester was interested in utilizing some of these sophisticated loopholes when he initiated a meeting with Leslie in person, which would, as with Phil Stanford, take place at the mutiny in Coconut Grove in February of nineteen eighty one.
I met him for dinner at a hotel that they had put me in, so I did not know of this hotel ahead of time. I had not a clue this hotel apparently was known for all the drugs smugglers.
Did he make it clear at that dinner meeting why he wanted to hire you and what he wanted you to do for him.
He was interested in my background, just my own personal background, so the sailing and the growing up on islands, and the tax and the CPA, and thought that he could utilize my expertise for lack of a work to help him with different businesses that he had running in the Bahamas and maybe elsewhere, and maybe setting up an account in the Caymans.
It was at that time that he told.
Me that he on these islands in the Bahamas, and if I ever wanted to go there or stay there, I'd be welcome to he'd arrange it for me. Back in that time, I mean I wasn't married, I didn't own a homes, I didn't own a car.
I had a sailboat.
So the option of living on the island was something that made the job offer appealing to Leslie's sense of adventure, even if there seemed to be some strings attached.
I don't know if at the first meaning he told me he was married or not, I'm not sure.
And he also had.
A farm or some kind of a farm up in Georgia. But again the hook for me was the islands and the Bahamas.
And the hook for Chester was likely in part the very unique access the privileged patrician and bohemian somewhat sheltered beauty sitting before him could provide, in addition to her offshore tax shelter savvy. How much older was Chester than you were twenty years something like that. Yes, so you're barely in your thirties and he is a much more
sophisticated worldly man. And it sounds like he is honing in on what makes you tick that first night at dinner and realizes that the islands that he owns would be a huge draw for you.
Yes.
Do you look back in retrospect and feel like he was reading you?
You know, it's an interesting question, Lauren.
I've come to recognize far too late in life that I don't think that way, and I didn't recognize that other people do think that way, that they size you up to see what they can get from you. I've never been that way. It's a flaw in one sense, because it leaves you vulnerable. So yes, he sized me up immediately. And it was with the islands. Darby and the Bahamas have an opportunity to go there, and I thought, sure, okay, why not?
It's a hell of a piece of bait to have this island paradise that you can offer to people as a place to visit, a place to live that seems like it's completely protected and utopia. Yes, yes, I was struck the Bickerton, like Stanford, was at a point in her life where she was drifting a bit, sort of following her fate where it led, which made it much easier to get sucked into the orbit of someone with
an agenda. Oddly enough, you were perfectly suited to take Chester up on the offer to go live on his island.
Yes, a place like Darby and some of the out islands. It's a test of courage, it's a test of adventure, a test of intellect. It's a test of how you connect with nature.
That's me.
When did you do that? And how long did you live there in relative solitude?
Right?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I brought my dog with me, my dope, i' mean pincher Cavena. So it was Cavena and there was another little dog there, a Mutt Island dog.
And that was it. There was nobody there.
To serve me or watch over me or any of that. But I knew I was capable of being able to exist that way, and it was again another adventure for me.
Remember Leslie had taken her dog to Darby. It will play a major role in her testifying for the prosecution. In addition to accepting the challenge of living on the island and the job with him, Leslie Bickerton would also become romantically involved with Chester. All three of those things would come back to haunt her.
I had not a clue of what I was walking into, but the draw was the Bahamas and the islands.
Leslie was not naive and had a pretty immediate inkling that marijuana was Chester's likely livelihood.
I didn't know he was involved with cocaine. If I had known that he was involved with cocaine smuggling and how extensive his operations were, and his involvement with the Colombian cartel and Central America and the FEDS, I wouldn't have touched him. I wouldn't have come near her with a ten foot pole, no way. He deliberately withheld all of that.
But Leslie, in particular so marijuana smuggling as almost part of the adventurous spirit associated with the sailing set in the islands.
The Bahamas has an interesting history. They were known for piracy in the Bahamas. These islands, I mean they're really small, They're not big like Jamaica or the Hawaiian Islands. So once upon a time, this is where the pirates would sort of hang out and go back and forth between the States and the Bahamas and Jamaica and Europe.
Because they knew the lay of the land and anybody who was pursuing them would probably end up wrecked because they didn't understand the proper entry points and exit points exactly.
And that legacy carried on, and I think it just really exploded again when you think about like the Vietnam War, the sixties, anti war, anti government, highly educated people dropping out, you know, the hippie movement, and there comes the marijuana in the seventies. And if you grew up sailing, I mean I grew up on the ocean and the other people that I know, there was always a sense of adventure. When you're sailing, you know what the weather's going to
present to you. And so during that time period you had the marijuana. Okay, you had the hippie movement, this is before cocaine. Then you have this enclave of sailors people that are highly educated, anti establishment, and there comes the Bahamas and it's kind of a perfect storm.
Every island in the Bahamas has its own unique personality, some untouched by civilization until recently, miles of unspoiled natural beauty here for you to explore, are thousands of islands and keys.
It sounds like the perfect storm of this rogue frontier, which is easy to romanticize with the anti establishment game event where suddenly there's this gold rush, but it's marijuana, because at that time there were a lot of people who believed that it was just a limited window because marijuana was going to be legalized sooner rather than later, and if you were going to make money, that was the time to do it.
And that's actually what drew a lot of the guys to Lamar, you know, the sailors, at least with the marijuana smuggling, that it was an event.
Sure, it was like sure, why not?
And I think they were clueless as to how they were being used and how it fit into a master plan that Lamar already had that none of us knew about.
But while she was staying on Little Derby, Leslie became aware that Chester's smuggling was much more prolific and diversified than she initially thought.
That was the first time Lamar flying the and into NASA to customs, well outside customs, and they all knew one another. The local guys knew Lamar quite well. That was my first indication that I'm not going through what I would call the normal procedures. In the Caymans, you went through customs, trick customs, that was a non issue. But the Bahamas, we just cleared through everything. I didn't have to go in line and show my past. I
didn't have to show anything. That was my first indication that, well, this person that I'm with, Lamar Chester, there's a lot more to him than I realized from my first meetings with him.
So you didn't even just get to skip the line. You never had to go through the line.
I never had to go through it.
And Chester wasn't just securing that preferential treatment with cash.
He brought chickens.
Lamar had chickens with him in crates and it was a matter of fact one another. We just swept right through and he gave the guys the live chickens that he brought in and cash.
No big deal, right, which led me to look at.
Then, Oh, this is a system that has already been in place for a while. And I knew then that, oh, this is somebody that's a lot bigger than I realized as far as power is concerned and presence in the Bahamas at that time. So that was my first clue, big.
Clue, But more clues would come out her full force. In the late summer of nineteen eighty one, Leslie had departed the Darby Islands, but would be told her Doberman Covina would have to fly out on a later flight.
There wasn't enough room, that's what was told to me. A small plane, and that, okay, small planes. I've been in a lot of small planes, so you know, okay, fine.
And you figured you'd either go back and get the dog or they would bring the dog to you.
Yep, exactly.
So it's that sort of plans, Leslie.
One that would become a bargaining chip for Chester when his adult son refused to return the dog.
Not a clue, no hint that something was wrong, that this may have been planned in such a way, or after the fact, that this is the leverage that they had over me.
It remains an emotional subject for Bickerton to this day. It was your kryptonite.
Yeah yeah, and they knew that.
Oh yeah, because I upset because I knew that I wasn't going to get that dog back.
He was holding it over me that the dog may or may not come.
That's so awful because he just said, I know how much that dog means to you.
Because she had significant knowledge into his now scrutinized finances, Bickerton believes Chester lured her to his Georgia farm with the promise the dog would be flown there, and also in the meantime she could help set up River Hills the college campsite. So all that narrative about out the camping site and turning it into a college thing. Looking back, do you think that was just some kind of excuse to keep you there?
Yes, definitely. Because I was not on board with it.
I had to go along with it, but I was uncomfortable.
When Bickerton became impatient about the time it was taking to get her Doberman back, she was given another job and power of attorney for Chester and his wife to fly to the Grand Caymans.
Both artists and Lamar signed a document and I've got the original document.
It gave me the authority.
To access their account down in the Cayman Islands and the bearer certificates to bring back to them.
Which was tied with a real estate shell company, the Knee in Georgia.
Yes, yes, and I think a little bit more than that, knowing what the Cayman Islands was involved with. And we're not talking a little bank account. I mean we're talking the Cayman Islands and Smythe And that's what Euston was after, was Smythe.
Smyth was the name on the Cayman Islands account and a bearer certificate. It's sort of like currency. If you hold it, it's yours, kind of like finding a coin on the sidewalk. It doesn't have to be validated to prove ownership. So by even acting as a courier, particularly an international one, Leslie Bickerton had become very much complicit
in Chester's operations. Did you have any clue at that point when you went to get the barriers certificates and you returned that Lamar was actually under federal investigation.
Not a clue, nothing, not even a hint. I had no idea that he was under investigation and I had no idea how big an operation he had, much less no idea that he was involved with the Colombian cartel with cocaine and then with Nick or Auguro and guns, all of it. I had not a clue. And so when he had a conversation with me, it was right around that time, during the summertime.
I'm nineteen eighty one. I didn't see it coming.
I just didn't that conversation would include the mention of a man named Clayton. To the best of your memory, can you take me to that conversation where you were, who was there, what he said, and how it impacted you.
I remember it was either sitting in the truck of his car, but it was on the farm and was on the farm road. The conversation he had with me was that he was in trouble and that it involved some big people. I remember it being very short and very block and I didn't know these people either, And I think that's another reason why it took me by surprise, because I had never heard of these people. He had
never talked about these people at all. So within this condensed conversation, he began telling me about a woman named Sibley, something to do with her selling boats to him, and that she was murdered and stucked in a chunk of her Mercedes. Just that alone, you're just like what if I entered into Like what the heck is what's going on here?
It's just was surreal.
I mean, can you imagine, just like he's just taking a walk down a road with somebody and you think that they're okay, you know, all right, and then hit you with something like that.
I mean, it came out of nowhere. I just must have just like maybe five minutes.
As difficult as it is, I want to go back to the Sibley Riggs and just try to recall as much of the specifics as he said about Sibley. But also of great interest to me is the snitch who he had murdered? Correct? Why how did he word that?
So?
I mean, obviously you know it was a long time ago. I mean, the first thing was about Sibley Riggs and that she was a threat and was found beaten and.
Stuffed in the trunk of her Mercedes.
And I thought, my god, I mean I had not a clue and I didn't even know who this person was except she was a woman. And then right after that was about this person, this man who was going to turn on him and had to get.
Rid of him.
So when you were in the pre trial hearing, you referred to that man you believed his name was Clayton, Ed Clayton, correct, Yes, And that would be the same man that Lamar implied had turned on him or was going to snitch on him and had to be gotten rid of.
Yes.
And I don't know who Ed Clayton is, you know, I had no interaction.
I don't know what he did for Lamar, whether Lamar did it directly or indirectly.
I mean, Lamar is connected with the Colombian cartel. Anyone who would be a threat to the Colombian cartel would be.
Gotten rid of. And that's how you got rid of people.
You dumped them in the everglades, you know, with the alligators, or with the crocodiles along the mangroves, and or you shoved them off a plane, you know, in the deep of the ocean. You never see them again. Real easy way to get rid of evidence. I mean my head was spinning, just spinning. I mean I didn't know what
to do. I didn't know where to turn, just trying to process this information at the same time trying to figure out immediately without saying a word, right how I was going to get off that farm number one without disappearing there because he had his own bodyguard there who you wouldn't want to mess with. Believe me, this is like good old boy right out of Appalachia. There's some people that you can meet along the way in your
life that you just know. It's just like the hair stands up in the back of your head and you just know that this is a very dangerous person.
And that's the kind of person that Lamar had on the farm. At all times.
I was scared for my life and I had to figure out how I was going to get out from underneath it.
I filled Lesliean on the timeline of Clayton Williams and my theory that the person she recollected as Ed Clayton could be the same man. Clay Williams would have gone missing in September of nineteen eighty one and his body was found in October.
So it was all happening this en period of time, this perfect storm in a horrific way. That summer and fall of nineteen eighty one, when everything started to fall apart.
What do you think was his purpose in telling you about Sibley and Clay? Was it to control you, to intimidate you.
I'd say more intimidation. It wasn't like he said to me, while I'm concerned about your welfare. It was more of an intimidation because of the way that it was said. It was implied to me that I was in danger. Not only I was in danger, but that I was a threat to other people.
Wow. And until that point, Leslie Bickerton is adamant that she had no idea Chester was under indictment or that by serving as his courier with power of attorney, she just implicated her and a federal investigation.
Just boom boom boom.
And then about somebody that had been killed off, found him in the Everglades, dumped off in the Everglades with the alligators, and then about Pablo Escobar and about the CIA and the Feds. I mean, it was just like wham bang bang bam, and there were contracts out on his life and contracts that I was also in danger, and then just sort of left me there.
And at that moment Leslie Bickerton's life forever.
Changed and That's where I talk about like walking into the Devil's den, my god.
On the next murder in Miami, a substantial break in the Clay Williams murder case could confirm Leslie's worst fears.
I had no idea what I was walking into that courtroom, or.
It could all just be part of a bigger plane.
Termed to me, looked right at me and said, let's go feed somebody to the gators.
And another prolific smuggler shares his story of being set up.
It was a show trial. He mean to end half the things that happened, or was said that the trial just were made up out of thin air.
Murder Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are Lauren Bright Pacheco, Taylor Chacoine, and Phil Stamford. Written by Phil Stamford and Lauren Bright Pacheco, Audio editing and sound design by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tyer, and Taylor Chacoine, featuring music by Evan Tyre, Phil Mayer, John Murchison, and Taylor Chacoine.
Archival elements provided by Film Archives Incorporated. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get the stories that matter to you.