Epiphany

That is, until January six. Three Kings Day, also known as Dia de los Reyes or Epiphany, is a religious holiday marking the day the Three Wise Men visited Baby Jesus. In many Spanish speaking communities, it's a celebration rivaling Christmas. Today, in Hartford, there's an annual parade featuring community members dressed as King's riding camels down Busy Park Street, much to the delight for children and onlookers. There's music, food, toy giveaways, even a chance for a photo op with the Magi.

But if we go back several decades, was more of an unofficial celebration, kind of like a block party, And on that day, in a very different type of procession caught everyone's attention, you know, all of a sudden, somebody showed up with this big tractor trailer full of toys and started luring into kids on Park Street, which is

the heart of the Puerto Rican commuter at Hartford. The weather was in the brisk thirties, but that didn't stop curious community members from gathering around the local moving company's truck, parked a few miles away from the parade route used today. Over two hours, three men just as the MAGI handed out forty dollars worth of toys, food and cash. It was an exciting occasion for locals, but to West Harford police officers, something just didn't feel right. Fromhow there must

have been some information passed on to the copts. There are somebody took them the number of the trackers. They found out about it, and the truck was sees eventually and brought to the detective. The worst hapic they used the Prince who identified these guys in the truck. And then the amazing thing is that we've found it. Surprising was when the the money shows up that was traceable money.

He showed up there because some of the builds were traceable, you know, so that I'm thinking myself, my god, there's some kind of control of all his money. Where did it come from? How how these guys getting this money? The answer to that question would breathe new life into a stalled investigation. How did thousands of dollars stolen the previous year from Wells Fargo end up being used to buy a truck full of toys for kids? Now he's

standing to think of something. It's organized here previously on White Eagle. It's like all of a sudden, this guy just existed and there wasn't a lot of background, a bottom to the head. Each day we put another piece of the puzzle together, you know, pieces here, and there was not the fit. Everybody figured that Victor herain it was the inside man, and everybody's waiting for his body to pop up someplace. My name is zem William Phelps.

I'm an investigative journalist and author of more than forty true crime books. What you were about to hear is the true story of a heist, one that funded an international independence movement and sparked an investigation spanning nearly four decades. This is White Eagle. Every story has its origin. This one is no different. Investigators looking to understand how and why Victor Harrain has stole seven million dollars in cash

needed to first consider his connection to Puerto Rico. There was a time and maybe the seventies and at least end of the early eighties, when I think they were more Puerto Rican people in Hartford on a per capita basis, and we were any place Celts except for Puerto Rico. It was a very, very big influential immigrant group, immigrants that the United States citizens for the people from the island looking at Hartford were a big part of the

stake's makeup. That said Mahoney, the Hartford current reporter who spoke in the last episode. He caught himself during our discussion, but people often forget that Puerto Ricans are in fact U S citizens, maybe because they lacked the right to do basic things such as vote in a presidential election. But more on that later. For now, it's important to understand that Hartford is home to one of the largest

Puerto Rican communities in the United States. More than forty of the city's population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, and according to some estimates, one out of every three Harford residents is of Puerto Rican descent. It's an important group, and it was an important group then I mean candidates for office in Puerto Rico would occasionally campaigned in Hartford, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and kind of like the

quasi embassy in Hartford. There were so many people in Hartford, did the government of the commonwealth headed office to look after them. Hartford had reciprocity agreements with Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico would send groups of teachers from university students who are studying to become teachers to work in Harvard, either as trainees or to work at Hartford, which kind of made sense because so many kids in the school system

or from Puerto Rico. Large groups of Puerto Ricans first started coming to Connecticut after World War Two, looking for seasonal work on one of the countless tobacco farms along sections of the Connecticut River. Many stayed and built the vibrant community in Hartford in parts of West Harford. Park Street, which runs east to west along the city's south end,

is the community's main artery. If you're dropped off on Park Street, um, you're definitely going to get the food, You're going to get the language, and you're gonna get the vibe. Joel Cruz is a lifelong Hartford resident and senior director of the city's Institute for the Hispanic Family, which is part of Catholic Charities and co sponsors the Three Kings they parade every year. You'll see people you know talking outside and connecting. The embracement you know, for

us is very important. The close proximity of like the hugs and the kisses, and Joel describes Harford's Puerto Rican community as extremely tightening. It had to be, he says, because for decades there was little to no public support for Spanish speakers in the city. That's part of the reason the Institute for the Hispanic Family grew into what

it is today. It provides opportunities for support and connection, help that wasn't made available for people like Joel's grandfather who left Puerto Rico in the fifties and came to Hartford seeking opportunity. I think that's the sense of people that came to Hartford and settled in Hartford, specifically from the Puerto Rican community. It's more like I'm just trying to survive, and if you ask me, I don't agree.

I'm not happy, but I'm just trying to survive for folks who like my dad who saw the racism, who saw the the abuse, who saw all the inequalities, especially like you know, US versus Puerto Rico. He has his reservations about, like how Puerto Rico has been treated like a colony, and I see it, like when I go to Puerto Rico, I can see it's treated like a colony more than part of the U s or with fair treatment. It's a world Victor Harana would have known well.

His mother, Gloria, was born in Puerto Rico and migrated to the US, settling first in the Bronx and later Hartford, where she raised Victor and his four siblings. Like Joel, Gloria worked at the Institute for the Hispanic Family. She was one of the region's first bilingual social workers and spent forty five years with the organization, working primarily with young kids. Joel says everyone called her La Madrina, which

translates to the godmother. He says they'd often eat lunch together, and he loved hearing her stories about sports, Hartford and Puerto Rico. She was a big time Giants fan, and so I'm a Patriots fan, and so we will always talk about that. We will go back and forth They were just fun conversations. We will talk about the community. We will talk about like the riots and Hartford and how it was sad that the US would continue to treat Puerto Rico um like a colony when we have

so much to bring. You know, she will talk about her dislike of that. She she was very vocal about making sure the younger generation understood we must stand up for our community. There was one unspoken rule when it came to talking with Gloria never ever mentioned her son Victor or the Wells Fargo heist. We always knew not to bring up Victor because you know, I mean, imagine a mother regardless so what happened, She's still a mother, and um we always knew we respect to her enough

not even to bring it up. And for good reason. Gloria is a controversial figure in this story. A number of people I spoke with said they thought she knew about Victor's plan to rob the Wells Fargo depot. A few even thought she put him up to it, though I should know I have never found any evidence to support that theory. Getting in touch with Victor's mother has been nearly impossible. During this investigation, I was told by a very close source. She did not want to be

interviewed by me. I respected that, and it's no surprise. In the years after the heist, she refused to cooperate with grand Juries looking into Victor's disappearance, which fueled speculation that she had something to hide. But any hope of making last attempt was dash when Joel Cruz revealed something during our interview an amazing maybe she actually passed away last week. Gloria Harraina died on February. She was eight four. Today, I'm dressing black because I'm actually going to go to

her funeral. And um, every time we met in the lunch room, before I got up and I was leaving, she will always tell me, don't forget your culture, don't forget your background. She was just a very instrumental person, very wise, kind, but she you know, she had this fighting spirit, even at her age. She had this fighting spirit in her of always making sure that we stood up for our rights. Gloria Horana was a staunch supporter of Puerto Rican independence, regularly attending rallies and protests in

and around Hartford. She was also a member of the Hartford chapter of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, a pro independence group. She said, died in the role independent Easter. That's her politics and that's what she lives for. I mean, whenever there's a protest, you know, involving some kind of independence issue, she's always there. Victor was a complicated figure as well. Friends and co workers described him as a loner, not nearly as active in the community or as vocal

about politics as his mother. But the heist made Victor something of a folk hero overnight. The stories that we were told, you know, talked about him as a very respectable man and just frustrated with systems and the racism that we were experiencing. I think even in the community people will talk about it from a perspective of like, look, he took some of that and he gave out toys, and you know, he did it out of frustration. I've never heard throughout the stories of anyone actually judging him

in a negative way. Plus, Victor wasn't violent, not really. That's actually something former Starford police officer Jack Casey pointed out during one of our initial conversations. You see, Victor could have seriously hurt those security guards, even killed them, but he didn't. And I think that's why throughout Hartford he became kind of almost like a robin Hood character, where they'd have his picture up in some of the little bodegas and the stores on Park Street and people

looked at um. And then when they came back on Three Kings Day and they were passing out the money and the food or whatever. So they got a lot of goodwill in the community from it. Victor didn't appear at the Three Kings Day parade, but the money he stole more than a year earlier did. West Harford police were able to confirm that serial numbers on the banded

bills matched those stolen from the Wells Fargo depot. But what many weren't aware of at the time was that over in Puerto Rico, the FBI had already spent months making huge investigative strides in the case. The question is, you know, why why did they pick hard for Why was this nobody from nowhere Bill? You know, Victor Herrina the inside man. Yeah, there's only one explanation. Before the

robin Hood like stunt on Three Kings Day. The last anyone heard from Victor Haraina was in the form of three handwritten postcards sent to various news outlets in which he vowed to explain why he robbed the Wells Fargo depot, while also teasing a major announcement about the missing money. About a month later, Victor delivered on his promise. A typewritten letter was sent to the San Juan offices of United Press International in Puerto Rico. This time, however, Victor

was not the author. The letter came from an insurgency group claiming responsibility for the Wells Fargo robbery. In it, they claimed they spent a year and a half planning every stage of the heist and had waited until the seven million dollars was out of the country and in a state of quote maximum security before going public. It's a communicate, but reads more like a manifesto. The group's leadership said the money was being used to fund its

revolutionary movement. Quote in the same manner in which we have sees seven million dollars from the very bowels of American imperialism, the organized force of the Puerto Rican people will know how in its own time to seize the liberty which will allow us to choose our destiny as a people. End quote. It goes on to read in part. We want to report that Comrade Harrena is in a perfect state of health and has joined the struggle which

our people carry out to obtain our liberation. That was the Maga Taros, the mas teros, who are upset that they weren't getting the attention that they thought they deserved for this patriotic express presation. They wanted to get some publicity for it, and the police weren't helping him because the police weren't linking him to the crime, so they

had to take some steps on their own. Los MACHOs, formerly known as the Boricua Popular Army, are a revolutionary nationalist group fighting since nineteen seventy six for Puerto Rico's independence from the United States. Depending on who you ask, Los mace Tero's translates to either the machete wielders or the cane cutters, a reference to Puerto Ricans who harvested sugarcane under Spanish and later American sugar monopolies, some of whom used their tools as weapons in the Spanish American War.

Half of the people I spoke with described them as ter arrests, the other half said they were a pro independence group. We can say that they were radical in the sense of the means that they were using to fight for or struggle for independence. Dr Jose A. Tellis is a professor at the University of Illinois or ban As Champagne. My areas of research as mainly Puerto Rico. I studied the legal and political relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, with special emphasis and colonialism and legal

mobilizations and pro independence movement. He's also from Puerto Rico and grew up hearing stories about Los mach Terros exploits. There were a small group and they were described in the media as terrorist criminal. The fact that Puerto Rico still being a colony kind of chose you that they didn't get the supper or that they wanted right and that this society were not behind these the type of actions. It's important to bear in mind that they were part

of historical context, right. That was what prow independence, Antiicolonian movement we're doing in there's seventies and eighties everywhere, not only Puerto Rico, pot Ireland, the Basque Country, Catalunia and elsewhere. Experts say that Macha Terros are not a major player today, but in the late seventies and early eighties. The group was engaged in armed conflict with the US government, with cells in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and barrios across the continental

United States, including Hartford, Connecticut. A lot of Puerto Ricans that joined prow independence movement in the seventies sixties seventies either were first generation Puerto Rican Puerto Ricans who migrated with the parents that grew up facing discrimination, racism, poverty, So it was not hard seeing that Puerto Rican would join uh struggle that advocated for independence from Puerto Rico, social justice or economic justice, and also some anti racism,

anti oppression at large. Can you tell me about yourself, Robert s Hibe, But we're in October thirty one, nineteen seven Halloween birth He had it better than that. Bob Hyble as a former FBI agent and Deputy chief of the Bureau's counter Terrorism Division. He's been stationed all over but spent the early part of his career in San Juan,

Puerto Rico work in the island's separatist movements. We were having a series of bombings and I was fortunate enough to have the case on the key player Philiberto Terrios. Bob would go on to study and investigate Philiberto Ojeda Rios's life, which included the founding of Mirra, a pro independence group in the sixties, followed by Los Macha Terros and its sister organization, the f a l N in the mid seventies. Here's reporter at mahoney. There were two

wings of the nationalist movement. I mean there was the f a l N, which was in charge of the quote unquote activities on the mainland, and there were the Macha Terris who were involved supposedly in activities. The FA l N was doing his damage in Chicago and New York. All right, they were blown up France's tavern, They're blown up, you know, the mobile oil building. They're blown up, things

like that. Over the course of nearly a decade, both Los Macha Terros and the f a l N claim responsibility for over one attacks in the continental United States and Puerto Rico, including the murder of a police officer, the bombing of eleven unmanned aircrafts on a National Guard airfield, and an attack on a Navy bus which left three

people dead and eight sailors wounded. Back then, things were getting blown up quite a bit too because of the Machan terrorist In late October, just six weeks after the Wells Fargo heighst the group used the shoulder launched rocket to strike a federal building in Puerto Rico. They called a laws rocket l a WUS Laws and somebody you know, initiated a missile attack on the federal building in a place called at del Rey, which is the commercial center

of San Juan. They were aiming for the FBI officers and they actually hit, you know, for the part of agriculture. No one was killed, but the harget was clear. One year firing rockets into buildings in the middle of downtown San Juan, chances are, you know, you're taking a risk of hurting somebody. You know this that law missile it was fired again, Bobbe. They recovered the two from that law missile. It was part of a lot that was left in Vietnam and the Vietnamese furnished it to the

Cubans and they given furnished it the mar barrels. When they fired the law missile at the FBI building and missed, they discovered the car that was used and the search of the car was so thorough that they recovered a traffic ticket. So what they did is they identified where the car had been parked from the ticket was issued. They set up with surveillance and took some pictures, and I got a call from the supervisor and saying on it said, Bob, can you come down to Puerto Rico.

I want you to look at some pictures. Because I was one of the only two FBI agents that everything Philip Bertho in person, and uh, sure enough, it was fully better to the photographs. So from then on they were able to identify where he was living in The whole investigative approach to this changed and it became a major case. From that point on, m the FBI began a detailed surveillance of Philip Berto Ojeda Rios, tracking the comings and goings of anyone associated with los Ma Terosh.

Over the next six months, the bureau collected enough evidence to obtain a search warrant for one of the group's safe houses. Inside they found a treasure trove of documents. To the surveillance, they were able to do microphones and wire taps, and because they had a microphone in Philip Bertor's car, it was in those wire tapped conversations that investigators first heard chatter of the missing seven million dollars.

Here's reporter Ed Mahoney again. No one ever conceived, No one law enforcement had any clue or even thought or imagine you know that a group of radical independent east is at an island in the Caribbean. We're knocking off armored cars in Hartford, Connecticut. It's just never occurred to anybody, and there's really no reason why it should have occurred anybody. The timelines in this case are actively confusing. The discovery made by the FBI happened before Victor Herrina and the

Macha Terros took credit for Wells Fargo. But it's important to remember that the FBI's field office in Puerto Rico was investigating a rocket attack in San Juan, not a robbery in West Harford. They were focused on their own investigation. The discovery of the stolen money was a surprise. The FBI in Connecticut never woke up to this thing, you know. It was the FBI in Puerto Rico it put all together,

and it was almost by accident that they did. From there, the bureau began piecing together Victor Herrina's connection to Los macha Ros. For one, they learned how long Victor had prepared for the operation, where he fled after the robbery, and who else was involved. But one of the biggest questions in this case has always and did Victor just happen to start working at Wells Fargo and Los Macha Terros saw an opportunity to recruit him? Or was he groomed by the group to apply for the job. Do

you know how they recruited Victor Harena? I think that it was through his mother. Through his mother, I think, how does a guy like that though drive away with thirt hundred pounds of money and then disappear. It was well prepared. One thing about Ajit, he was a tremendous planner. Everything Philiberto Oheda Rios did was intentional. Take the date of the heist as an example to a lot of folks.

September twelve is just another day to Puerto Ricans. It's the birthday of Pedro L. Bzoo Campos, a leader in Puerto Rican's independence movement, a man seen to this day as a national hero and patriot. I spoke to a former member of Los Machateros. He wouldn't confirm how the group came into contact with Victor, only that a quote friend helped identify the opportunity at Wells Fargo and made

the introduction. It's worth pointing out here that Victor started his job at Wells Fargo in May two, just shy of a year and a half before the heist. In the communic at which the macha Ros take credit for the robbery, it's noted that the planning took a year and a half to fully execute. That former Macheterro member told me that at the time, Victor was angry about Puerto Rico's political status and eager to do something about it.

He felt the US treated the island like a colony, using it for military exercises, stripping it of its natural resources,

and depriving residents of basic opportunities. Like many Puerto Ricans in the early eighties, Victor was also reeling from a shocking act of police violence a few years earlier, the seroh Mara Villa murders in eight wherein two pro independence activists were ambushed and killed by police in Ponce, Puerto Rico after being set up by an undercover agent It was hugely controversial, and government investigations into the killings in an attempted cover up we're still going on at the

time of the heist. Here's Jose Attila's again. Every time that they stayed carry out a act of this type of violence or carry out of some sort of assassination, pro independence movement will react, and Cerro Mario was especially radicalizing. For many young people that saw this grows some auction us pulling of no return. So I cool reminded that or that and understood that this was kind of too much.

From all of it, a picture pulls into focus. A smart, highly capable young man, deeply connected to his Puerto Rican roots, takes a dead end job while secretly training for a meticulously planned robbery. But it wasn't just some gas station hold up or common burgle. This was a military operation, a criminal enterprise that involved elaborate disguises and a daring international escape, an organized heist with the code name White Eagle. And those security guards who suspected Victor had some help

that night, well they were right. What nobody knew then and would not know for decade to come, is that there was at least one other man a top Los MACHOs operative waiting around the back of the Wells Fargo building for Victor on the night of the robbery. You see, Victor knew this, Victor planned for this, Victor trained for this, and within hours of loading all that money into a rented buick, Victor Heraina had successfully completed the first step

in the macha ter plan. The second step, well, that would involve the twenty five year old testing his look at attempting to smuggle millions and stolen cash across the US border. Next time, I'm White Eagle, So he practiced grabbing me by the night and taking right out to the ground. We hear from the man who made it happen. White Eagle has written and executive produced by me Em William Phelps and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional

writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate producer and script supervisor is Darby Masters, Audio editing and mixing by a Bouzafar and Christian Bowman. Our series theme forms Regal or Grant is written by Aaron Kaufman and special thanks to Arlene Santana and will Pearson at I Heart radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.