How to Get Away With Murder in America by Evan Wright Read Free Book Online

reservist, street enforcer, family man—coexisted without incident. He had no more problems at work. His superiors gave him good performance ratings.
    Maria sometimes noticed funny things, though. Once, she later told investigators, while putting away laundry she found what looked like a grenade in Ricky’s sock drawer. When she asked Ricky about it, he told her it was a toy, but he warned her that if she ever saw one again, never to touch it, pull the pin on it, or tell anyone about it.
    In late 1979, according to Maria, Ricky grew dissatisfied with his life in Miami and applied to federal law enforcement agencies. Once, she came home to find him destroying photographs of him and Albert together. She asked what he was doing and, according to her statement to the OCS, he “bluntly told her it was none of her business.” In early 1980, he took a leave of absence from the fire department and told Maria the State Department had hired him. They moved to Seabrook, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. Ricky put on a suit every morning and told Maria he “worked in a lab doing medical work.” About eight months later, in January 1981, Ricky told Maria he was moving the family back to Miami to resume his job at the fire department. They returned, but Maria divorced him a few months later.
    As the OCS would learn in its 1991 investigation, the story Ricky had told Maria of working for the State Department was a cover. In Maryland he had entered a CIA training program to become a paramilitary officer. (The CIA calls its full-time employees officers, not agents, as they’re known in movies; an “agent” refers to an outside asset recruited for a specific job.) Since the 1950s, CIA paramilitaries had served as advisers to foreign armies or resistance groups and had led covert military operations, such as the capture and execution of Che Guevara. Ricky’s experience in Air Force special operations gave him an edge in qualifying as a paramilitary, but after completing training he withdrew his application. According to sources interviewed by the OCS, he feared he would not pass final background checks.
    Becoming a CIA officer required passing rigorous checks, similar to those performed on prospective FBI agents. The CIA routinely rejected applicants who had no criminal record but had dubious personal associations. Ricky had likely destroyed photographs of him and Albert to try to erase evidence of their relationship. But the CIA normally interviewed an applicant’s spouse, employers, and friends. Had it done so with Ricky, his ties with Albert would have come to light. Albert’s felony convictions and police intelligence reports identifying him as a major drug dealer would have been enough to scuttle Ricky’s chances. Ricky’s ties with El Oso also would have been problematic. In 1980, after having become an enforcer for the Tabraue smuggling clan, El Oso was convicted on federal weapons charges and was a suspect, later convicted, in the murder and beheading of an ATF informant. That Ricky had worked with him at Transworld and had become godparent to his son in a public ceremony would have raised red flags.
    But Ricky had withdrawn his application from the CIA, perhaps before a background check had been completed. When he did so in late 1980, the CIA was on the verge of a transformation. In January 1981, after President Reagan was sworn in, he named a pugnacious new CIA director, William Casey, who began ramping up covert anticommunist operations in Latin America. The agency began to rapidly expand its paramilitary forces. As Ricky later told OCS investigators, in September 1981—nine months after he had withdrawn his application—someone from CIA headquarters invited him to reapply for a “paramilitary assignment in South America.” Ricky resubmitted his application on November 23, 1981.
    OCS investigators who later reviewed Ricky’s second application saw that it elided many details about his life. There was no mention of his