Republican Party Reptile(52)

In the matter at hand—the United States of America vs. Norman Saunders, Stafford Missick, and Alden Smith a/k/a Smokey—there’s also basis in some genuine hanky-panky. Saunders owns the fuel concession at that South Caicos airport. He did a lot of night business. And Saunders was living better than he should have been on his $18,816 chief minister’s salary and the profits from an airplane gas station on a landing strip with one scheduled flight a day. He had a fair-sized house built on Grand Turk, a kind of Samoan-style peaked-roof affair looking like the Trader Vic family mausoleum. Local gossip says it cost $1.2 million, an estimate that’s surely high and outside. But it is on the beach two doors from the governor’s mansion. Saunders has a big car and a yacht. At election time there was a scad of campaign money bouncing and fluttering around in his South Caicos parliamentary district. Missick, too, has a nice house and an Oldsmobile. I don’t know about Smokey. Generally speaking, there are more items of gold jewelry, Piaget watches, and Michael Jackson fashion jackets on the local population than you’d expect in a place where the last time anybody painted a building was 1956.

But it was ever thus all through the seedy archipelagos of the Caribbean. There never has been an unnaughty way to make a living. In the Turks and Caicos the traditional livelihood was raking up evaporated sea salt—an industry in gradual decline since 1780. In 1964 it petered out completely, leaving smelly pools of half-evaporated brine all over the islands. Other than that the only profession was salvaging the thousands of neighboring shipwrecks—most caused, probably, by distracted harbor pilots using placemats to navigate and trying to get the natives to shut up about what all the islands are called. Sometimes the locals would get overenter-prising. In 1864 an American frigate ran aground off North Caicos “and the Captain was forced to retire to his quarter deck and prevent the incursion of Salvagers with force of arms.” All through the nineteenth century there were complaints of false lights being set out to drum up business. I like to think the smuggler’s wife in the pickup truck was an unintentional party to this old tradition.

Some islanders, mainly white ones, will tell you that it was Saunders’s predecessor, JAGS McCartney, who was involved in the drug trade and that when Saunders and the PNP came in the smugglers seemed to disappear. Certainly JAGS, who sported mild dreadlocks, looked a bit more criminal. When he and his cohorts were elected, they all flew to Haiti and had identical leisure suits made. If you fired anybody in the PDM, they’d come over to your house, all dressed alike, and glower. But JAGS is revered today, and the PDM supporters I met were the most likable people in the islands. Plus the present PDM leader, Clement Howell, has a reputation for probity standing somewhere between Lincoln’s and Mom’s. Yet JAGS died in a suspicious plane crash while flying to Atlantic City with a reputed American crime figure. However, it was also JAGS who first appealed to the British government for help in combating drug traffic. Who knows? There are no facts south of Palm Beach.

Saunders, if he was doing anything, was doing nothing that didn’t come naturally; 250 years ago Governor Bruere of Bermuda complained, “The Caicos trade did not fail to make its devotees somewhat ferocious.” And one official replied, “Sir—you’ll have business enough upon your hands if you go about to rectify that, for there is not a man that sails from hence, but will trade with a pirate.” Especially if he’s offered a deal like the one the DEA was offering Saunders. The DEA, by its own admission, had undercover agents promise Norman Saunders $250,000 a week to refuel drug planes. We had an interesting discussion one night in the bar of the Third Turtle Inn. Everyone—foursquare businessmen on fishing vacations, fat American tourists, the kitchen help, me, honeymoon couples—I mean every one of us said we’d refuel dope planes for $250,000 a week. What wouldn’t we do for $250,000? After a certain number of drinks some pretty frightening admissions were heard.

Later I would go back to Miami and root through complaints, indictments, affidavits, and so forth. In a sworn deposition, a DEA special agent with the unprepossessing name of Gary Sloboda said . . . well, he said all sorts of things. The document rambles on for sixteen pages, chronicling what amounts to a lot of big talk. No presence of an actual drug is mentioned anywhere. And every person who talked to Saunders about dope was some kind of DEA agent, informant, or plant except one loudmouth French Canadian named André who stumbled into these bull sessions and began announcing what a scam artist he was. Despite the palaver about astronomy-sized payoffs, it seems Saunders was given only sixty grand and ten of that was to pay off a fuel bill run up by an informant’s business partner. Smokey got $2,500.