The truth behind the CIA/Mena Conspiracy!Notorious Louisiana drug smuggler Barry Seal made countless runs from Central America to the United States, flying thousands of pounds of cocaine and marijuana into the country and making millions of dollars. Upset that he has lost his pension and healthcare at TWA, he embraces the idea of making $2,000 per kilo of cocaine smuggled into the United States. -Vulture.com, Yes. 5 Jackson Stevens. . Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal was an American commercial airline pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel. Also, view a news story about Barry Seal's death. [44], When Seal received only time served and probation, Louisiana state and federal drug investigators were faced with a dilemma. Mermelstein, who had told the DEA of the murder contract after his arrest in 1985, testified that Ochoa, Escobar, and Cardona had asked him to take the contract and provided him with money and weapons to do the job. [41], Seal was taken into federal custody in June 1985 and spent several months testifying in court. She is a brunette, not a blond like Sarah Wright's character in the movie. [13], To avoid this unwanted attention, Seal moved his aircraft to Mena Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas, where he did maintenance and modifications to improve the planes' carrying capacity and avionics. When faced with criminal prosecution, Seal turned snitch for the DEA, but he continued to smuggle drugs into the US. [36], The evidence acquired from the arrest, plus the evidence gathered by Seal, provided the basis for the first drug trafficking indictment in the U.S. against Escobar and the Ochoas. The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair. He was unaware that a Colombian assassin was hiding behind one of the donation drop boxes. The true story of Barry Seal, a TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler and government informant, played by Tom Cruise in "American Made." . He didn't meet Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers in person until 1984, after his arrest when he was working as an informant for the DEA on an undercover operation. But the CIA were determined. In this photo Barry Seal is third from the bottom left, with a drink in his left hand. Although newspapers published his name after his arrest, Seal was known to the Ochoas as Ellis MacKenzie. You can also support FAIR on Patreon! Exposure of Nicaraguan undercover operation, Criticism of U.S. failure to protect Seal, President's Commission on Organized Crime, "Barry Seal murder in Baton Rouge 25 years ago helped expose Iran-Contra debacle", "Louisiana governor denies parole for man who helped kill Barry Seal for Escobar's cartel", "Slain drug smuggler Barry Seal's daughter sues to halt movie on her father's life", "Family of murdered drug smuggler sue Universal over Tom Cruise film Mena", "North's name bandied about on news leak", "Special Reports - Interview - Drug Wars", "Informants murder puts head on authorities", "TV Reviews: 'Doublecrossed': Story of Drugs and Politics", "Who Killed Barry Seal? Soon, Seal caught the attention of none other than Pablo Escobar and his Medelln cartel. Despus de haber trabajado como piloto de TWA, la mayor. [5], Ironically, Seal's operations received an important boost when he was arrested and jailed in Honduras on the return leg of a drug-smuggling trip to Ecuador. Although Seal had pleaded guilty, with the support of his DEA supervisors, he was sentenced to five years of unsupervised probation. Yet, it's also certainly possible that Seal had no involvement with the CIA in the early 1980s at all, given there is nothing to support the claim but rumors. Wouldn't it be fun if they were fooling around in a plane and the plane went into the same kind of parabolic arc and they got pinned against the ceiling?" Barry Seal was able to get photos of Pablos Escobar himself loading cocaine onto Barry's cargo plane in Nicaragua. In 2017, Seal's life became the subject of a second Hollywood adaptation titled American Made and starred Tom Cruise. [5] By 1978, he had expanded to flying significant loads of cocaine, pound-for-pound a much more profitable enterprise than marijuana smuggling. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 And by 1978, according to The Gentlemans Journal, he had moved on to cocaine. Yes. Universal Pictures (@UniversalPicsPT) 5 de junho de 2017. I was young and it was impressive." He testified that in January 1986, he was ordered by Jorge Ochoa to kill Seal. An interesting fact we learned while researching the true story was that while training for the Civil Air Patrol in Baton Rouge, Barry Seal met President John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Covers; Columnists; . A leak regarding the operation came to light before Seal's second trip. As a progressive group, we believe that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information. It proved impossible to impanel sufficient jurors in Baton Rouge, so the venue was moved to Lake Charles. A DC-4 was seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport loaded with almost seven tons of plastic C-4 explosives, 7,000 feet of explosive primer cord and 2,600 electric blasting caps. Investigators are still trying to separate myth from reality. Barry Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, 1986), was a drug smuggler and aircraft pilot who flew covert flights for the FBI, . -Daily Mail Online. An FBI sting. The Haunting Story Of How Sylvia Plath Died And The Tragic Events That Led Up To It, Amateur Metal Detectorist Unearths A 500-Year-Old Pendant Celebrating Henry VIII's First Marriage, What Stephen Hawking Thinks Threatens Humankind The Most, 27 Raw Images Of When Punk Ruled New York, Join The All That's Interesting Weekly Dispatch. [27], The plane Seal acquired was a C-123K, a large aircraft used primarily for military transport. "I can state absolutely that Oliver North had nothing to do with my story as far as I knew, or as far as I know today," said Jacoby. I never saw drugs, that's for sure." He then was able to get a meeting with Vice President George H.W. Once he flew into U.S. airspace, Seal would drop his plane to 500 feet and slow to 120 knots to mimic a helicopter on the radar screen of anyone who was watching, as the small aircraft frequently flew between oil rigs and the coast. 1986, President Ronald Reagan showed one of the photos Seal had taken of Pablo Escobar and Nicaraguan government official Federico Vaughan loading cocaine onto Seal's C-123 cargo plane, The Fat Lady. Later, after Seal's cover was suspiciously blown, President Reagan used the photo shown below in a 1986 television address to the nation. [3] Seal's career with TWA ended in July 1972, when he was arrested for involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle a shipment of plastic explosives to Mexico using a DC-4. The cartel tells Barry that they'll deal with JB, a suggestion that Barry opposes. However, the U.S. needed a way to covertly get the funds and weapons to the rebels. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, . [20], The Florida Task Force plan called for Seal to set up a cocaine purchase with the Ochoas and other cartel members, providing the basis for indictments in the U.S. Seal had previously dealt with the cartel through another associate so that they were unaware of his real name. The photo was in a cardboard frame of the kind used by nightclubs and tourist attractions, with the date it was taken, January 22,1963, stamped on the back. The DEA initially tried to protect Seal, but he refused to go into the Witness Protection Program. The assassination happened on February 19, 1986 in the parking lot in front of the Salvation Army building on Airline Highway (U.S. 61) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Domhnall Gleeson, right, stars in director Doug Liman's crime drama 'American Made,' based loosely on the story of Baton Rouge native Barry Seal, a pilot-turned-smugger-turned-federal-informant. Bush's anti-drug task force in hopes of convincing them of his value as an informant. However, when a drug shipment was seized by the DEA, the Medellin Cartel blamed Seal for the loss. The plane was hit and Seal had to make an emergency landing at Sandino International Airport in Managua. It is not clear whether Seal and his crew were informed of this before they returned to Nicaragua. He had already been flying planes for nearly half his life, earning his student pilot's license at age 15 and pilot's license at 16. The scene was actually inspired by something that happened while director Doug Liman and Tom Cruise were training for the movie. -Daily Mail Online. From 1980 on, Bottoms was the main pilot in Seal's smuggling enterprise, often flying with Camp while Seal oversaw planning and operations. It is believed that the Colombians put a hit out on Barry after they learned he was going to help the feds with the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain, one of the heads of the Medelln Cartel. They were all sentenced to life in prison. The movie's loose interpretation of the true story is echoed in the trailer when a voice-over by Tom Cruise as Barry Seal tells us that only "some of this sh*t really happened." While there, he had a chance meeting with Jorge Ochoa's New Orleans business manager. Originally planned for mid-April, the flight did not take place until the end of May. At the beginning of the movie, the fictionalized Seal gets bored on his daily flights with Trans World Airlines and begins performing daredevil stunts with passengers onboard. At the height of his career, he was under investigation by the DEA in Mena, Arkansas, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in addition to being under the watchful eye of the FBI. "Tom did all his own flying in the movie," says Liman. However, there was a moment when the pilot thought he had given himself up. Seal used his knowledge of aviation to aid in his life of crime. He also provided testimony that led to drug charges against high-level government officials in Nicaragua and Turks and Caicos. Wikimedia CommonsBarry Seal started his career as a pilot for Trans World Airlines but he soon turned to the more profitable life of drug smuggling. [40], Soon after the broadcast, the heads of the Florida and Louisiana task forces met to work out an agreement that would allow Seal to continue working with the Florida task force and testify as a witness at trial. -Daily Mail Online, The movie proposes that Barry Seal's first foray into smuggling drugs happened in 1980 after he was kidnapped while refueling his plane in Colombia. That was until, believing himself smarter than the Colombian . Watch President Ronald Reagan's address to the nation on Nicaragua and Central America, delivered from the Oval Office on November 13, 1986. The most important witnesses were Max Mermelstein and Luis Carlos Uribe-Munera. -Daily Mail Online, No. The Florida sentence meant no jail time for Seal in Louisiana, yet Seal was pleading guilty to buying 200 kilograms of cocaine, already more serious than the Florida charges. . Featured Image:The low-res image of Frederico Vaughn (in the striped shirt) that Ronald Reagan offered as proof of Sandinista drug trafficking. [42] Following his testimony in Las Vegas, Seal spent another month in a witness protection center. After this look at the brazen smuggler Barry Seal, check out how the Medelln cartel became one of the most ruthless crime syndicates in history. He made four trips to Nicaragua that year, allegedly to document the complicity in cocaine trafficking. He would have to operate the rear camera by hand. The Nicaragua drug story first appeared in the Washington Times (7/17/84) and was immediately given big play by all the major papers, wire services and TV networks. -Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal. [25] Vaughan was an aide to Tomas Borge, Nicaraguan Minister of the Interior. In April 1981, a DEA informant introduced Seal to an undercover DEA agent. A Fairchild C-123 military cargo plane similar to Barry Seals Fat Lady.. [18] Jacobsen was impressed with Seal's connections, especially the ones with the Ochoa family, and on March 28, Seal signed a letter agreeing to serve as a DEA informant. Schafer recruits Seal to take reconnaissance photos of guerillas operating in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, wooing him with a super-fast, super-nimble twin engine plane. [66][67] Hawkins told Frontline that neither she nor her staff leaked the information after the briefing. The White House saw the pictures as proof of the communist Sandinista government's corruption and believed that the photos would help to convince the public of the need to support and arm the rebels (Contras) in Nicaragua. On the morning of June 25, Seal, Camp and their mechanic, Peter Everson, landed . On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Also, before the agreement was reached, the Louisiana task force investigation had been looking into Seal's involvement in smuggling thousands of kilograms of cocaine. In 1988, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing that looked into how Seal's 1984 trip to Nicaragua was leaked to the press. Barry also got lucky and captured photos of the communist leader of the Sandinistas . In his address, Reagan talks about a photo taken by a hidden camera on Barry Seal's plane. Though hed done his job as an informant, Seal was still sentenced to six months of house arrest at a Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge. "Barry Seal was a friend of mine," Plumlee says. [55] The trial began in April 1987. The DEA had been informed before the publication of the Jacoby article, so they were still able to have Seal set up a meeting with the chief cartel supervisor in Miami, Carlos Bustamonte, and arrested him on July 17, along with other cartel employees. [7] At his peak, he earned as much as $500,000 per flight transporting shipments of cocaine from Colombia to the United States. In reality, there is no evidence that Seal was ever involved with the CIA. The DEA agreed to put surveillance equipment on Barry Seals plane and track him on his next flight to Central America. A work of Doug Liman, previously known for Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the new film, American Made, could turn out to be the crime drama of the year in its telling of Seal's story. -Daily Mail Online. The two American . The narcotics runner, Barry Seal, allegedly . Despite the heat surrounding Seal, he made a drug run to Nicaragua in 1984, where he picked up 1,465 pounds of . Purwin was a passenger in a plane that went down, killing both Purwin and Venezuelan pilot Carlos Berl. November 15, 2017. Yes. The DEA had been onto him for a long time. But the 1984 investigation got derailed when Seal told his handlers that cocaine was being trans-shipped through Nicaragua with the permission of high-level government officials. [51], On the evening of February 19, 1986, Seal was shot to death in front of the Salvation Army Center, three weeks into his probation. It was probably shortly before the operation or thereabouts when he was enlisted to give us proof that the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was actually . The 70s. That film finds Seal (portrayed by Michael Par) being assassinated in a motorcycle drive-by shooting while he is driving and Robert Mazur (Cranston) is his passenger. In real life, his first encounter with the Medelln Cartel happened less dramatically. -TIME, As a drug smuggler for Colombia's Medelln Cartel, Barry Seal earned as much as $500,000 per flight smuggling cocaine into the United States. Wikimedia CommonsA Fairchild C-123 military cargo plane similar to Barry Seals Fat Lady.. The gunman was later identified as Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz. Soon after, JB is killed by a car bomb. The real Barry Seal claimed that he started running covert operations for various government agencies as early as the late 1950s, while he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, well before he became a TWA pilot. Barry met Debbie while he was on his way to a hearing after he was caught in 1972 trying to smuggle military explosives out of the country. -TIME. [60] All three men's fingerprints were found in the vehicle. Alder Berriman Berry Seals life has become somewhat distorted over the years, and it isnt really a mystery why: such an exciting and controversial story is bound to be reproduced or exaggerated. Daniel Rennie is a freelance writer residing in Melbourne, Australia. [43] After listening to summaries of Seal's successful work for the DEA, Judge Norman Roettger sentenced Seal to time served (a little over three months in witness protection) and three years probation. 4 - July/August, Iran-Contra Affair. There is no information on Barry Seal's net worth, but it must have been substantial. . [1] In this capacity, he worked for both the CIA and Pablo Escobar. Using pilots like Barry Seal was a means to an end. [68], Louisiana Attorney General William Guste wrote to United States Attorney General Edwin Meese criticizing the government's failure to protect Seal as a witness. There is no real-life Monty. Her character in the American Made movie is much more aware and suspicious of her husband's activities, stating that she flat out doesn't trust him, which is the opposite of Seal's real-life wife. Sep 30, 2017 Stefan Andrews. TwitterBarry Seal, the drug smuggler-turned-DEA informant who helped take down Pablo Escobar. But the 1984 investigation got derailed when Seal told his handlers that cocaine was being trans-shipped through Nicaragua with the permission of high . From earning his pilots license at the age of 16 to his blood-soaked end at the hands of a notorious cartel, Seal certainly got the life of excitement that he so desired. He once said in an interview, The exciting thing to me is to get yourself into a life threatening situation. Seal said that he started by doing things like flying guns for the CIA to revolution fighters in Cuba in the late 1950s and flying operations for U.S. Army Special Forces in Laos just prior to the Vietnam War. When he learned that he would probably be killed afterward, he refused. He made more than $50 million smuggling drugs into the United States from South America between 1977 and 1986. . No other name is perhaps more associated with the Iran-Contra affair than Oliver North, but his involvement in exposing Barry Seal's mission and blowing his cover is unknown and entirely speculation. Twitter/VICEBarry Seal likely never worked for CIA, as shown in American Made. And it was there, according to The Gentlemans Journal, that he was arrested by the DEA in 1984 with 462 pounds of Escobars cocaine on his plane. FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation. This doesn't add up with the true story. Barry Seal's apparent piloting of a JFK assassin getaway plane points, again, to Bush Sr. and his cronies (the Biderman part of the DuPont family, Rockefellers, and more). If they were, the mission was aborted. The Charmed, Doomed Life of Barry Seal. Starring Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Copyright 2023 HistoryvsHollywood.com, CTF Media, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Now thats excitement.. Advertisement During the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, the U.S. plotted to secretly help the rebels (Contras) overthrow Nicaragua's Communist Sandinista government. The man said that despite the incident, he was still very fond of Barry. "He stopped in there and, just like that, he asked me out," says Debbie. Barry Seal modern day outlaw, adventurer, and drug smuggler, full of fun, full of folly . At Guste's request, Meese launched an investigation to determine whether or not attorneys in Louisiana, Miami, and Washington had mishandled the case, and to determine whether or not Seal should have been forced into protective custody. In addition to implicating Escobar as a drug kingpin, Seals photos provided evidence that the Sandinistas, Nicaraguan revolutionaries who overthrew the countrys dictator in 1979, were being funded by drug money. American Made (2017) The Real Barry Seal (Universal Pictures) . Hed get in his plane and hed go down there and throw 1,000 kilos on the plane and come back to Louisiana.. Seal pilote un avin C-123 que llevaba tambin unas cmaras fotogrficas escondidas. He was assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group and graduated from the United States Army Airborne School selection and training. [45], At Seal's sentencing hearing in January 1986, Judge Frank Polozola acknowledged that he was bound by the agreement, but informed Seal and his lawyer of his dissatisfaction with Seal's failure to receive jail time in Florida, forcing Polozola to sentence Seal to probation on much more serious charges in Louisiana.

Lynnfield School Committee, Gary Hall Episcopal Priest, Windows Media Player Dark Mode, Vanderpump Rules Baby Due Dates, Articles B