THE MIAMI CONNECTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100100060-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 2, 2011
• Sequence Number: 60
• Publication Date: February 18, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/06/04: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100100060-6
ARTICLE APPEARED NATION
ON PAGE/ 18 February 1984
? GOLDEN GATEWAY FOR DRUGS
The Miami
Connection PENNY LERNOUX
A bout two and a half years ago, Penny Lernoux told us she
wanted lo follow her just-published Cry of the People with
a book about banks. We assigned an intern, David Corn, as
a full-time researcher on the project. When the first draft of
her book came in, we were fascinated by some of the stories
she had collected on Miami's booming drug scene and asked
her to expand them into an article, with her banking mate-
rial serving as a backdrop. She did so and here are the re-
sults. (Additional research, supervised by Eric Etheridge,
was done by interns David Bank and L.A. Kauffman.)
The Editors
Penny Lernoux is The Nation 's Latin America correspond-
ent. This article draws on In Banks We Trust, published this
month by Anchor Press/Doubleday. ? Copyright 1984 by
Penny Lernoux. The author gratefully acknowledges the as-
'sistance of The Fund for Investigative Journalism.
iami International Airport. All year round, the
mile-long concourse is jammed with sweating
people who pound on ticket counters and push
-A-.7_A.through customs gates. The worst crush is at
the counters of the Latin American airlines, where crowds
of Spanish-speaking passengers mill about, surrounded by
wailing children, anxious relatives and enormous crates of
gringo goodies-inflatable boats, television sets and refrig-
erators. At Colombia's Avianca, airport security guards
are regularly called to clear a path through the mob and
the boxes.
"You live in Colombia, huh?" says the Cuban exile taxi
driver as we slam out of the airport. "I'm looking for some
extra business. You wouldn't happen to have any coke
for sale?"
When I say no, he floors the accelerator and jumps
the light at the tollgate on the freeway. "I'm not going
to pay their fucking toll," he says. "Those gringos, their
rules are for them, not us." One hears that often in Miami.
`Casablanca on the Gulf Stream'
When the narcotics boom took off in the mid-1970s,
Miami became the drug capital of the world. More than 70 per-
cent of the U.S. supply flows through it. The traffic has
brought drug-related crime (Miami's murder rate is the na-
tion's second highest) and wealth in the form of "narco-
bucks,". which are laundered. in legitimate as well as shady
banks and financial institutions. The huge influx of hot dol-
lars has madc.Miarr
financial capital.
"Casablanca o
the city. The intri
movie, but the city
the same venal poll
ble strings. Spanis
this down-home di
rupt practices endemic to politics in their native lands.
Four groups of players are prominent in the Miami ac-
tion: Italian and Jewish crime syndicates; Cuban exile ter-
rorist groups and the Central Intelligence Agency; Latin
American drug dealers; and bankers.
The Cuba-Mafia-C.I.A. Axis
A high proportion of the Latin drug dealers are Cuban
exiles. Actually, the Cuban 'irug connection goes back to
Prohibition and the rise of Charles (Lucky) Luciano, one
of the most brilliant organized-crime executives of the cen-
tury. In the early 1930s he restructured the old Mafia into
twenty-four family cartels. Luciano also brokered an en-
tente cordiale between the Mafia and the Jewish mobs of
Meyer Lansky, who became Luciano's lieutenant and later
the financial genius of the U.S. underworld. With the end of
Prohibition in sight, Luciano turned to heroin, which of-
fered an attractive substitute for the liquor trade. His agents
developed an efficient supply network in China, where
Gen. Chiang Kai-shek had come to power with the help
of the Shanghai heroin cartel.
Under dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1930s, Cuba be-
came the principal entry point of Luciano's heroin network.
Lansky controlled the Cuban traffic as well as most of
Havana's gambling casinos, but his base of operations was.
Florida. There he became friendly with Sicilian-born Santo
Trafficante, who had earned his reputation as an effective
organizer in the Tampa gambling rackets. Lansky came to
trust Trafficante and in 1940 put him in charge of his in-
terests in Havana. By early in the next decade, Trafficante
had carved out an empire of his own, and he set up his son
Santo Jr. with the Havana rackets. When the elder Traffi-
cante died in 1954, Santo became Mafia boss of Florida. Un-
ostentatious and self-effacing, he proved to be one of the
most effective organized-crime leaders in the United States.
After Luciano's death in 1962, his number-two men,
Lansky and Vito Genovese, were the logical successors.
Genovese, however, was serving a fifteen-year sentence on a
heroin-trafficking charge; Lansky, then in his 60s, was too
old and too carefully watched to become more actively
involved. Thus; Luciano's role went. to Trafficante by
default.
IF Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/06/04: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100100060-6