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

employment at Transworld. For personal references, Ricky listed five people, such as the owner of the clothing store where he’d worked during high school, who had had very little contact with him after graduation. Mike Fisten, who reviewed the application and had undergone similar FBI checks to join CENTAC, says, “From a security-clearance standpoint, Ricky’s application was a joke.”
    Nevertheless, the CIA hired Ricky in January 1982 as a paramilitary officer in the Special Activities Division, its most secretive section. Perhaps in the rush to add personnel, Ricky slipped in by mistake. Or perhaps the agency knew of his criminal associations and ignored them, or viewed them as an asset. In any case, Ricky’s first assignment with the CIA was to help break American law.
    As Ricky revealed in a résumé he posted online in 2010, he was “the first CIA officer living in the anti-Sandinista ‘Contra’ camps.” Advising an insurgent group such as the contras—then battling the government of Nicaragua—was a classic CIA paramilitary assignment. After decades of talk, Ricky finally had a chance to kick some communist ass. But as he arrived at the contra camps in Honduras, Congress passed a series of laws that forbade the CIA from arming contras or helping them to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. To follow his orders, Ricky had to in effect commit a bunch of felonies. The camps were at the receiving end of the CIA’s illegal arms-smuggling pipeline, as the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s would reveal. Based on interviews I conducted with intelligence sources, Ricky’s job included training contras and assisting them in hostile operations—runs across the border into Nicaragua to blow up pipelines, torch grain stores, and kill Nicaraguan soldiers or civilians who tried to stop them.
    When the OCS investigated Ricky’s work for Albert as a Transworld detective, they would tie him to similar activities—bombings, arsons, killings. On a transactional level, there was little difference between the jobs he is alleged to have done for Albert in Miami and what he did for the U.S. government in the Nicaraguan guerrilla war.
    The lines blurred in other ways, too. Investigators discovered that a Miami gun dealer who had sold weapons to Ricky in the 1970s met him in Honduras in 1983 to discuss his CIA operations with the contras, presumably with an eye to supplying weapons for the effort. Ricky’s former supervisor in the fire department, Captain McCallister, told the investigators he’d received a bizarre phone call from him in 1982. Ricky told his old boss that he was overseas “studying karate and the use of swords” and asked if he could obtain swords in Miami and sell them to him. McCallister never followed up on the request. In the Central American wars of the 1980s, combatants commonly used machetes for torture and beheadings. Was Ricky’s request a variation on that theme?
    Whether it was or not, OCS detectives would learn that Ricky was a stellar CIA employee. After the contra program, he was posted to Peru to help fight the CIA’s covert war against leftist guerrillas and then, in the late 1980s, to the Philippines. Along the way he earned a diploma from George Mason University, enabling his promotion to staff officer. The leap from paramilitary to a managerial position was not typical, but Bill Casey’s reinvigorated CIA valued men of action. As one former CIA officer described him to me: “Ricky was a hard guy, a stud.”
    Throughout Ricky’s CIA career, he remained in contact with Albert. He visited him in Miami, and when he was abroad Albert phoned him through U.S. embassies where he was posted. (Albert took such pains to protect the secrecy of his contact with Ricky that in the mid-1980s he instructed his political operative Donald Dugan to hide his number from the police should he be arrested.) OCS investigators would develop a theory to explain Ricky’s ongoing contact with Albert: that