Here's a little bit of news that might interest batty boy away from his obsession and it even has the Mafia and Cuba playing a role in developments.

Enjoy, I know El Batty will

J. EDGAR HOOVER

Homosexual Allegations and Mafia Blackmail



J. Edgar Hoover headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. With his death, it was disclosed that Hoover had seriously abused his power during his tenure as FBI Director. Some of the most outrageous abuses concerned Hoover's use of FBI surveillance agents to obtain defamatory information--much of it sexual--on prominent persons to be used for political and blackmail purposes.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk would later say: "Hoover passed along gossip to the President he served, and that practice could raise questions in a President's mind. What did Hoover know about him? In theoretical terms, that put Hoover in the position of a veiled blackmailer."

In the case of Martin Luther King, Jr. the blackmail was not veiled, but veritable, with Hoover threatening to make information he had on King public. In the book Official and Confidential, author Anthony Summers presents evidence that Hoover had the tables turned on him and was subjected to blackmail by both the Mafia and the CIA.



J. Edgar Hoover



The following text is excerpted from the book, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers.



Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. "Ways could be found," he said in his memoirs, "so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn't interfere with him." The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar [Hoover], according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.

The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde [Tolson]. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.

Edgar Hoover

Seymour Pollock, an associate of Meyer Lansky's, said in 1990 that Edgar's homosexuality was "common knowledge" and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. "I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on! . . . They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it."

Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have "turned" and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. "I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front," Fratianno recalled, "and said, 'Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it's J. Edgar Hoover.' And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, 'Ah, that J. Edgar's a punk, he's a fuckin' degenerate queer.'"

Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men's room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. "Frank," he told the mobster, "that's not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me." It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar.

Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis Dragna of Los Angeles and Johnny Roselli, the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob. All spoke of "proof" that Edgar was homosexual. Roselli spoke specifically of the occasion in the late twenties when Edgar had been arrested on charges of homosexuality in New Orleans. Edgar could hardly have chosen a worse city in which to be compromised. New Orleans police and city official were notoriously corrupt, puppets of an organized crime network run by Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and heavily influenced by Meyer Lansky. If the homosexual arrest occurred, it is likely the local mobsters quickly learned of it.

Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar's homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving "Ash" Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarcha family for New England, and an original owner-builder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to the one used by Edgar and Clyde. "I'd sit with him on the beach ever day," Resnick remembered. "We were family."

J. Edgar

In 1971, Resnick and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galeria Bar at Caesars Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as a genius, the man who "put everything together,"--and as the man who "nailed J. Edgar Hoover." "When I asked what they meant," Hamill recalled, "they told me Lansky had some pictures--pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover--to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI."

Meyer Lansky

Seymour Pollock, the criminal who saw Edgar and Clyde holding hands at the races, knew both Resnick and Lansky well. When Lansky's daughter had marital problems, it was Pollack who dealt with her husband. [B] He and Lansky went back to the old days in pre-revolutionary Cuba, when Havana was as important to the syndicate as Las Vegas.[/B] "Meyer," said Pollock in 1990, "was closemouthed. I don't think he even discussed the details of the Hoover thing with his brother. But Ash was absolutely right. Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter and verse. One night, when were were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornedo, we were talking about Hoover, and Meyer laughed and said, 'I fixed that son of a bitch, didn't I?'" Lansky's fix, according to Pollock, also involved bribery--not of Edgar himself, but men close to him.

Lansky and Edgar frequented the same watering holes in Florida. Staff at Gatti's restaurant in Miami Beach recall that the mobster would sometimes be in the restaurant, at another table, at the same time as Edgar and Clyde. One evening in the late sixties, they were seated at adjoining tables. "But they just looked at one another," recalled Edidio Crolla, the captain at Gatti's. "They never talked, not here."

If Edgar's eyes met Lansky's, though, there was surely an involuntary flicker of fear. "The homosexual thing," said Pollock, "was Hoover's Achilles' heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people. . . . Let me go way back. The time Nevada opened up, Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo. I understand Hoover helped get the okay for him to do it. Meyer Lansky was one of the partners. Hoover knew who the guys were that whacked Bugsy Siegel, but nothing was done." (Siegel was killed, reportedly on Lansky's orders, in 1947.)

According to Pollock, Lansky and Edgar cooperated in the mid-fifties, when Las Vegas casino operator Wilbur Clark moved to Cuba. "Meyer brought Clark down to Havana," Pollock said. "I was against him coming. But I understand Hoover asked Meyer to bring Clark down. He owed Clark something. I don't know what. . . . There was no serious pressure on Meyer until the Kennedys came in. And even then Hoover never hurt Meyer's people, not for a long time."

Like Frank Costello, Lansky did seem to be untouchable--a phenomenon that triggered suspicions even within the Bureau. "In 1966," noted Hank Messick, one of Lansky's biographers, "a young G-Man assigned to go through the motions of watching Meyer Lansky began to take his job seriously and develop good informers. He was abruptly transferred to a rural area in Georgia. His successor on the Lansky assignment was an older man who knew the score. When he retired a few years later, he accepted a job with a Bahamian gambling casino originally developed by Lansky."

Also in the sixties a wiretap picked up a conversation between two mobsters in which, curiously, Lansky was referred to as "a stool pigeon for the FBI." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, taping a conversation between a criminal in Canada and Lansky in the United States, were amazed to hear the mob chieftain reading from an FBI report that had been written the previous day.

There was no serious federal effort to indict Lansky until 1970, just two years before Edgar died. Then, it was the IRS rather than the FBI that spearheaded the investigation. Even the tax evasion charges collapsed, and Lansky lived on at liberty until his own death in 1983.

New information indicates that Lansky was not the only person in possession of compromising photographs of Edgar. John Weitz, a former officer in the OSS, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled a curious episode at a dinner party in the fifties. "After a conversation about Hoover," he said, "our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson. . . ."

Weitz would not say who his host was on the evening he saw the picture. He implied, however, that the host also had intelligence connections. A source who has been linked to the CIA, electronics expert Gordon Novel, claimed he was shown similar pictures by another OSS veteran, CIA Counter-Intelligence chief James Angleton. [Note: In 1994, after publication of Anthony Summers' book, Official and Confidential, Weitz confirmed to Summers that his host was James Angleton.]


James Angleton

"What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob," said Novel. "There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover's head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they'd been taken with a fish-eye lens. They looked authentic to me. . . ."

According to Novel, the CIA Counter-Intelligence chief showed him the pictures in 1967, when Novel was involved in the furor swirling around the probe into the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. "I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I'd been told I would incur Hoover's wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I'd seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food. Hoover told me something like, 'Get the hell out of here!' And I did. . . ."

With Angleton dead, there is no way to follow up this bizarre allegation. While Novel is a controversial figure, his account of seeing compromising pictures must be considered in light of other such references--not least that of former OSS officer John Weitz. For Novel added one other significant detail, that "Angleton told me the photographs had been taken around 1946, at the time they were fighting over foreign intelligence, which Hoover wanted but never got."

During his feud with OSS chief William Donovan, dating back to 1941, Edgar had searched for compromising information, sexual lapses included, that could be used against his rival. His effort was in vain, but Donovan--who thought Edgar a "moralistic bastard"--reportedly retaliated in kind by ordering a secret investigation of Edgar's relationship with Clyde. The sex photograph in OSS hands may have been one of the results.

It may be significant, too, that compromising pictures are reported as having been in the hands of both the OSS and Meyer Lansky. The OSS and Naval Intelligence had extensive contacts with the Mafia during World War II, enlisting the help of criminals in projects including the hiring of burglars and assassins, experimentation with drugs, the protection of American ports from Nazi agents and the invasion of Sicily. Lansky helped personally with the latter two operations, meeting with Murray Gurfein, a New York Assistant District Attorney who later became one of Donovan's most trusted OSS officers.

At least once, Lansky worked alongside U.S. intelligence officers on exactly the sort of operation likely to turn up smear material on prominent public men. In 1942, he arranged for the surveillance of a homosexual brothel in Brooklyn suspected of being the target of German agents. "Clients came from all over New York and Washington," Lansky recalled, "and there were some important government people among them. . . . If you got hold of the names of the patrons you could blackmail them to death . . . take some pictures through a hole in the wall or a trick mirror and then squeeze the victim for money or information."

There is no knowing, today, whether the OSS obtained sex photographs of Edgar from Lansky, or vice versa, or whether the mobster obtained them on his own initiative. A scenario in which Lansky obtained pictures thanks to the OSS connection would suggest an irony: that Edgar had tried and failed to find smear material on General Donovan, that Donovan in turn found smear material on him and that the material found its way to a top mobster, to be used against Edgar for the rest of his life.

http://edgar-hoover.tripod.com/

no need to hog the thread, Atabey. by the way, one poster refers to you as a turd. that is something the batty discards, as useless.

Eduardo Rovner.The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution. Translated by Russ Davidson. Latin America in Translation/en Traducción/em Tradução Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 288 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3175-5.

Reviewed by Megan Feeney (St. Olaf College)
Published on H-Diplo (January, 2010)
Commissioned by Christopher L. Ball



Drugs via Cuba: A Transnational History

This translation of Eduardo Sáenz Rovner’s The Cuban Connection is a welcome addition to English-language scholarship on an understudied period of Cuban history, the Republican era from 1901 to 1958. Impressively compiled from primary sources from Cuba and the United States, it is the first book-length study devoted to Cuba’s substantial role in twentieth-century drug trafficking, notwithstanding recent scholarship published in Cuba and discredited by Sáenz Rovner. For these reasons alone this is an important study. After all, during World War II, Cuba became the primary site for the transshipment of drugs from ports around the world to the United States. Sáenz Rovner explores the economic, political, and social factors, as well as the institutions and individuals, that made this so. The Cuban Connection also contains useful if ancillary chapters on U.S. mafia figures and gambling in Cuba.

Sáenz Rovner’s research reveals much about Cuba from the 1920s to the 1950s. But the work is not nation-bound; rather, it is as transnational as the flow of drugs he traces. Not surprisingly, there is much focus on U.S.-Cuban relations, particularly how drug trafficking was shaped by and helped to shape diplomacy, trade agreements, migration, and tourism between the two countries. Here the transport of drugs forms another knot in the “ties of singular intimacy,” as President William McKinley stated in his 1899 State of the Union address, between the United States and Cuba. Still, Sáenz Rovner does not fall into the trap of fixating on this relationship at the expense of the global forces that affect it. Instead, his study follows its diverse cast of transnational actors: from Havana and Camagüey to New York, Miami, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. In so doing, he rejects the Yankee blaming that he believes undermines much historical scholarship published in Cuba today. Consistently, he argues against the well-entrenched notion that Cuba was a victim, corrupted by its neighbors to the North. Rather, native Cubans, immigrants to the island, and foreigners of every stripe sought profit in drugs. Sáenz Rovner paints a complex picture of local and global forces and multiple, multinational criminal agents coming together to make Cuba a drug trafficking hub.

Sáenz Rovner’s introduction concisely outlines his arguments. Geography alone cannot explain why Cuba became this hub. Rather, Cuba became a nexus of this illicit trade precisely because of its profound integration within international flows of goods and capital of the legitimate sort. Easy flows of peoples between nations also facilitate illicit trade. Since colonization, Cuba was a destination for immigrants, from Spain, then Africa, China, Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States. By the 1920s, this continuing influx and resultant diversity made it easier for the immigrants who predominated in the drug trade to blend in and operate out of Cuban ports. Furthermore, though Sáenz Rovner discredits the overgeneralization of pre-1959 Cuba as a “den of corruption,” international drug traffickers were able, in fact, to take advantage of Cuban political instability and widespread public malfeasance (p. 10). Traffickers did not operate with total impunity but convictions were inconsistent, and money and position could purchase a decided laxity of enforcement.

One of Sáenz Rovner’s most provocative arguments is that “the U.S. mafia was not involved in the drug business in Cuba,” despite what U.S. authorities thought then and Cuban historians claim now (p. 14). This argument strains credulity and is contradicted by Sáenz Rovner himself. Even if neither of the most famous U.S. mobsters to operate out of Havana (Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky) trafficked drugs out of Cuba, Sáenz Rovner points to drug trafficking activities therein of the Antinori crime family of Florida. He also notes that, in 1959, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) had a list of forty-one U.S. mobsters it wanted the new revolutionary government to deport. It is hard to imagine that the FBN was wrong about all of them.

Sáenz Rovner opens his body chapters with a familiar story about how Prohibition in the United States led to much smuggling of liquor from Cuba. However, seeking to avoid Yankee blaming, Sáenz Rovner clarifies that smuggling had been practiced out of Cuba since the sixteenth century. The Prohibition era was unique in that a trickle of illegal drugs piggybacked on the rum, a phenomenon tracked by the FBN. Prohibition, which coincided with new commercial air and ferry travel, also sent waves of U.S. tourists to Havana where they could imbibe alcohol and pack bootlegged booze to smuggle home. Cuban government officials encouraged this tourism, hopeful it might prove a steadier source of funds than the island’s sugar trade with the United States. Nonetheless, they were not totally permissive of criminality nor were they unresponsive to the imperative of national “dignity” in their negotiations with the U.S. State Department, Commerce Department, and Justice Department (p. 23).

In chapter 2, Sáenz Rovner describes how drug trafficking picked up after Prohibition, from 1933 to 1940, more as a result of factors in Cuba than factors in the United States. In these tumultuous years, the Revolution of 1933 remained essentially unresolved, as presidents cycled in and out of office, political violence prevailed, the economy staggered, and top officials used state funds for personal enrichment rather than public welfare. Narcotics were imported into Cuba from Europe and Turkey; marijuana arrived from Mexico. Some of these drugs were consumed in Cuba but most were reexported to the United States. The Spanish immigrants predominating in the trade blended into elite Cuban society and capitalized on an environment of lawlessness and their connections to power. Chinese immigrants, in contrast, were not so lucky. They became easy targets whenever the Cuban public demanded a crackdown on drugs. Cuba’s population of Chinese immigrants, the highest of any Latin American country, brought opium with them in the nineteenth century. And though they were not interested in getting rich reexporting opium or spreading its use, xenophobia and moral reform imperatives combined to make them targets for supposedly infesting Cuba with their vices.

(Continues below)

During World War II, Cuba became central to the transshipment of drugs to the United States. The war slowed European and Asian supplies, and Latin American countries stepped in to fill the vacuum. (This wartime shift to Latin American production is explored at greater length in chapter 8; and postwar heroin trafficking between Marseilles in France, Cuba, and the United States is the subject of chapter 9.) Increased legitimate trade between Latin America and the United States--the result of U.S. imperatives of hemispheric defense--also facilitated this shift. Further, drug traffickers continued to find Cuba’s climate of corruption useful during Fulgencio Batista’s presidency, from 1940 to 1944, and the Aútentico presidencies from 1944 to 1952. Narcotics traffickers continued to bribe high- and low-level officials alike while a new centralized office for drug control prosecuted users and dealers of marijuana and opium, disproportionately affecting poor Afro-Cubans or Chinese Cubans. By the early 1950s, the charge that leaders were cozy with drug traffickers was one among many launched by the emerging revolutionary movement. Sáenz Rovner gives credence to long-circulating rumors that President Carlos Prío Socarrás himself was “a habitual cocaine user” (p. 73).

Chapter 5 is devoted to Lucky Luciano’s short stint in Havana. Deported from the United States, Luciano skipped out of Italy and arrived in Cuba in 1946. From there he intended to manage his empire, including new casinos in Cuba. He was temporarily protected by connections with Cuban senators and intimates of President Ramon Grau San Martin, but the director of the FBN, Harry J. Anslinger, was able to exert enough pressure, through a medical drug embargo, to have him deported by March of 1947. Though Sáenz Rovner argues that the overzealous director was wrong about Luciano’s drug trafficking activities, he leaves enough of Anslinger’s convictions intact that the reader remains dubious that Luciano was only tinkering with slot machines and roulette tables in Cuba.

Chapter 7 focuses entirely on gambling in Cuba from the 1920s through the 1950s. Sáenz Rovner argues that the culture of gambling on the island was not the fault of U.S. influences but rather “the fruit of a historical process internal to the country’s society and economy” (p. 93). He traces its historical roots, from early Spanish immigrants’ bolita and Chinese immigrants’ games of chance, from the institution of the national lottery in 1812 to the construction of the first casino in 1910, which garnered strong opposition from U.S. politicians. U.S. mafia figures’ involvement did not begin until the 1930s, and expanded greatly in the 1950s under Batista’s dictatorship. It was then that Batista called in the mob to ensure that casino workers were not cheating U.S. tourists and thus creating a public relations dilemma. Thereafter, U.S. mob figures benefited from tax benefits and Cuban loans for the construction of hotels and attached casinos. These proved highly lucrative legal businesses, and not fronts for more profitable illegal dealings, like drug trafficking, as Cuban historians have argued. As Saénz Rovner goes on to argue in chapter 11, this misinterpretation develops out of that historiographic trend of postrevolutionary Cuba, in which a Christlike Fidel Castro appears in 1959 to sweep away the many sins of pre-1959 Cuba, especially of the Batista era. But the reversal was not so immediate (nor so total), and the revolution’s moral repugnance toward the casinos developed only after U.S. tourists began to stay away. In truth, Castro kept the casinos open as long as they proved a source of revenue and employment.

As dictator in the 1950s, Batista is guilty of many things, but he was not complicit with international drug trafficking, argues Sáenz Rovner. In fact, his last administration had a strong record of enforcement that might have been even stronger if he had not had to devote so many resources to fighting the rebels and if not for the resultant civil unrest on which traffickers capitalized. Batista complied with UN antidrug initiatives, cooperated with the FBN, joined Interpol, used his military police to pursue cocaine traffickers and imposed strong sentencing guidelines for trafficking.

Of course, it did take the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to remove Cuba from international drug trafficking. And, at first, at least on this front, the new revolutionary government’s puritanical impulse coincided well with U.S. objectives. The revolutionary government pledged full cooperation to the FBN, and did deport many top U.S. mafia figures on its aforementioned list. But this accordance was short-lived, a casualty of the rapid deterioration of U.S.-Cuban relations in the early 1960s. Inter-American meetings on drug control became yet another venue for the two states to vilify one another. U.S. authorities and press launched baseless accusations that Cuba, led by the cocaine-addicted Castro, was aiding and abetting drug trafficking into the United States as part of a global Communist conspiracy to weaken Americans’ wills. Meanwhile, as the trade embargo was imposed, opportunities for illegal trade were closed.

The Cuban Connection is best when it remains focused on international drug trafficking via Cuba. The chapters on gambling, though impressively researched and important in their own right, are insufficiently integrated and thus act as a distraction. And there are too many other smaller distractions along the way: Sáenz Rovner dwells overly long on the sociopolitical details of U.S. Prohibition and Estes Kefauver’s political fortunes within the U.S. Democratic Party, as just two examples. These have the effect of making the United States more central than his argument intends. Likewise, there are overly long sections on Cuban political developments filled with irrelevant details that have been well told elsewhere. Paring these might leave space to explore the social factors that made Cuba a drug trade hub. For one thing, the occasional instances in which Sáenz Rovner glosses over drug use in Cuba merit further consideration. Despite these minor shortcomings, this exhaustively researched text will be of great use to scholars of twentieth-century Cuba, U.S.-Cuban relations, and the global drug trade.


http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25915

You can read this book on line @ link below:


The Cuban connection: drug trafficking, smuggling, and gambling in Cuba from ... By Eduardo Sáenz Rovner


http://books.google.com/books?id=1pIJOeNx-e4C&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=Drugs+via+Cuba:+A+Transnational+History&source=bl&ots=HwbOfrPYbp&sig=pNMlk74sswsJ4z06rj5SRlG8QOY&hl=en&ei=e8LdTpCAHZOWtwfc-YXEBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Think of it as an alternate free Kindle or Nook.

ENTRE CARLOS LEHDER Y LOS VAQUEROS DE LA COCAÍNA. LA CONSOLIDACIÓN DE LAS REDES DE NARCOTRAFICANTES COLOMBIANOS EN MIAMI EN LOS AÑOS 70
Eduardo Sáenz Rovner1

A mediados de 1978, el narcotraficante colombiano Carlos Lehder compró la mi-
tad del islote Cayo Norman en las Islas Bahamas cerca a la costa sur de la Florida.
Hasta entonces Cayo Norman había sido un lugar de turismo para gente rica que
quería tranquilidad y aislamiento. Lehder se apoderó de la isla y sus hombres,
norteamericanos, colombianos y alemanes, hostigaron a los vecinos y visitantes a
punta de pistola, uno de ellos Norman Solomon, reciente miembro del parlamento
de las Bahamas, el otro Walter Cronkite, periodista decano de los noticieros de
televisión norteamericanos. Para que no quedaran dudas un cadáver acribillado a
balazos fue encontrado en un bote de placer a la deriva. Lehder amplió la pista
de aterrizaje en Cayo Norman, que se convirtió en un lugar de paso de la cocaína
enviada por los narcotraficantes colombianos del llamado Cártel de Medellín hacia
los Estados Unidos. La cocaína colombiana se llevaba en avión al cayo y de ahí
era distribuida al sureste de los Estados Unidos.

pdf file http://www.revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/ceconomia/article/viewFile/24106/24734