Placing the Pieces - E10

Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on Murder in Miami. On June twentieth of nineteen eighty five, drug smuggler Lamar Chester was killed in a plane crash on his property in rural northern Georgia.

Lamar Chester died in a very strange plane crash.

And when you look back at a nonsensical really that they could have come to any sort of conclusions about the cause of the crash in less than twenty four hours.

At the time, the initial explanation for the crash was that the plane had run out of fuel.

One of their agents, Frank Baker Junior, was on the scene almost immediately. He had to be there when the plane went down. Among those who considered it more than just suspicious was Lamar's best friend, Ron Elliott, who was at the ranch at the Chicken Farm in North Georgia the night before the crash.

Why wouldn't you have a coroner's a quest, particularly given the circumstances.

They wanted to see the body, and when they opened the casket, the body had already been crea made.

So what happened to the plane? The wreckage?

The plane was gone and all that was left was an oil spot on the floor.

Hello, Lauren, So I have an update. Okay, Detective Denmark was able to track down Clay Williams medical records and he actually has the file.

No kidding. What'd you find out?

Well? A lot more than expected. Turns out that we're not the only ones who were interested in tracking down that file.

Now that is interesting. Who I was cared about it?

Multiple government agencies, fill multiple ones. I'm Lauren brat Pacheco and this is the final episode of Murder in Miami. Six months after I'd submitted a formal request for information regarding the murder of Clay Williams, Miami Dade cold case, Detective David Denmark reached out with news he'd located the medical report.

We always hope that we're going to find something in it to be complete, but we understand when it's not because of the workload that's put on each case. We want to find everything, but if we can't, we'll take any little piece of that case because then we can explore a different avenue of that information we have, and the medical examiner is one of those sources. But we always hope to find the entire five and everything that was put in there.

In this case, apparently we got lucky. Okay, Now, once you got your hands on Clay Williams medical records, what immediately popped out as useful for you pictures.

Pictures is huge. I would tell you it's in my opinion, but I think a lot of other investigators want to see what's going on. And you could study a picture of pictures one hundred times, and every time you receive information outside of those pictures, either from a file, a piece of paper, a witness, anything that regards that case,

And so what kind of pictures were included in Clay's file?

Those were that of the landscape, which was a flooded area beyond southwest two hundred and seventeenth Avenue, which is way out west Everglades. Basically, it gives the waterways and then it gives the horrifying look of a torsto that has been mutilated by alligators and affected by the sun and being decomposed. So those pictures bring all that to light, pictures.

That were likely the same one shown to Phil Stamford in nineteen eighty one.

And again when you read it into someone's investigative rite up, it's different when you're reading it and looking at the picture that they're describing, because words can't describe what we

The file also contained a small clipping from the Sunday, October fourth edition of the Miami Herald, under the headline body found in flooded glades may be missing. Private detective quote a mutilated, decomposed body discovered by Florida National Guardsmen in a flooded East Everglades area maybe the remains of a missing private detective, police said Saturday. There's no way

By reviewing the medical examined report, we found out that there's at least four or five different agencies that were involved, to include fd LEE, US customs Irs, Marshalls, and of course Miami Dad or Metro daid back then, which will always raise an eyebrow on the detective's part, actually everybody's part, because they start understanding the amount of people and different

Here's Phil Stanford.

I think that it's because Leslie was talking to the grand jury about and it looked like Clay's death might be connected to Lamar and these agencies I had no idea. There were so many of them wanted to get in on it, see what was there.

Yeah, David Denmark said that as a detective, that raises a lot of eyebrows, and suddenly this is much more valuable and interesting than anybody thought. I'm going to turn over everything that I've accumulated during the research of all of this to the Miami Dade Cold Case Division. I

Yeah, that's certainly a possibility.

A lot of that depends on Leslie's recollection of the dates, and that's going to be hard for them to pin down. But I know the family would like to know what happened to Clay.

But if Leslie's recollection is accurate, it would support the likelihood Chester and Bob Adams were aware of the murder of Clay Williams before his body was even found. Which adds additional weight to Phil's initial interactions with Bob at intercept.

He introduced me to Bob Adams and another fellow there, and I had understood from Clay that these were former intelligence people from the federal government, whether it's CIA, army intelligence, and they had what I thought was an awfully large computer setup. I just was impressed that such a small office would have such a an enormous setup for computers. I don't know what these guys accessed.

But the prosecutors in Operation Lone Star had a definite theory Intercepts computers would pop up in the transcripts and connection with the allegation that Chester might attempt to obstruct their investigation, stating that quote, mister Chester and mister Adams had discussed the purchase of a computer that would be used to tap into their various federal law enforcement agencies, and that such an advanced computer was apparently purchased for

Oh, I think that they tried to pick a name that made them sound competent and somewhat mys serious. I don't see too much behind it. There may be, but I don't know if there is.

I did think it was interesting, though, that the prosecution at one point claimed that Chester and Adams were trying to break into other agencies computers to interfere with the investigation.

Oh, I'm sure they were.

I don't doubt that Bob was up trying to do everything like he could find out about the investigation.

That's that's Bob.

Technology under understanding of its capabilities has obviously evolved, and Happy Miles says, so has our views on drugs, especially cocaine, which is why he've used his coconut grove smuggling days as a bit more innocent than they may seem today.

Back in the seventies and mid seventies, cocaine was seen in a different light. Cocaine wasn't the addictive drug that we found it out to be. It was a high end drug for high end earners. The people that were using it were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, Wall street people. It wasn't looked like it is now. The laws were different too back then as far as punishment went. In the beginning, it was a different deal. And it was fifty thousand dollars a key then now it's fourteen thousand dollars a key.

You thought at one point there was a way to shut it down. Do you think there's any way to shut it down anymore?

Oh?

Then let her hercu leam cash it would be.

During the production of this podcast, I was able to reconnect Happy with C. B. Hackworth, whose paths had not crossed since their initial meeting at the Ritz Carlton, and I'm happy to report that the two may collaborate on assembling a collection of Happy's adventures during his Adventurers Club and cartel days.

You're a good writer.

I love what I read all the articles in your wrote back when, and.

I was impressed with them.

So yeah, I'm impressed by what I know of your adventures and I'm looking forward to hearing more. I'm actually ready to come out there.

So I've got to fence that'll write the forward to this thing too.

Some of those stories will undoubtedly involve Happy's young protege of sorts, Jack Devo. If you'll remember, Deveau is now in witness protection but ended up testifying against Noriega.

Yep testsiflied before Congress with a hood in his face, Wow, with the black hoodover's head.

In addition to Clay's murder and Chester's questionable crash, one of the enduring mysteries in this Twisting Tail is the identity of the informant who turned on Jack Devo.

Our greatest sale ever Newmark and Lewis's presidential recon.

We believe this ring is the largest cocaine trafficking ring ever organized, said Robert Dempsey, Commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The ring was responsible for flying fifteen eight hundred and thirty seven pounds of high grade cocaine with a street value of two point two billion dollars into the United States between June nineteen eighty two and November nineteen eighty three.

Happy Miles has long taken great offense at any innu that he rolled on devot.

You gotta remember Jack and I were really good friends.

Jack didn't know who flipped on him and even asked if you'd done it.

Oh yeah, Well, of course everybody thinks because of the deal I ended up with, and I'm the guy that rolled on everybody, which is in true.

During my research for this podcast, another former smuggler linked to the Coconut Grove guys who wishes to remain unnamed, sent me two extremely detailed Florida Department of Law Enforcement logs from nineteen eighty three, detailing twelve cocaine trips from departure the cocaine's origin, Columbia, sight of the offload, and

That had to be from a debrief of Jack Devo. I'm sure because nobody would have had all that information. It was just too detailed.

Ah, So you attribute all the information on that to.

Jack, I would say, so, yeah.

Yeah, because they certainly had everybody's names and all the details.

And they have the amount of the load where.

And so it could be because Chester shows up on that list, but that's from nineteen eighty three, so he was already being investigated before that.

Yeah.

Chester's name only appears once linked with Little Darby. But my anonymous source added that quote all of the ones stating Rudder cut Key were transported to the US via Darby Island, unquote, accounting for another five trips six in total, half of the twelve My source also mentioned Jack DeVoe was trying to purchase the larger Darby Island from Chester.

Four, Lamar asked me he seemed to know about the trips. Would I like to buy big Darby Island.

DeVoe goes on to state that they settled on a purchase price of two million dollars and his down payment made to Chester.

I bought the island. I gave him a half a million dollars. I gave him several planes after that, and more money and a couple of keys of coke, almost a million dollars over a period of time. It was not all done in a day. It started off with a half a million. Devout adds there was no paperwork.

It was a handshake, something he was comfortable with because.

We had known each other a long time and that we trusted each other.

Apparently, de Vaux was busted after that payment, but before the sale occurred, and the logs were actually used as evidence to indict Devout. All of which makes the tape you're about to hear even more telling. Here's Lamar Chester proving his participation with the FEDS to C. B.

Hackworth April.

In particular, starting in December, who were working in the Dragon podcast on Dark.

These same agents were living on that I mean physically living there total every day for.

Three weeks now.

It's flat him back and forth to Miami.

I think the first who of him, NASA wrote him down, got him set up. There was a lot of things that preceded that. We're not guns where they produced gruns, alphabolos or any other guns on many half done there for their own protection, and then brought on some guns from Massaw that had to come from the embassy because it couldn't come through the custom.

That Chester mentions he was working on the Jack Devau case.

Who're working Jack Purcas.

Makes Chester's acceptance of that million dollar down payment from Devout seem calculated, especially since the man he took it from ended up incarcerated before testifying against people like Noriega and apparently is now in the witness Protection plan. It also lends more weight to the comment on the Georgia Bureau of Investigations crash report that mentions Chester was quote

Passport pace.

Yeah, a drug enforcement for they assigned the pastor was hollow where signed passwork, and that's where I had been meeting them, meeting with them at task force headquarters and walking across the.

Street to drug enforcement headquarters. Passports got out in commercial office.

Building out in dot of Miami International Airport and right next to it is a new drug enforcement building and passports head like a huge ready room math you know, the.

Huge ball chark radios.

You know, all set up and rosters, games of desk in the main room, and then private offices for these guys.

Each had a private office each other. That's the caliber. Good guys.

Here's the response of mister Happy Miles to that audio.

Let her up, Let her at Jack. If you're listening to this, number one, get a hold of them. And number two, if you want to know who the hell we're outed you out, it was Lamar. That's unreal. That's just totally unreal. How he's bragging them out, flying them back and forth and bringing them guns, and you know they needed guns on Darby like I need a hole

The revelation also contradicted a sort of smuggler's code that Happy maintains. Set the Coconut Grove guys apart.

We were in a different league.

And maybe that fed into the icarous complex of flying too close to the sun. What was the mistake that Chester made.

Well, not having any moral compass, not having any loyalty to everybody he was working with. It just shows who he was and you can't live that way. Everybody should have morals and integrity.

Here's Phil Stanford's reaction. Now that it appears that Chester actually flipped on Jack Devo, Does that open up more questions than answers in terms of who possibly could have wanted him dead.

The list keeps expending, doesn't it. I don't think that devote should be added to the list. But you you know, you've got, of course the obvious, the CIA. But then, as Trento writes in his book, there was a CIA outside the CIA, and I think that's actually where Lamar and Elliott came in. The same guys who were running the drugs and guns trade in Southeast Asia were transferred to Central America. In fact, Ron Elliott had contact with them in the Mid East, so they're part of the list.

If he got there. So you have that.

You have the law enforcement officials in White County who didn't get along with him. One was in fact on the scene of the crash as the plane was going down. It might have done on their own. They might have done it at the behest of one or another agency. And the cartels and the cartels of course, yeah, who would have had the wherewithal to buy whatever help they needed. So far from answering questions, I think the list keeps expanding.

Well.

It's also true though, knowing that he set up Devot and tried to sell him an island and took a down payment for it before Devout went away for the rest of his life, that would have made a lot of people nervous because he was capable of flipping on anybody, and the domino effect of that, because de Vaux had links to the cartel, so there were a lot of people who would have been pretty nervous as to who he was willing to turn on.

Oh I agree, yeah, absolutely.

For Leslie Beckerton, her sense of betrayal and loss of faith on multiple levels was a direct result of her experience with Lone Star and Chester, and it set her on a very specific path.

What happened forty two years ago, that loss of security of who I am as a human being. I remember I was telling you about just being humiliated in that Atlanta court. It's amazing how just something like that can just trip you down where you become like a ghost. And that had such a profound impact on me, and you lose a complete sense of yourself. You're worthless, collateral damage. You know you're worthless. It's a wound and it's traumatic

Right.

That allows me to understand, say another culture and other people their history, and to also establish trust.

It seems like your path has almost been to move into these places where you know the drug trade has wreaked havoc. You're almost on the cleanup crew.

Yes, right, more ways than one.

This past summer I traveled to meet Bickerton in person. It's like little islands nestled. Oh my gosh, there's a house nestled on that island, like a cabin. See it.

Your destination is on the left.

Now, in her early seventies, she still strikes a commanding presence.

Hey, there's noble, a good why.

Tall and athletic and not prone to artifice. As we pulled up, she was sporting jeans and a baseball cap while hard at work watering the botanist level garden that frames one side of the rustic picturesque property she shares with her husband four decades.

Okay, so there was nothing here. Okay, this was all literally rubble. Okay, there wasn't even grass growing. So this is all perennials okay. And pollinators. Wow, look at the little beat all sleeping.

They're nesting in the flowers.

Bickerton radiates a crackling sort of energy. There's a shifting vulnerability to her, at times almost brittle, at other times edgy, sharp, but always with a bit of defensiveness and self deprecating humor.

And I'm blaming her my mother because I was breech birth. I came out feet kicking. My mom tied me on a rope when I was two.

Years of age.

Where you get your wanderlust, Jandra, she says, I could never keep track of you.

Inside Bickerton's home exudes an eclectic, creative aesthetic, filled with comfortable, dog friendly furnishings. The walls are lined with art, both displayed and propped along the sides awaiting display. During our tour, she unwrapped several of them, a series of enlarged photographs taken Afghanistan during Leslie's humanitarian travels there.

So they build this the Chinese wall, this huge wall, pomp pom, and then within it was going to be the farm in a couple of buildings and this man single handedly, They would throw the mud up to him in the straw and I've got photos of it, and he would build them in rectangular shapes, and he built the entire wall.

One photo in particular stands out of Bickerton standing in the center of a small group of young men in a rural setting, holding a small sandy brown puppy in her arms.

You're wearing this beautiful Fusia traditional garb with a sky blue scarf and a very western looking orange zippo.

It's noteworthy not just because of the moment it captures and the fact the men were breaking social norms by standing in close proximity with a woman, because of the calm joy Leslie radiates. It's fine.

I went all over the world and don't want a good because I teach and I trained farmers food and water security, and this place just grabbed my heart and it's it's second home for me. My mom said, she said, you're at peace with himself here I are in a war country time country. She said, You're in your element.

You've found your way.

It's been an unlikely and unpredictable path that's led to this point one, intensified by the uneasiness that's lingered in her life since Lone Star, but further compounded and complicated by the fact that Leslie met her husband of four decades, Mike, during the Lone Star grand jury?

Was it the grand jury in Houston? There was one other person there, nobody else who was just me and somebody else. And that other somebody else is a person that I married, and he was there to testify. I didn't know for what. I didn't bother to ask him about the connection that we had is that we were both hardcore sailors in the waiting room, struck up a conversation.

Now a doctor, that husband was once very much involved with Chester's smuggling operations, which makes one of her last memories of Lamar Chester after she was married and shortly before Chester's crash that much more revealing.

It was down in Key Largo that Lamar shows up. Mike seems to think that it was just by sheer luck that Lamar happened to be on the same road that we were on, which is a northern part of Key Largo that connects Homestead to Ocean Reef. So Mike thought, oh, just by chance, an accident that Lamar's following us. I mean, just so the bumped in to him. I'm like, knowing everything we know about Lamar, Lamar doesn't do anything by accident.

After Mike turned in for the night. Bickerton says she had what would be one of the final interactions she would ever have with Lamar Chester.

Lamar then in the house told me that he wanted me to come back to him, and I was like, wow, this is what you do to your friends.

How disrespectful that was.

And I told him no, flat out. But there was something about it was just something about Lamar that I almost felt sorry for him. I think he knew something was coming. It's weird. And then he, you know, he got murdered.

As for Chester dying in a plane crash, shrouded in mystery, here's c. B. Hackworth.

That really wasn't the ending that anybody had anybody had expected.

Except maybe Chester. Here's a snippet from one of his calls to CB.

Hey, I'm not gonna make me run, give me make me right.

We've tried to improve the quality of the tape, but it definitely sounds like Chester's saying they're going to kill me or make me run.

They make me run, give.

Me Revisiting his extensive recorded interviews with Chester has given C. B. Hackworth new insight into Lone Star, which he will further explore in an upcoming book.

It worked out well for some of the targets, and then it ultimately, you know, didn't work out well for Lamar, except to the extent that he he did manage to extend this whole proceeding and turn the tables on the government and put the government on trial for so long that he did live out the rest of his life without going to jail, without ever doing what the government instructed him to do or any judge instructed him to do. He did live life on his own terms until he died.

In an op ed letter Chester wrote published in the Gainesville Times December fourteenth of nineteen eighty four, Chester wrote, quote, the indictment against me was not brought by the DEA, but is an IRS indictment brought by the US Department of Justice based on what the government says is my net worth with the importation of marijuana and cocaine as probable sources of income. Those issues may very well have

It did continue to trouble me. It haunted me.

What happened in your world after Chester died?

Well, you know, I was back in DC when I got the word from Bob that Lamar died in a crash. I did some work, investigative work to make some money, but no luck with congressional offices or with newspapers.

That what I needed was a.

Job, and finally, finally I got one in Portland, Oregon, which I guess was the only place my reputation hadn't caught up with me with The Oregonian, initially as a reporter. But after a few months they made me a columnist and I was one of two Metro columnists writing three times a week telling stories, which is really what I wanted to do. It was going pretty well, and then here came the Frankie case, the news that the head of the corrections department had been stabbed to death outside

Phil and I revisit the killing of Michael Frankie in the Murder in Oregon podcast. It's compelling content, as are the book Stanford wrote after leaving The Oregonian.

I wrote several books about official corruption in Portland and also in Washington, DC. I did a book about the Watergate break in, and after a few years of that, I started getting interested again in Miami.

As he struggled to make sense of his Miami experience, Stamford decided to start his own investigation Lamar's claims.

I'd been very skeptical of them in the beginning, maybe because he just hadn't done a good job of explaining to me or to anyone else what it was that he did with the CIA, and it wasn't clear to me that he even knew that he was working for the CIA. I think he was working for Naval intelligence at one time. I think he was working for someone who was connected to the CIA at one time, but

He said, I really don't know.

You know, you'll have to ask ed Marger who was the other lawyer just down the road about sixty miles, and he told me that he didn't think that either Lamar or Ron Elliott had direct contact with the CIA. And there's a guy who had won the green Mail defense before, and he said, you ought to ask Bobby Lee Cook. It was Bobby Lee Cook who came up with the idea of the gray mail defense.

So they sent you back and forth between the two of them.

Yeah, and I said, of course I already talked to him and he sent me to you, So it didn't really answer any questions. And of course nothing I found out reduced in any way my feeling that Lamar had been murdered, that his plane was sabotaged.

A feeling that would be reinforced by information he'd later learn back in DC.

Made some phone calls, got in touch with a guy named Ferris Bond, who had been with the US Justice Department at the time and on a team working on Lamar's prosecution. He told me about the time before the trial. Of course they were more than just aware of Lamar's gray Mail defense. They had arranged for someone from the CIA to come speak to them and tell them what was going on. And so he said, some guy came. They said, didn't look at all like what you'd imagine a CIA agent would be.

I guess he was sort.

Of shortened, spindling, and put his briefcase on the desk, And before he said anything, he told them that if he talked to them they would not be able to reveal his name, and they said that as lawyers they were bound to tell the other side what they knew. I guess in discovery it was an issue with that. And he put everything back in his briefcase and walked out and.

That was the end of that.

So what do you make of all of this now, I mean, that's another interesting layer.

It had been, of course, a very intense experience for me, and I'd never really figured out was Lamar telling the truth when he said he was working with the CIA or not. You know, even looking back at it now, after we've done all of this, you know, it has been useful to me to revisit it again.

Well, certainly as the eighties unfolded, his claims became much less far fetched.

Oh yeah, it allowed me to see it made me see that these things are real, especially with the Kerry Committee and the press. Eventually there really was no doubt that there had been in a drugs for gun trade going on that was somehow connected with the government. Lamar

Yeah.

That's a very strange omission. Yeah, as I was wrapping up the research and interviews for this podcast, I would connect with a most unlikely and surprising target of interest. You will never guess in a million years who I just got off the phone with and who I was able to track down. Who Morgan Cherry.

You gotta be kidding.

No.

And the good news is we had a really interesting chat. The bad news is that he is not surprisingly unwilling to speak with me on the record and declined my request for an interview.

I bet he did it very elegantly too.

This is a very smooth guy.

I can neither confirm nor deny that he was smooth.

This is the.

Guy whose name Lamar dropped in the Bahamian tribunal said it was his contact with the CIA. Ron Elliott told me that Morgan Cherry was Lamar's CIA contact. Did you ask him specifically about his involvement with the CIA and Dea.

Phil, I can neither confirm nor deny that we had any such discussion.

That's fitting.

The once conspiracy concept of covert operations and shadow wars has percolated closer to the surface over the years, and continues to do so today. My dad used to quote the opening line from a legendary radio detective show that ran from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The

It's been great working with you.

We're all so appreciative to the incredible array of people we've encountered and interviewed during this process, those named and unnamed. We also want to thank you the listener for your time and support. Murder Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are Lauren brad Pacheco, Taylor Chaqoine, and Phil Stamford.