Graymail - E6

Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on Murder in Miami. So you offered Lamar a million dollars to land at his island and to bring the coke back to the United States.

Right.

One of the most significant things in this whole case was Lamar Chaster's appearance before a Royal Commission of Inquiry in the Bahamas.

So at the time that the inquiry was happening in the Bahamas, were you even aware that it was going on?

Well, it was shortly after this that the mysterious Morgan Cherry mentioned that I got a call from Bob who said that Lamar wanted to hire me as a consultant. There was going to be a pre trial hearing in Atlanta.

You didn't worry that you were getting into something that you might not escape from.

I just sort of walked right into it.

Here's Chester talking to CB about Phil Stamford.

I am an eye, I mean, I am not by any mean any and me and Agne all.

Right, 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 male defense pretty much. Yeah, and your girlfriend Mickey's okay with all.

That, not exactly. Remember Bob and I were at the Mutiny to meet Lamoiar, drinking pretty much all afternoon before finally got to see him, and when we're finished, were both drunkard than Skunk's. Drove back to the apartment I got out. It was getting dark by then, so I guess I figured time to take a nap. Is So I dozed off, and when I wake up, for some reason, I decide I need to call this girl I met in Washington, d C. When I was up there, and it's dark in the apartment and I'm still so out

I guess that was it.

For Mickey and me.

Phil, I'm sorry, that's kind of awkward.

And the funny thing is the girl in DC didn't even remember my name when I called her.

I'm Lauren brad Pacheco and this is murder in Miami.

So I moved out of the Amsterdam Palace and ended up renting a room from Jack McClintock, a writer friend who actually did the piece you referred to earlier about the Cardozo. He and his girlfriend had a place in south of Miami.

So when Bob called about the pre trial hearings, you were basically available for a consulting gig.

Whatever that might be. Yeah, Bob said, I was supposed to look for inconsistencies in the daily transcript, and I'd be paid a couple hundred dollars a day plus travel, So it didn't sound like such a bad idea. Bob said, I could stay at Lamar's place in Cleveland while I was up there, and he was going to get the tickets and we'd fly on.

I mean, not to sound like a broken record, but you seriously didn't have any hesitation about getting messed up with a federal investigation.

You've got to realize I still didn't quite believe that what was going on was even real. But if Lamar thought I was with the CIA, and I told him the God's honest truth that I wasn't, who was I to turn down the money? Mostly though, I was just going whichever way the wind was blowing.

Well, you know, at this point you had to have put some thought into why he would have thought that you were actually a CIA operative. I mean, those guys weren't exactly naive or stupid.

Well, it has taken me years to get my head around that one. But here's what I think they were thinking. Now, here's this guy down here from Washington, DC. He's written for the New York Times on national security matters, for Christ's sakes, and everyone knows the agency uses journalists as cover all the time. He's even worked for congressman on the House Armed Services Committee and for a think tank in DC. It would be easy enough for them to

Well, you know there's another possible reason too. Here's the recording of the taped phone call between Chester and C. B.

Hackworth.

I have a guy I'm made together our agreement Watt would I am not, by any meaning comment that he's not currently and to one of the guys that worshiped with his own attorney of.

The combers on the guy, Russell Burt.

I don't know who this guy is, Russell Burns or Russell Brooke. I never met him. There was a Russell Brooke who was in the indictment, so he would have testified in the Lone Star grand jury or have been a subject of the Lone Star brand jury. But whatever it was, I have no idea how he could have come to that conclusion. Probably just the same as Lamar and Bob. No one can be that dumb, so he must be with the CIA for background.

Operation Lone Star was a sprawling federal investigation of money laundering, but it began in nineteen eighty one as a probe of oil price manipulation in Houston. One of the principal targets of the initial probe, Miami tax lawyer Lance Eisenberg, also happened to represent Lamar Chester, which is how the former Miami based Eastern Airlines pilot and his opulent lifestyle caught the attention of the US Customs and Internal Revenue

Yeah, and when we land, Bob gets a rental car and we drive out to Lamar's place in the countryside outside Cleveland, which was what's left of a tiny old town in the Georgia Hills, about seventy five miles north of Atlanta. A gas station, hardware store, little diner with a fifties rock and roll theme.

What was the atmosphere at Chester's place when you arrived, It was kind of strange.

First thing, they put Bob up in the guest house on their property, drop them off there, and I'm staying at the main house with Lamar and artists his wife, who I can tell right off, really doesn't want me there at all.

Why did you get that impression?

I remember her as sort of a glowering presence, very dark, always in the background. I don't think she said a word to me the whole time I was there.

Sounds welcoming.

It was kind of strange, and I guess starting then, but certainly over the years, I've come to think of her as sort of a driving force beyond all. This sounds to me like she sort of egged Lamar on, and she was quite capable of doing that. Lamar was always trying to please her. Her previous marriage was to

A quick note here, I did request an interview with the artist through her daughter aj Henderson, who declined my request to speak with either one of them or to comment on Phil's characterization. It's interesting though to me that when you got there, you're the one staying in the main house and Bob staying in the guest house.

Yeah, it didn't make much sense to me at the time. Actually, nothing about this was making any sense. What I eventually figured out was that they must have done this to make it easier for me to talk to Lamar about what my boss is back at CIA headquarters had in mind for him.

What was your interaction like with Lamar? What did you guys talk about?

Not too much for sure, because I, for one thing, I didn't say that much. One time though, I remember we were driving around the grounds there. He had about five hundred acres there, rolling hills and pasture, and we passed by this pond, an irrigation project that he was having some work done on at the time, and for some reason it reminded him. And this was right out of the blue, because we'd never spoken about the subject before.

We will wait. I'm sorry he brought up Clay Williams. Why didn't you mention that before?

It just came to my mind when we were talking about driving around with Lamoire passed this irrigation project, and he said, you know, when they found him there, a lot of people thought I did it, which I didn't, but it sure gained me a lot of respect. I'll tell you that is sort of laughing when he said it.

Not exactly comedic.

Five.

But did you push him for more details about what had happened?

Like I have said before, I didn't ask too many questions. I think that's one of the reasons I was able to get along so Will. But I don't know then, and I certainly didn't know now exactly why he brought it up. You know, Lamar was always working the angles. Was efficient for information from me? Or was it a warning? I don't know.

Speaking of Clay Williams, let's pause here for a quick update. At this point, I'd poured through newspaper clippings that covered the Atlanta leg of Lone Star's grand jury hearings. In them, there were multiple mentions of a man murdered and left

My name is David Denmark, and I'm a detective with the Miami Dade Homicide Cold Case Unit. I've been a cop since nineteen ninety three, so going on thirty years, and I spent twenty of those in homicide.

Although the Records Department had done a thorough search, they were unable to locate the police report on Clay Williams's death. It was complicated by the fact that the department recycled case file numbers in those days, and when they pulled what they initially thought was the correct one, it contained the report for an entirely different murder. Frustrating but somewhat understandable given the time. According to Detective Denmark.

There's over ten thousand goal cases in Miami Dade, which is a staggering number. I would tell you that the eighties were a very large part of the ten thousand cases. Compared to other years, they were handling two and three a day, and that lasted for quite.

Some time, particularly since eighty one and eighty two saw record numbers of homicides in Miami.

Yes, and to speak on that, the type of homicides that they were receiving were in vehicles, are in pools, meaning they would come out to the scene and there were three people unidentified in a pool and gagged and shot in the head. Or they would come into an apartment and there'd be two or three people bound and gagged, where they'd open up a trunk of a car and find two people bound and gaged. So it was rough

And so those reports compiled pre computer era were contained in folders, consisted of physical paper clippings and photos stored in files and warehoused storage that has withstood physical relocation due to moves and catastrophes like hurricanes and flooding, all of which makes locating older case files much more complicated than simply searching a database.

There's a process that we follow as Gold Case Detectives to locate files, and that includes our archived files. We contact our Property and Averdance bureau along with warehouse personnel and we'd give them the case number. Sometimes it takes two to three weeks for them to go through everything documentation folders that were created back in the day. We try to exhaust all of that before digging into the medical examiner records.

And that's the point we'd gotten to. As Detective Denmark pursued tracking down the medical records for Clay Williams, I continued to look for anything that linked him to Lamar Chester. Back to Phil Stamford and his nineteen eighty four visit to Lamar Chester's five hundred acre farm in Cleveland, Georgia.

Looking back on it all, I guess one of the reasons he thought I knew more than I did was because I never said that much. Most of the time, I just listened. Another time, we were sitting in their living room, nothing fancy about the place, shag carpets, heavy wooden furniture, big picture window, overlooking the gravel parking lot, listening to country music, and Lamar, for some reason, starts talking about this valuable German pistol he's recently acquired and

What happened?

Well, I remember Lamar and artists. It was in the living room then looking at each other, exchanging glances. I even thought I saw a flicker of or at least uncertainty in his eyes. No, I don't think so, he said, because, as I realize now, he was probably worried that I'd take the opportunity to shoot him and say it was an accident. As he was telling everyone at the time, they were either going to have to drop the charges against him or they were going to have to kill him.

So do you think maybe at this point he was getting a little paranoid?

And to this day I have no idea how consciously I was playing on Lamar's fears or his belief that I was a CIA agent whould come to help him with his great meal defense. But I can see now I was really getting into it too.

Wow. So how long were you a house guest and that dysfunctional dynamic before the pre trial hearings began in Atlanta.

It couldn't have been too long, you know, just three or four days and Bob flew back to Miami, and Lamar R moved operations to Atlanta pre trial hearings were going on. And here I am staying at the rich Carlton Hotel, which I know is costing more per night than I'm probably paying a month in rent back in Miami, watching these proceedings in federal court. Exactly why, I don't know. I'm supposed to be a consultant, but no one Lamar or anyone else ever asks me to do anything, So I just watch.

Did any of the testimony really stick out as noteworthy?

Well? Yeah, 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 billing as Lamar's bookkeeper and mistress.

Do you remember seeing her testify? What do you remember about her?

Lamar's lawyers are trying to get the case thrown out before it even gets to trial, and this is their claim. They say that Leslie, who at one point had skipped out on Lamar and gone over to the Feds, gave them some phony documents to make Lamar look even guiltier

Yeah, from what I've read, she seemed kind of caught in almost a tug of war in terms of her loyalty between the prosecution and the defense. You know, I did go back through old newspaper archives and looked into the testimony she'd given in Houston, and it would appear that Leslie Bickerton had gone to Georgia to help set up that college campsite River Hills for Chester, and that she ends up moving to Hugh and becomes a paid witness for the government there. You know, the papers do

Oh yeah, it's extremely important, and it sounds to me like she's someone we definitely ought to talk to her. I haven't talked to her, by the way.

Yeah, you know, I've been trying to track her down. The problem is that in the paper they mentioned that she may or may not be in the witness Protection Plan. I mean, they spell her name in several different ways given the different publication. But I I've tried every single possible combination to search for her and reached out to even people I think are possible relatives in multiple states. I mean, I'll keep you posted if I can and

I had never done anything in close proximity to Lamar other than in the Bahamas under the circumstances I had described before, so it was totally unexpected that he wanted me to give him a ride back to his hotel, which was the Ritz Carlton. Of course, my car was the car of a reporter who was making nine thousand dollars a year, and I lived in my car. It was full of trash, and I didn't even know if another person could fit in the passenger seat. So I

But first Cbe had to deal with the issue of his cluttered car and rather empty wallet.

There was some embarrassment and professional tight rope that I felt like I was walking there for a minute, because I knew that I had barely enough money to get out of the parking lot that my car was parked in at the Federal Courthouse, and I knew that I was not going to have enough money to park at the Ritz Carlton and get out. So, in addition to being embarrassed about the transportation situation, period, I didn't know

So all of this is running through his head as Cbe walks to his cluttered car with an international drug smuggler. Lamar Chester, did you rush before him and try to clear a space on the seat.

My recollection is that I did not have time to even attempt to clean up my car. But at that point in my life again, I lived in my car, and I had valuable things. In the middle of the trash. McDonald's wrappers was just a pile of garbage. You opened the door and it spilled out. It was like something

I cannot even imagine that moment.

It was a moment that I was not really prepared for. And by that I don't mean in any way that I was tempted to take any of that money for myself. It was that it was so obvious to me what he was doing. He was turning his head, and it was a tacit invitation to take whatever I wanted. I had written enough articles about other people who had come under his influence, the chief of Police of Cleveland, others

Bickerton, basically working as a publicist.

Almost very aware of Dan and his transgressions, certainly as a reporter, because he continued to write about Lamar after he had was working for Lamar. You just don't do that, You certainly don't do it without telling your readers that you have that conflict. Dan wrote the notorious article in the Telegraph that had a glaring headline that said unglued agents pursue White County farmer. As if that was as

What happened after he saw you holding a ten dollar bill?

He was grinning. I think that there was an unspoken understanding of what had just happened. That he gave me the opportunity to be bribed and I did not take it, and he was kind of amused. I told him profusely that I was going to repay this ten dollars, the ten dollars that I borrowed. Aside, I wasn't sure why I was going to the Ritz Carlton to meet this fella.

As CB Chaufford chester to the Ritz Carlton, his thoughts were spinning.

I mean, are there people in his room waiting to kill me? You know, those kinds of thoughts flash in your mind when you're dealing with someone who was accused of the things that Lamar was accused of, and that had the kind of testimony that had arisen in the case.

A quick aside, in addition to the mention of a man fed to alligators who may or may not have been Clayton Williams, I discovered that in pre trial transcripts, a prosecutor involved in the Houston leg of Lone Star specifically refers to Clayton Williams by name as a potential witness against Lamar Chester. This lends extra weight to possible motive for his murder, particularly since Chester was quoted as calling him a snitch who had to be gotten rid

One of them was Sibley Riggs Papers, described as a beautiful young yacht salesman whose body was found stuffed in a trunk of a Mercedes in the Fort Lauderdal Airport in late nineteen eighty one, shortly after she'd been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury in Houston. Another was her boyfriend, a mobster named Alan Rivenbark by all all accounts, a slightly crazy, dangerous person who had already testified before

There was also an Alfred J. Miller, a business associate of Chesters with ties to River Hills, who died under suspicious circumstances in Nashville and was cremated almost immediately as in the next day. This happened in nineteen eighty two, shortly after he learned he was about to be subpoenaed to testify before Lone Star's Atlanta grand jury.

So the question is, you know, were these connected if they had testified against Lamar, where they have been a further danger to him? If Lamar wasn't involved, was the mob because the mob certainly didn't want anyone expanding the scope of the investigation. Whatever the answer is, certainly it would have weighed heavily on Lamar's mind at the time, whether it was involved or not. Because of the additional deaths around him, he was quite worried about his own future.

Back to Ceb Halfworth meeting mister Happy Miles at the Atlanta Ritz Carlton in nineteen eighty four, mister Miles having just returned from a sort of two year exile that was part of his immunity deal, two years basically spent sailing around the world.

Lamar was happy, no pun intended. He could not have been more pleased that Happy Miles had made a deal that got him off the hook, even at Lamar's expense. What Lamar had to say about that was that he wasn't worried. He had nothing to hide, that whatever Happy was going to testify to truthfully was not anything that would get Lamar in trouble, according to Lamar.

As Lamar escorted Cbe through the hotel lobby, they were met with a rather warm reception.

It's hard to tell where Lamar ended and the Riz Carleton began because their customer service is so good they know their guests. As we walked in, somebody who worked at the Ritz, Carlton did say welcome back, mister Chester. He stayed at the Rich Carleton when he was in Atlanta for those prolonged pre trial hearings. It was his home away from home.

I want to hear your first impressions of Happy Miles when the door opens.

I would say his name suits him, almost like something Carl Hyason would come up with for a novel. I'm not at all sure that Lamar had even told Happy that I was coming, or who I was. It may have been a surprise to Happy. Didn't really matter. We got this warm reception. I think Happy had already had a few drinks and was making one for himself. Happy

A persona that didn't seem too dampened by the current circumstances.

It's hard to say what I expected, but it was not laughter and this gregarious reception from somebody who is so immersed in consequential legal actions with the United States government. Here, I've got on one hand, Lamar Chester, who is flaunting practically his relationship with a member of the news media, and you've got Happy Miles, who is virtually flaunting the fact he's just got the deal of a lifetime.

And in true form, that's not all Happy was flaunting.

These days, you'd use the word bling. I don't think that was a thing then. It was unusual in my experience to see someone wearing so much of it. He had a rolex, he had something gold around his neck. He had a bracelet that spelled out his name in what I took to be diamonds. And I assumed that all this jewelry that looked like it was gold probably was gold. And again, what little I knew from Lamar on the way over to the hotel was about an immunity deal. I learned more about it in the room.

And yet here was a very happy, happy Miles, happily sharing his story with a young reporter on the record.

I mean, you couldn't make this fella up as a character, and he's real, and he is in Lamar Chester's hotel room.

So happy basically backed up what you had heard Chester testified to in the Bahamas his claim that he had done everything with the understanding of the DA and the CIA.

Happy absolutely backed up Lamar's claims. Happy backed up everything Lamar said in terms of general statements about the drug smuggling having been done in concert with different government agencies and agents, that agents supposedly got information from Lamar, passed it on, acted on it successfully, according to Lamar, and in turn they let him continue to smuggle marijuana.

After all these years. What sticks out most to C. B. Hackworth about the surreal gathering at the Ritz Carlton was the way it contrasted with the reality that other potential witnesses involved with the investigation, like Clay Williams, wound up dead.

They didn't know who killed who, but there were dead people. It bothered me. I was a lot younger and braver than I am.

Now.

I wouldn't say I was ever reckless, but I didn't take as many precautions as I probably would now. But here I am in this room with two of the major players, and I can't believe that Happy Miles is in the room if he's going to testify against Lamar Chester, if even a small amount of what has been either implied or outright stated about Lamar Chester being dangerous is true,

But cb he was beginning to fear. The real danger involved the information Chester had shared and the people linked to it.

I'm the person he called in the middle of the night. I worried that I knew too much.

It's really interesting to feel like you're the confidante of somebody who knows things that may or may not have gotten people killed, and you're now on the receiving end of that information. Yes, on the next murder of Miami, Perseverance pays off on double fronts in a connection with a mysterious key player in the Lone Star legal proceedings.

I can understand she would have been worried back then. For sure, bodies turn it up all over the.

Place, and a major break in the search for information about the murder of Clay Williams. This man who was going to turn on him and had to get rid of him. Murder of Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are Lauren Bright Pacheco, Taylor Chicoigne, and Phil Stamford. Written by Phil Stamford and Lauren Greg Pacheco, Audio editing and sound design by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tyer, and Taylor chackoine featuring music by Evan Tyre, Phil Meyer, John Murchison