Republican Party Reptile(53)
The hard evidence presented to the grand jury was yet less magisterial. Various meetings were secretly tape-recorded. Here’s a sample page from the transcript:
SMOKEY—Let’s say, lets say it was about two thousand just for them at the airport
CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT: Huh
SMOKEY—(Unintelligible)
C.I.—How do you know?
SMOKEY—(Unintel.)
C.I.—One of those black haired
SMOKEY—(Unintel.)
C.I.—I don’t know a fucking thing about
SMOKEY-(Unintel.)
SAUNDERS—(Unintel.)
SAUNDERS—Let’s say OK look at some figures. Lets say we’re talking about two thousand each, that’s just throwing out some numbers (Unintel.) If you give two guys in the tower four thousand, two times four is eight thousand, and (unintel.)
SMOKEY—Alright fuck em.
I watched the videotape where Saunders stuffs $20,000 into his pants pockets. I mean, the man’s not at the Ramada for his health. Somebody does say, “Here’s twenty thousand,” and he does stuff it into his pants pockets. Other than that it was hard to tell what was going on. The tape was shot with a pinhole lens stuck through a wall at the level of an electrical outlet. What I saw was mostly knees and behinds. The drug agent and the drug informant talked about drugs. The ratchet-jawed Canuck kept putting his two cents in. The DEA guys reiterated everything they said, obviously for the benefit of a hidden microphone. The only words from Norman Saunders that I could make out were: “We’re talking about fees. A sort of finder’s fee.” As of this writing Saunders is finding himself in prison, bail set at $1.1 million.
It seems to me the Drug Enforcement Agency picked the Turks and Caicos as a nice lackadaisical place, a place with a friendly NATO-ally administration, a place that was an easy target. No stonewalling commies or angry armed peasants or touchy blackpower governments here. Governor Turner said the very reason the Turks and Caicos are popular with drug smugglers is that the people are law-abiding. “There’s no violence, no rip-offs, no shakedowns.”
And they are lovely islands. And the Third Turtle really is first-rate—excellent food, big, airy rooms opening onto terraces above the beach, great bar. And the expanse of wilderness is wonderful. There’s no clog of high-rise condos or clots of dippy shops and prissy restaurants, just miles of verdant land aroil with bird and lizard life where perhaps no human has stood since hungry Carib Indian invaders chased edible Arawak natives into the brush.
On Providenciales I took my Jeep an hour’s trip out a near-impassable track to eight miles of untouched beach and cliffs. I found a little cove between two great rocks where the waves came up on Clairol sand. I took my clothes off and all morning disported myself like Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon (about as much chest but more stomach).
Back at the Third Turtle I was writing in my notebook—“Drugs—can’t find any”; “Pirates—a lot of hooey”—when I heard the unmistakable bellow of the redneck Gulf Coast man of affairs, the peckerwood entrepreneur, the Snopes with an M.B.A. “Two hundert square miles of un-de-veloped beachfront. . . God damn! I tell you what we gotta do! You know that Golden Door place? Where the fat ladies go? How about wunna them! And how about with a goddam cosmetic surgery clinic right attached? Huh? How ’bout that!? God damn!!!” Ah. Well. I crossed out “a lot of hooey.”
With Hostage and Hijacker in Sunny Beirut
Boarding Middle East Airlines flight 804 from London to Lebanon, I was picking out the terrorist. The guy in the shiny suit who looked like Danny Thomas—it wasn’t him. The exhausted mother with three children under three—it wasn’t her. Then dozens of swarthy youths, bearded to the eyes, came trotting on board. They wore the off-brand blue jeans and pilled-up synthetic polo shirts that are the usual mufti of the Lebanese militias. “Allah akbar!” they shouted as the plane took off, which just means “God is great” but always sends a chill up my backside. As the hoot of the Moslem fundamentalist, it carries a meaning like “Jesus loves you!” would if Jerry Falwell and his friends were running around America murdering Episcopalians. I headed for the toilet to take a nervous leak and size up my flying companions. There was one bunch standing by the galley. I leaned in close to see who had the fragmentation grenade in his duty-free shopping bag. “Yalluh!” They jumped back in alarm. “Awk!” I did too. “CIA!!” said their horrified faces. What a letdown. With blue eyes and striped necktie, the most suspicious-looking person on the airplane was me.
I don’t know why any of us was getting in a sweat. The only way to keep from being hijacked to Beirut these days is to buy a commercial ticket and fly there.