January 19, 2023 • 41 mins
Phil Stanford leaves political reporting in Washington D.C. to cover crime stories and stumbles directly into the dangerous, cocaine-fueled world of Miami in the early 1980s. In the process he finds himself intertwined with an unsolved murder after a chance encounter at a dive bar with a private detective named Clay Williams.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Let me
get my head around this. You drop out of journalism
in Washington, DC, moved to Miami and end up working
for a detective agency that's a front for a major
drug operation with CIA connections.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, how stupid? Can you be? Right?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Phil? I've known you for a long time and your
many things, but you're not stupid. You're going to have
to tell me how you got caught up in all
of this.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Yeah, it's something I've been trying to figure out myself
for years now.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
And the guy you replaced was murdered.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
It started when I took place of the detective the
guy had been murdered, but that was just for starters.
It got crazier as time went on. And if I
do say so, it's a pretty good story.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm Lauren breg Pacheco and this is Murder in Miami.
(01:16):
Journalist Phil Stanford and I first cross paths during my
first podcast, Happy Face, about Keith Hunter Jesperson, the serial
killer and rapist in the nineteen nineties. Stanford was the
newspaper reporter at the Oregonian who had received an anonymous
letter from Jessperson basically bragging about his kills creepily signed
(01:36):
with a smiley face. As a result, Stanford coined the
happy face killer moniker and it stuck.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah, I certainly don't take credit for the happy face nickname.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
That was him.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
That was Keith Jefferson. He drew all those little happy faces.
That's who he wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Stanford ended up connecting with the hulking, nearly six foot
eight killer in person for a pretty interesting reason.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
He was arrested.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
He wanted credit for a murder that two people were
already serving time for, and I had written about those
two people trying to point out that the case against
them was completely full of it. Jesperson was coming at
it from a slightly different angle. He wanted credit.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Stanford's subsequent reporting helped prove Jessperson had indeed killed twenty
three year old Tanya Bennett and contributed to getting the
two people already serving time for her murder out of prison.
But by the time I'd tracked Stamford down, he was
pretty sick of talking about Keith Hunter. Jesperson.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Well, he was certainly no Hannibal Lecter. He's just a
big dummy driven by compulsions he didn't understand himself.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
When we connected. Stamford, who was at one point the
most successful columnist in Oregon, was so tired of talking
to people in general. He'd pretty much dropped off the grid,
living as far west as he could without falling into
the ocean.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Yeah, it was one of the more remote places in
the United States. I think Gold Beach, Oregon, which is
down at the southern tip of Oregon on the coast
just above the California line.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
After some politely persistent stalking, Stanford begrudgingly agreed to be interviewed.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I'm glad you finally found me. Yes.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Well, to get to you, I had to go through
your publishers, who were quite pragmatic in letting me know
that they could reach out to you. But the likelihood
was that you would want nothing to do with me.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
It's oh.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
The Bill Stamford, I'd grow to know was extremely private
and more than a bit guarded and senecal, understandable given
the story that motivated his departure from his career as
a reporter. Due to the politics that surrounded the nineteen
eighty nine murder of Michael Frankie.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Ahead of the Oregon's Correction department had discovered a rat's
nest of corruption in his department and was going to
expose it clean house, and he was murdered. He was
assassinated out in front of the building where he worked
in Salem, Oregon, stabbed to death. That was the night
(04:20):
before he was supposed to address a Senate committee on
the subject.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Using his newspaper column as a platform, Stanford started relentlessly
questioning Frankie's highly suspicious murder and the guilt of the
low level drug dealer it was penned on, all while
calling out the corruption that surrounded the case.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
And it was denied, absolutely denied, that his murder could
have had anything to do with corruption, because of course
there was no corruption in Oregon, and I was writing
a column for The Oregonian at the time. Smelled a rat,
and I kept raising questions.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Doing so would ultimately cost Stanford his job take its toll.
When we first met in person, here's how I described Phil.
Phil's a fiercely loyal guy with a choppy head of
silver hair that matches the stubble of his beard, and
soft brown eyes that seem to have seen a bit
too much of the corruption. He writes about thirty years
(05:19):
after Michael Frankie's death, the Murder in Oregon podcast would
again raise questions about Oregon's Department of Corrections and Corruption.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
A new hit podcast called Murder in Oregon is uncovering
new information about the stabbing death of forty two year
old Michael Frankie.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
In the process, Phil and I would become pretty good friends,
speaking regularly and crossing paths in person whenever possible. That's
how I became familiar with his time spent working as
a private investigator in Miami.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
It's a story that just gets crazier and crazier as
we go along.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And it's one filled with drugs, deception, conspiracies, and more
than one daly questionable killing. Set in the time and
place that was equally extreme Miami in the early nineteen eighties.
Pastels and palms, dancers, and a hint of danger. Together
they can pride the image of Miami, a city some
(06:15):
have described as America's Casablanca. By the nineteen seventies, parts
of Miami, especially Miami Beach, had fallen from the glory
of its nineteen thirties Art Deco heyday. The glamour that
carried it through the nineteen fifties and sixties as a
trendy tropical hotspot for the jet set had dissipated and
(06:35):
Miami settled into more of a mundane destination for retired
snowbirds fleeing snowy northern winters. But as the eighties approached,
the city was about to be revitalized by a different
sort of white powder.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Cocaine comes from the leaves of the coquetree, found chiefly
in Peru and Bolivia, then processed in Colombia.
Speaker 6 (06:56):
About a third of the world's production finds its way
to the United Slime States.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And its preferred point of entry, Florida. As nineteen eighty approached,
Miami was on its way to becoming the skyline. Built
by cocaine and overrun by drug cartels, crowned the murder
capital of America, setting the stage for the salacious scene
that would be dramatized and immortalized when the hit television
(07:24):
show Miami Vice first aired in nineteen eighty five. Will
dive more deeply into all of that a bit later,
But the Miami Stanford ended up moving into was definitely dangerous.
Maybe that's part of what Pollsville to Miami.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Okay, it's nineteen eighty. I'm working as a columnist for
political magazine in Washington, d C. Except I don't like
politics or government or military affairs. Written about that too,
and I want to write about crime.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Okay, So how did you end up chucking it off
and heading to Miami.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Well, like I said, I was sick of writing about
politics and government.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Why wouldn't you just stay in Washington then and write
about what you wanted to Why just walk away from
everything that you built in terms of your career.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Well, I suppose that's entirely too sensible.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
But in fact I had tried to get out of
the political rut I was in. I'd actually gone down
to Miami for another smaller magazine called Quest and covered
a big.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Drug trial, the Black Tuna.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, the Black Tunic case.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Drug smuggling was also the topic at federal court today
with the beginning of testimony in the government's Black Tuna case.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
The Black Tuna gang ran Miami's drug trade in the
nineteen seventies. The name was coined by the media based
on the solid gold medallion with a black Tuna emblem
worn by members to identify themselves at the time, the
Black Tuna Gang was alleged by the DA to be
one of the most sophisticated drug smuggling organizations in existence.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
Federal Judge James King listened as one time smuggle turned
government informant Luke McLeod told of the eight tons of
marijuana which he claims to have delivered to the key defendants,
Robert Meinster and Robert Plattshorn in nineteen seventy four nineteen
seventy five, the.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Gang was accused of importing around five hundred tons of
marijuana and to the United States over the course of
sixteen months, operating at one point from a suite in
the Fontaine Blue Hotel in Miami Beach. But we'll come
back to all of that later. Back to Phil in
his time covering the trial.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
I remember sitting there in this big courtroom with stone floors,
I think they call it Chattahoochee or something like that.
And the courtroom was never packed, you know, it was
always about a third full. Sometimes there were more defendants
up there behind the railing than spectators and reporters from
the local papers in Miami, and few others than me.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Was a big deal of a trial at the time.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
The government was making a big thing of it.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
Now, I was always disposed to excuse marijuana smugglers anyway,
you know. I thought it was ridiculous that there was
a law against this, regardless of how much they were
supposed to have smuggled in. And it turns out the
government greatly exaggerated the amount they did smuggle. But they
charged Platschorn under a Kingpin statute that was meant for
(10:20):
much heavier drug offenses. And what I really remembered about
that is that he got sixty years for smuggling marijuana
in the United States.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Remember the length of that sentence. Sixty years will come
back to it. Because it wasn't entirely motivated by drugs.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
I certainly didn't understand things as well as I might
have when they were happening. I think I probably got
taken in an awful lot by the government. I was
fascinated by the agents too. They were living in a
very exciting life and got to know a couple of them.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
It was way better than Washington, d C. That's for sure.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
While Stanford definitely found the trials top bit more compelling
than Washington based politics, he was equally attracted to its setting.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I was fascinated by Miami. I was fascinated by the
whole vibe.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Back then.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
It was wild, and the Miami assignment was a welcomed
break from his usual beat.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
But other than that, I wasn't having any luck getting
any assignments. I remember sitting in the office at Harper's
Magazine in New York talking to the editor. I totally
wanted to do stuff on crime, and he wanted me
to do some government procedural peace and I said, oh
my god. And it was about that time I decided
(11:36):
to chuck it all and go to Miami.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Well, in a way that kind of makes sense, because Miami,
particularly at that time, was swimming in crime, just in
terms of the drug trade and everything, and it must have,
on top of being romantic, it must have felt like
an outlaw town.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
I mean there was a vibe there, really was, and
people were different down there. I mean, DC is really
a very boring place.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
And Stamford was basically bored of his life and the
way he was making a living.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
I was stuck professionally. That's what I meant by wanting
to write about crime. But in a way that's sort
of a mental dodge. I suppose the way we give
ourselves more palatable excuses for what's really going on underneath.
And it was personal as well.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
How old were you at the time.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I was thirty eight, And of course there was the
divorce certainly had something to do with it.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I was missing my boys.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Phil had two sons with his first wife. After the divorce,
she relocated with him to Oregon, leaving Stamford feeling unsettled
and a bit adrift.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And I was having these dreams every two weeks regularly.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
I was in a.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Desert somewhere there's nighttime, just moonlight or starlight, looking out
across the desert at a walled city after midnight, you know,
still a few lights shining through windows, maybe a caravan
leaving what I remember hearing the camel bills in the dream,
(13:11):
and concealing myself behind some sort of sand dune. This
walled city is maybe a quarter mile a half mile away,
and knowing that I have to get into the city
without being noticed and come back with something I don't
know what it is. And so I'm there waiting, waiting
to go, but not really daring to go. And it
(13:36):
starts to get lighter, and lighter. Here a rooster crow,
and that's it. I have this dream once a week
or so, and even I can see is some connection
with Miami. I'd already been down to Miami for the
Black Tuna trial.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So the dream is about an opportunity that you're going
to miss if you don't make a.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Move, or something is telling me that there's something I
have to find out.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, you left Washington in a bit of a rush.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Nine or two before I left, there was a party
at the place where I was living. There wasn't a
going away party, it was just a party telling everyone
talking about going to Miami. And someone says, do you
have a job yet? I know this person is much
more practical than I am. I guess said, well, I
know the publisher of a newspaper down there. I'll give
(14:43):
him a call and he'll be expecting to hear from you.
Maybe you can work out something there. So I quit
my job on very short notice. I'm ashamed to say,
load everything into my old beat up Capri and head
to Miami. Attribute its exit and driving down that It
was a huge change from Washington, d C. It was
(15:03):
during the winter months and DC everything is drab, and
you've got the dirty ice and overcast sky and the
farther south. I'd get the writer. I'd finally in Miami,
the sun just burst upon you and primary colors.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Miami just it was.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Another world, bright blue, dark green vegetation, the sea, blue
green sea, lit with the sun, and it was a
glorious place, it seemed to me.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
I parked in front.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Of the Miami News building, which was on the right,
on the edge of the Bay. I persuade the managing
editor of the Miami News, a very nice lady named
Gloria Anderson, to give me a job writing what I
referred to as detective stories.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So you start doing investigating crime stories.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yeah, And I liked what I was doing, long stories
divided by chapters, and I think readers liked them too.
Miami was full of great stories back then. And I
did several unsolved murderers, Jewelry heis pirates off the shore
of Andros Island.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
And then you decided to take on one of Miami's
biggest unsolved mysteries.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
I started working on a story about a pretty young
seventeen year old girl, Amy Billig, who about what five
or six years before, had been walking down the street
near her home in Coconut Grove on the way to
the store or something like that, and she just disappeared,
as far as anyone who vanished into thin air. No
(16:48):
one saw her again, ever, and the mother, to her credit,
never let it go. She kept demanding answers. And so
I got in touch with the mother and she had
a new lead. Someone had called her three o'clock in
the morning, called or collect and told her daughter was alive.
And well, so you know, this was well before the
(17:11):
cell phones.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Or call her id. She had to go down to
the phone company to.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Get the address of the of the person who called,
which she had because she'd had accepted the call. Someone
had called her turns out from a little town in Oklahoma, Ceman, Oklahoma.
So I was going to go out there, Toman, Oklahoma
and solve this case and probably make a name for myself.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
That's what I was thinking at the time.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
And how would you do.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Well at that point, the story was taking too long anyway.
After several weeks, Gloria calls me into her office and says,
the publisher is getting a little bit restive about our
little experiment with detective stories. This one is taking too long.
He doesn't think it's good use of the time. And
if I don't come up with something pretty quick on
the Amy Billy case, we would have to reassess our arrangement.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
And I say, Gloria, but I have a new lead.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
And I tell her about that phone call and how
I want to go out to Seaman, Oklahoma, and all
I need is an airline ticket and money for a
rental car. Come on if it works out as Pulletzer
prize material. And she says, okay, but I'm telling you.
So I get my ticket and I get all packed
and ready to go, and the night before I'm with
(18:27):
my girlfriend Ruth in the Prying Pub.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
That's where we hung out.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Who was Ruth? Did you meet her in Miami?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (18:33):
She was Gloria's secretary and we sort of took up
together after I started working at the News. It's a
very talkative, cute redhead who'd spend some time hanging around
with country bands in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
So she had no problem attracting mail attention, none at all.
And Stanford's not exaggerating. I tracked down a candid photo
of the couple at the time, and it actually looks
like a paparazzi shot. It's in black and white, and
the two appear to be arriving at some sort of event.
Phil's glancing back towards Ruth. He's wearing a blazer and
a collared shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal a disco
(19:10):
era amount of tanned chest, and Ruth is smiling broadly
at the camera from underneath thick bangs, her face framed
in a wavy mane that just falls past her shoulders.
Her vibe is as cool and confident as the silky
top that accentuates her slim, yet pronounced curves. They made
a stunning couple. Here's Ruth, that former girlfriend recollecting Phil Well.
Speaker 7 (19:35):
I met him in the newsroom Miami News. My first
impression was he was basically kind of an explosing personality.
Most of our reporters and all were kind of laid
back and all that, but Phil was always on charge,
very verbal and outspoken. Dolly's traveling at one hundred miles
(19:58):
an hour, there was no down mellow time would fail that.
He was so smart and interesting. Our conversations were just
so different than you have with most guys. You know,
and Bill was very good looking. Oh yeah, and he
(20:19):
had a great body.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Okay, back to Phil and Ruth. In that bar in Parime, we.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Were sitting in the bar there, the big horseshoe shaped bar,
and she's telling the bartender about how I'm going out
to Oklahoma and I was going to solve the Amy
Billy kicks. And one of the things she's saying to
the bartender is that the theory at that time was
that Amy Billy had been snatched off the street by
(20:47):
some bikers who were coming through tent and down at
the end of the bar a few places away, there's
this guy, long hair, sort of good looking guy who says, say,
I'm going to be talking to some bikers here over
the weekend.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Maybe I can help.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
And it turns out he's a private investigator, hands me
his card, says Clay Williams Intercept Detective Agency.
Speaker 7 (21:15):
I remember a guy doing that, but he didn't register
with me that much, you know, because people, when they
knew you were reporters, are always giving you their cards.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
While the offering of the card wasn't noteworthy, Ruth recalls
the guy offering it was.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
I remember he was kind of unusual for that bar.
You know what I'm saying. The way he looked and
dressed and everything.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Do you remember him?
Speaker 8 (21:41):
What way?
Speaker 7 (21:41):
Well, he was just a little more high rent than
most of the customers there, well dressed and all that which.
The Parime Pub was the kind of bar you go
in and your pajamas if you wanted to. There's nothing
about it sophisticated or chic.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
And it was very small.
Speaker 7 (22:03):
It wasn't a big bar at all.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
That card and the man it belonged to, Clay Williams,
would end up having an enormous impact on Stanford.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
And this story, okay, Well, to make a short story short,
I'd fly out to Seam in Oklahoma, get a rental car,
go to this little town, just two thousand population, find
the address, knock on the door, and the woman there,
(22:33):
of course doesn't look anything like Amy Belling. Her husband's there.
And the story is they have parties all the time,
people coming in and out of the house, and on
this particular night when a mother got the call, they
were having one of those big parties. They have no
idea who is there. In other words, it was a
complete flop. I go back to the airport, get on
the plane, go back to Miami, and I know I'm
(22:56):
in trouble.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Stanford figured he was likely to lose his job at
the paper. Then he remembered that stranger from the bar,
Clay Williams, the private investigator who'd offered to ask the
bikers about Amy Billig.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
So I get out the card for Clay Williams, which
I thought I'd never have to use because I was
so sure that this was going to be it, and
I called the number on it. Intercept secretary answers. I
asked for Clay Williams and she says, I'm sorry, we
don't have a Clay Williams here.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And I said what she said? No.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
At this point, Stanford's not only desperate, he's confused and annoyed.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
So I jump in my car drive out there.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
They're actually in Perne too. They have nice offices in
the Bank of Parne, third floor. And barge into the
office and I'm waiving this card and the secretary and
I said, look, I have his card.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
It says he works here.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
And this big burly guy comes out of the office,
introduces himself Bob Adams. He's an inventor scept going in
and let's talk and so we go into his office.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
The first thing we noticed there's.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
This big poster of Casablanca behind his desk. Turns out
he's something of a romantic. So we talk and he says,
sorry about the confusion, but we didn't know who you
were when you called. You know, we get all sorts
of calls from all sorts of people, but yeah, Clay
Williams did some work for us, and we haven't been
able to get in touch with him for two or
(24:29):
three days. I guess it was. And we're worried about
him too. And I say, I'm worried about him because
I think I may be responsible.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Worried Williams wound up in trouble after asking bikers about
Amy Billig. Stanford fears it's his fault. The guy's gone missing.
When he conveyed that to Bob Adams, Adams offered to
assist Stanford in his search for Clay Williams.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
The next few days, they sort of squire me around
as a dog and pony show. We're looking for Clay Williams,
and of course we don't find him.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Did he ever turn up?
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
About two weeks later, got a call from Bob. He
said they found Clay.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
He's dead. They found his body in the Everglades.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Suddenly Stamford is really regretting that exchange in the bar.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Now I am quite convinced I'm responsible for Clay Williams's death.
I told Bob too that I was worried that I'd
caused Clay's death because he was doing research for me.
And he says, well, look, you're still working for the newspaper,
right And I said yeah, And he said, well, why
don't you go down to the Sheriff's office talk to
(25:42):
the detectives working on this case and see what they know.
And so I go down Miami Dade Sheriff's Office tell
the person at the entrance that I'd like to talk
to the detectives from the Miami News and I might
have some information that's useful on Clay Williams. One of
the detectives comes out, tall, lanky guy, sort of detective
(26:04):
issue suit, and leads me back to the room where
his partner is and I sit in front of their
desk and I tell them about the Amy Billy case.
I think I might be responsible for this death, and
they say right away, no, this has nothing to do
with the missing girl. They think it's drugs, and I
said no, no, no, no. So we go back and forth,
(26:26):
and at a certain point they start pulling out pictures
of Clay Williams's body, polaroids taken out in the Everglades,
and he's just this is after two weeks now. He's
a skeleton with long hair down to his shoulders. Most
of the flesh has gone from his face, and the
alligators have taken off an arm and part of a leg.
(26:49):
And they show me more photos of the body and
they say, you better watch what you're getting into. I
said no, no, I'm fine, and so they just sort
of throw up their hands escort me to the.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Door, but not without offering Phil a final warning.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
They said, look, you're involved with some dangerous people here.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And I report back to Bob. I call and tell
them what I found out.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
They said, good work, good work, And so that was
sort of my first job for.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Intercept as a private detective.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
As a newspaper reporter slash private detective.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Yes, as gruesome as Clay Williams's death may sound, apparently
it didn't even make news. I couldn't find any information
(27:48):
about it online or in any of the newspaper archives,
but that could be because it was just one of
an avalanche of murders in that year. In nineteen eighty alone,
Miami had a record five hundred and seventy three murders.
The Miami Dade Morgue was so overwhelmed with corpses that
the Medical Examiner's office had to lease a refrigerated truck
(28:11):
to keep the cascades of bodies on ice, and Miami
earned the dubious distinction of being the nation's murder capital,
largely as a result of shootouts among cocaine cowboys and
violent crimes committed by Mariolito's crime games of mostly male
Cubans who'd poured into Miami at the time straight from
the prisons in Cuba. It was a recipe for violence
(28:34):
and volatility. Here's how Ruth Phil's then girlfriend, who also
worked at the Miami News at the time, remembers it.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
During those years in Miami, there were so many people
that turned up dead because anybody crossed the cartails and
any white. They just killed everybody that was home. One
of the people that got arrested even said that we
just killed everybody that was at home, And there were
so many murders that were just inexplicable. Back then, it
(29:07):
was a crazy time in.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Miami and a time when drug money fueled the mayhem, as.
Speaker 7 (29:12):
We say in the South, money tops and bullshit walks,
because I had millions of millions of dollars that I
were making from.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
That money made on supply and demand during the eighties.
Speaker 5 (29:26):
The number of Americans abusing cocaine has skyrocketed. In the
early part of the decade, this white powder was considered
a white collar drug. Coke was it. Coke was chic,
and at one hundred dollars a gram, it had the
high price tag to match cocaine his big business. Americans
(29:50):
are spending over thirty billion dollars a year on it.
Both suppliers and users are a formidable adversary in the
war on drugs.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
And in nineteen eighty Miami was the undisputed ground zero
in that battle.
Speaker 9 (30:06):
I tell people that that was our capolan era because
it was just crazy with all the achilles.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
That's Israel reeis a former Circuit court judge of the
eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Today, he runs his own
law firm. After nearly thirty years of public service as
a judge and assistant State's Attorney. I sought him out
because from nineteen eighty until nineteen ninety five he was
also a police officer detective with the Miami Dade Police Department,
(30:36):
where at various times he worked in the Homicide Bureau,
Media Relations Section, and Special Investigations divisions Criminal Conspiracy and
Racketeering squads. So he was no stranger to drug related violence.
Speaker 9 (30:50):
My first exposure to that was when I was still
a patrol officer in nineteen eighty or eighty one, when
I was dispatched to a shooting in the New part
of Miami Les, Florida. I mean Lakes is now an
incorporated town, but back then it was just an unincorporated
area of Day County.
Speaker 10 (31:05):
As I arrived on the scene, I was the first
officer on the scene.
Speaker 9 (31:08):
That was the victim was lying in his driveway and
he had been peppered with either a Mac ten or
a Mac eleven, which is a small panheld submachine gun
that was used a lot by the Colombian pitman.
Speaker 6 (31:21):
I remember he was lying in his driveway there and
the garage store was behind him in the five story
was just littered with holes because they just kept shooting
at this guy with this automatic submachine gun.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
In that era, most if not all, of Miami's violent
crimes were meant to serve as messages or warnings to
those who'd crossed the drug cartels or even considered it.
Speaker 10 (31:44):
We would just hear about these different cases people just
being killed. I think there was like eight or nine
people killed inside a housing Kendall, which was, you know,
the South Date area, a nice middle class area. Eight
or nine people killed there. There were a lot of
kidnappings for ransom.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
I mean, it was just.
Speaker 7 (32:00):
Day in and day out.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Former detective Jeff Lewis, who is now a private investigator,
started out as a uniformed officer in the Liberty City
area of Miami in nineteen eighty before going on to
become an undercover detective, robber detective, and homicide detective in
Miami Dade. He also gave me his take on the times.
Speaker 11 (32:21):
I would categorize it as the wild will left. Every
day somebody was getting shot, murdered, robbed, victimized. The crime
was definitely out of control in that particular time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Buyed by the influx of drug related conflicts, the crime
wave hit with a gruesome severity not before seen in
the US, and.
Speaker 11 (32:42):
Then started in Miami because that's what the money was
and that's what the people that wanted to make money came.
The term home invasion robbery was coined in Miami. You
didn't have all invasion robberies in la or Chicago or
New York like we did in Miami. That's where it started,
because that's where a drug trade really started and blew up.
One of our sergeants coined the term home nation robbery.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Wow. And so that was a direct result of the
influence of the violence that the cartels brought with the business.
Speaker 11 (33:12):
Absolutely. I mean, you know, between the Columbians and Mary
Elitos and a lot of those Cubans that came over.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Everybody saw the movie Star Base.
Speaker 11 (33:19):
I mean, that's what would happened if you were a
criminal and you came to Miami from Maryelle. If you
didn't become a drug dealer, you became a drug robin,
and then you would recruit those to work for you,
and usually those were the people you were in prison
with inquboat. So it was a big vicious cycle and it.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Was a business.
Speaker 10 (33:35):
You had two businesses with that.
Speaker 11 (33:37):
You had the drug dealers and then you had the
people that were robbing a drug dealer. So our hands
were full because we had to deal with both both groups,
and they were vicious and they were nasty. I mean,
these guys were ruthless. Victims were hurt so bad they
had to call the police or an ambulance or go
to the hospital, and otherwise they probably wouldn't even call
the police. We would have on cooperative viness and that
(33:57):
was a problem as a robbin detective was very prevalent.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
And so it was also pretty prevalent that many of
these crimes went unsolved, especially ones involving discarded bodies like
the body of Clay Williams.
Speaker 11 (34:13):
During that specific time, and they had what they would
call body dumps out in the redlands or out in
the swamp areas or anywhere outside of the cities. Sometimes
they would get the individual identified, sometimes they wouldn't. But
a lot of those cases turn out to be drug related,
and they didn't get the assistance from the Vickers family
because they were either too afraid or they were also
involved in the drug trade. So a lot of those
(34:35):
cases went unsolved. But it was basically drug dealers killing
other drug dealers.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
And if the rise in drug dealing was linked to
the rise in body counts. So was the violence those
bodies endured before being found.
Speaker 11 (34:48):
And you just don't kill a lot of times. Either
that person stole from you, lie to you, it's something
to your family in regards to drugs, or they knew
where big stash was or whatever. So they're going to
torture you. They're going to kill you. Now they've got
to get rid of the body out there in the Everglades.
You go out there where nobody goes, and middle of
(35:11):
the night, dump the body and leave no id. Sometimes
you might pull the teeth, cut the fingers off, maybe
the head. You know, you don't want the body to
get identified, or you put it in there and hope
the gators will get it. That's not a myth. I mean,
there's been plenty of bones found in the Everglades even today.
I'm sure there's bones still out there. I'd say that's
part of the deal. Cost of doing business in the
(35:31):
drug trade and crossing somebody.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Phil Miami and the situation you were walking into sounded
outright dangerous. Didn't you realize any of this?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Well, sure I did.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
When I was at the News, I had written a
front page story about how Miami had become the murder
capital of the United States. I just looked at the
FBI crime statistics and did the necessary arithmetic, and it
had the highest per capita rate of murders in the
United States clips Houston, New York City was murder City USA.
(36:05):
Kind of interesting that after it appeared on the front page.
I mean it was a banner headline across the front page.
The delegation from the Chamber of Commerce came in and
there were hush meetings with the editors back behind those
little glass cubicles, and they were upset that newspaper would
be pointing this out.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
When Bob Adams made Phil Stanford and offered a work
at Intercept Agency, basically replacing Clay Williams, Phil didn't suspect
Intercept and its activities may actually have been responsible for
Clay Williams being murdered and left to the alligators in
the Everglades.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
At this point, I don't know exactly what it was
that got him killed.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
So after his gruesome death, being warned by police detectives
that you're getting involved with dangerous people, taking the job
of a man who was just murdered dumped in the
Everglades and half eaten by alligators.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah, I suppose you could look at it that way.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
And you realize that the murder of Clay Williams has
never been solved.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, apparently that's the case.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So after you gave me his name, I put in
a formal request for information on the case months ago
in January with the Miami Dade Sheriff's Office, and to
date they can't seem to find the file. I mean,
they're still looking for it, but they believe it may
have been misfiled or even lost.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Now that's ridiculous. A cold case murder, and they think
maybe they lost the file.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
But you must have realized even at the time that
something wasn't right.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
I wasn't thinking about that.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
I was at a point in my life where I
was just sort of throwing my fate to the wind.
It's one of those times when all your plans are
coming to nothing, when nothing's working.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Maybe the best player of all is no plan at all.
And I ended up working for Intercend What could go.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Wrong more, it turns out than Phil could have ever imagined.
Because Intercept, that private investigation firm. Phil now worked for
wasn't exactly what it seemed, But of course.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
I had no way of knowing the detective Agency would
turn out to be a front for a major drug
operation that was about to be indicted in federal court.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
And when the indictment came down, the guy they were
working for, this dashing drug pilot by the name of
Lamar Chester, would claim he did it all.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
For this CIA. Did he have proof, he said, if they.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Put him on trial, he was going to spill the
beams on the CIA and it would shake the foundations
of the government to its core.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Did he give you any idea of what kind of
secrets he had?
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Well, that's where things start to get interesting and maybe
a little bit dangerous too.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
So Clay wasn't the only person who oh no on
the next murder in Miami. Months of researching the mysterious
death of Clay Williams raises more questions than answers.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
It was a strange funeral anyway.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Standing in the back end of the trailer were about
four or five very big guys, obviously detectives. They were
there to send a message.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Stanford was all too willing to dive into the new
role of private investigator.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I'm just there to handle the stuff that comes in
from the Yellow Pages.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So the rest of the.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Guys contend to the real business, which was the drug business.
Of course, this is Miami, and there was no big
secret at all that their biggest client at the time
was this dashing dope pilot by the name of Lamar Chester.
Speaker 8 (39:52):
He introduced me to Bob Adams and another fellow there,
and I had understood from that these were former intelligence
people from the federal government, whether it's CIA, Army intelligence,
they were all associated. I think that's how Clay got
to know these people.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Murder Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are
Lauren Brei Pacheco, Taylor Chackoine, and Phil Stamford. Written by
Bill Stamford and Lauren bred Pacheco, Audio editing and sound
design by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tyer, and Taylor Chackoine, featuring
music by Evan Tyre, Phil Mayer, John Murchison and Taylor Chackoine.
(40:37):
Archival elements provided by Lennon Lewis Wolfson, the Second Florida
Moving Image Archives and phil Archives Incorporated. For more podcasts
from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or
wherever you get the stories that matter to you.
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Let me
get my head around this. You drop out of journalism
in Washington, DC, moved to Miami and end up working
for a detective agency that's a front for a major
drug operation with CIA connections.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, how stupid? Can you be? Right?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Phil? I've known you for a long time and your
many things, but you're not stupid. You're going to have
to tell me how you got caught up in all
of this.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Yeah, it's something I've been trying to figure out myself
for years now.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
And the guy you replaced was murdered.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
It started when I took place of the detective the
guy had been murdered, but that was just for starters.
It got crazier as time went on. And if I
do say so, it's a pretty good story.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm Lauren breg Pacheco and this is Murder in Miami.
(01:16):
Journalist Phil Stanford and I first cross paths during my
first podcast, Happy Face, about Keith Hunter Jesperson, the serial
killer and rapist in the nineteen nineties. Stanford was the
newspaper reporter at the Oregonian who had received an anonymous
letter from Jessperson basically bragging about his kills creepily signed
(01:36):
with a smiley face. As a result, Stanford coined the
happy face killer moniker and it stuck.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah, I certainly don't take credit for the happy face nickname.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
That was him.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
That was Keith Jefferson. He drew all those little happy faces.
That's who he wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Stanford ended up connecting with the hulking, nearly six foot
eight killer in person for a pretty interesting reason.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
He was arrested.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
He wanted credit for a murder that two people were
already serving time for, and I had written about those
two people trying to point out that the case against
them was completely full of it. Jesperson was coming at
it from a slightly different angle. He wanted credit.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Stanford's subsequent reporting helped prove Jessperson had indeed killed twenty
three year old Tanya Bennett and contributed to getting the
two people already serving time for her murder out of prison.
But by the time I'd tracked Stamford down, he was
pretty sick of talking about Keith Hunter. Jesperson.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Well, he was certainly no Hannibal Lecter. He's just a
big dummy driven by compulsions he didn't understand himself.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
When we connected. Stamford, who was at one point the
most successful columnist in Oregon, was so tired of talking
to people in general. He'd pretty much dropped off the grid,
living as far west as he could without falling into
the ocean.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Yeah, it was one of the more remote places in
the United States. I think Gold Beach, Oregon, which is
down at the southern tip of Oregon on the coast
just above the California line.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
After some politely persistent stalking, Stanford begrudgingly agreed to be interviewed.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I'm glad you finally found me. Yes.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Well, to get to you, I had to go through
your publishers, who were quite pragmatic in letting me know
that they could reach out to you. But the likelihood
was that you would want nothing to do with me.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
It's oh.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
The Bill Stamford, I'd grow to know was extremely private
and more than a bit guarded and senecal, understandable given
the story that motivated his departure from his career as
a reporter. Due to the politics that surrounded the nineteen
eighty nine murder of Michael Frankie.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Ahead of the Oregon's Correction department had discovered a rat's
nest of corruption in his department and was going to
expose it clean house, and he was murdered. He was
assassinated out in front of the building where he worked
in Salem, Oregon, stabbed to death. That was the night
(04:20):
before he was supposed to address a Senate committee on
the subject.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Using his newspaper column as a platform, Stanford started relentlessly
questioning Frankie's highly suspicious murder and the guilt of the
low level drug dealer it was penned on, all while
calling out the corruption that surrounded the case.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
And it was denied, absolutely denied, that his murder could
have had anything to do with corruption, because of course
there was no corruption in Oregon, and I was writing
a column for The Oregonian at the time. Smelled a rat,
and I kept raising questions.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Doing so would ultimately cost Stanford his job take its toll.
When we first met in person, here's how I described Phil.
Phil's a fiercely loyal guy with a choppy head of
silver hair that matches the stubble of his beard, and
soft brown eyes that seem to have seen a bit
too much of the corruption. He writes about thirty years
(05:19):
after Michael Frankie's death, the Murder in Oregon podcast would
again raise questions about Oregon's Department of Corrections and Corruption.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
A new hit podcast called Murder in Oregon is uncovering
new information about the stabbing death of forty two year
old Michael Frankie.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
In the process, Phil and I would become pretty good friends,
speaking regularly and crossing paths in person whenever possible. That's
how I became familiar with his time spent working as
a private investigator in Miami.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
It's a story that just gets crazier and crazier as
we go along.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And it's one filled with drugs, deception, conspiracies, and more
than one daly questionable killing. Set in the time and
place that was equally extreme Miami in the early nineteen eighties.
Pastels and palms, dancers, and a hint of danger. Together
they can pride the image of Miami, a city some
(06:15):
have described as America's Casablanca. By the nineteen seventies, parts
of Miami, especially Miami Beach, had fallen from the glory
of its nineteen thirties Art Deco heyday. The glamour that
carried it through the nineteen fifties and sixties as a
trendy tropical hotspot for the jet set had dissipated and
(06:35):
Miami settled into more of a mundane destination for retired
snowbirds fleeing snowy northern winters. But as the eighties approached,
the city was about to be revitalized by a different
sort of white powder.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Cocaine comes from the leaves of the coquetree, found chiefly
in Peru and Bolivia, then processed in Colombia.
Speaker 6 (06:56):
About a third of the world's production finds its way
to the United Slime States.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And its preferred point of entry, Florida. As nineteen eighty approached,
Miami was on its way to becoming the skyline. Built
by cocaine and overrun by drug cartels, crowned the murder
capital of America, setting the stage for the salacious scene
that would be dramatized and immortalized when the hit television
(07:24):
show Miami Vice first aired in nineteen eighty five. Will
dive more deeply into all of that a bit later,
But the Miami Stanford ended up moving into was definitely dangerous.
Maybe that's part of what Pollsville to Miami.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Okay, it's nineteen eighty. I'm working as a columnist for
political magazine in Washington, d C. Except I don't like
politics or government or military affairs. Written about that too,
and I want to write about crime.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Okay, So how did you end up chucking it off
and heading to Miami.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Well, like I said, I was sick of writing about
politics and government.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Why wouldn't you just stay in Washington then and write
about what you wanted to Why just walk away from
everything that you built in terms of your career.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Well, I suppose that's entirely too sensible.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
But in fact I had tried to get out of
the political rut I was in. I'd actually gone down
to Miami for another smaller magazine called Quest and covered
a big.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Drug trial, the Black Tuna.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, the Black Tunic case.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Drug smuggling was also the topic at federal court today
with the beginning of testimony in the government's Black Tuna case.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
The Black Tuna gang ran Miami's drug trade in the
nineteen seventies. The name was coined by the media based
on the solid gold medallion with a black Tuna emblem
worn by members to identify themselves at the time, the
Black Tuna Gang was alleged by the DA to be
one of the most sophisticated drug smuggling organizations in existence.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
Federal Judge James King listened as one time smuggle turned
government informant Luke McLeod told of the eight tons of
marijuana which he claims to have delivered to the key defendants,
Robert Meinster and Robert Plattshorn in nineteen seventy four nineteen
seventy five, the.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Gang was accused of importing around five hundred tons of
marijuana and to the United States over the course of
sixteen months, operating at one point from a suite in
the Fontaine Blue Hotel in Miami Beach. But we'll come
back to all of that later. Back to Phil in
his time covering the trial.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
I remember sitting there in this big courtroom with stone floors,
I think they call it Chattahoochee or something like that.
And the courtroom was never packed, you know, it was
always about a third full. Sometimes there were more defendants
up there behind the railing than spectators and reporters from
the local papers in Miami, and few others than me.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Was a big deal of a trial at the time.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
The government was making a big thing of it.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
Now, I was always disposed to excuse marijuana smugglers anyway,
you know. I thought it was ridiculous that there was
a law against this, regardless of how much they were
supposed to have smuggled in. And it turns out the
government greatly exaggerated the amount they did smuggle. But they
charged Platschorn under a Kingpin statute that was meant for
(10:20):
much heavier drug offenses. And what I really remembered about
that is that he got sixty years for smuggling marijuana
in the United States.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Remember the length of that sentence. Sixty years will come
back to it. Because it wasn't entirely motivated by drugs.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
I certainly didn't understand things as well as I might
have when they were happening. I think I probably got
taken in an awful lot by the government. I was
fascinated by the agents too. They were living in a
very exciting life and got to know a couple of them.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
It was way better than Washington, d C. That's for sure.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
While Stanford definitely found the trials top bit more compelling
than Washington based politics, he was equally attracted to its setting.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I was fascinated by Miami. I was fascinated by the
whole vibe.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Back then.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
It was wild, and the Miami assignment was a welcomed
break from his usual beat.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
But other than that, I wasn't having any luck getting
any assignments. I remember sitting in the office at Harper's
Magazine in New York talking to the editor. I totally
wanted to do stuff on crime, and he wanted me
to do some government procedural peace and I said, oh
my god. And it was about that time I decided
(11:36):
to chuck it all and go to Miami.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Well, in a way that kind of makes sense, because Miami,
particularly at that time, was swimming in crime, just in
terms of the drug trade and everything, and it must have,
on top of being romantic, it must have felt like
an outlaw town.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
I mean there was a vibe there, really was, and
people were different down there. I mean, DC is really
a very boring place.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
And Stamford was basically bored of his life and the
way he was making a living.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
I was stuck professionally. That's what I meant by wanting
to write about crime. But in a way that's sort
of a mental dodge. I suppose the way we give
ourselves more palatable excuses for what's really going on underneath.
And it was personal as well.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
How old were you at the time.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I was thirty eight, And of course there was the
divorce certainly had something to do with it.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I was missing my boys.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Phil had two sons with his first wife. After the divorce,
she relocated with him to Oregon, leaving Stamford feeling unsettled
and a bit adrift.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And I was having these dreams every two weeks regularly.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
I was in a.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Desert somewhere there's nighttime, just moonlight or starlight, looking out
across the desert at a walled city after midnight, you know,
still a few lights shining through windows, maybe a caravan
leaving what I remember hearing the camel bills in the dream,
(13:11):
and concealing myself behind some sort of sand dune. This
walled city is maybe a quarter mile a half mile away,
and knowing that I have to get into the city
without being noticed and come back with something I don't
know what it is. And so I'm there waiting, waiting
to go, but not really daring to go. And it
(13:36):
starts to get lighter, and lighter. Here a rooster crow,
and that's it. I have this dream once a week
or so, and even I can see is some connection
with Miami. I'd already been down to Miami for the
Black Tuna trial.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So the dream is about an opportunity that you're going
to miss if you don't make a.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Move, or something is telling me that there's something I
have to find out.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, you left Washington in a bit of a rush.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Nine or two before I left, there was a party
at the place where I was living. There wasn't a
going away party, it was just a party telling everyone
talking about going to Miami. And someone says, do you
have a job yet? I know this person is much
more practical than I am. I guess said, well, I
know the publisher of a newspaper down there. I'll give
(14:43):
him a call and he'll be expecting to hear from you.
Maybe you can work out something there. So I quit
my job on very short notice. I'm ashamed to say,
load everything into my old beat up Capri and head
to Miami. Attribute its exit and driving down that It
was a huge change from Washington, d C. It was
(15:03):
during the winter months and DC everything is drab, and
you've got the dirty ice and overcast sky and the
farther south. I'd get the writer. I'd finally in Miami,
the sun just burst upon you and primary colors.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Miami just it was.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Another world, bright blue, dark green vegetation, the sea, blue
green sea, lit with the sun, and it was a
glorious place, it seemed to me.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
I parked in front.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Of the Miami News building, which was on the right,
on the edge of the Bay. I persuade the managing
editor of the Miami News, a very nice lady named
Gloria Anderson, to give me a job writing what I
referred to as detective stories.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
So you start doing investigating crime stories.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yeah, And I liked what I was doing, long stories
divided by chapters, and I think readers liked them too.
Miami was full of great stories back then. And I
did several unsolved murderers, Jewelry heis pirates off the shore
of Andros Island.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
And then you decided to take on one of Miami's
biggest unsolved mysteries.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
I started working on a story about a pretty young
seventeen year old girl, Amy Billig, who about what five
or six years before, had been walking down the street
near her home in Coconut Grove on the way to
the store or something like that, and she just disappeared,
as far as anyone who vanished into thin air. No
(16:48):
one saw her again, ever, and the mother, to her credit,
never let it go. She kept demanding answers. And so
I got in touch with the mother and she had
a new lead. Someone had called her three o'clock in
the morning, called or collect and told her daughter was alive.
And well, so you know, this was well before the
(17:11):
cell phones.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Or call her id. She had to go down to
the phone company to.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Get the address of the of the person who called,
which she had because she'd had accepted the call. Someone
had called her turns out from a little town in Oklahoma, Ceman, Oklahoma.
So I was going to go out there, Toman, Oklahoma
and solve this case and probably make a name for myself.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
That's what I was thinking at the time.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
And how would you do.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Well at that point, the story was taking too long anyway.
After several weeks, Gloria calls me into her office and says,
the publisher is getting a little bit restive about our
little experiment with detective stories. This one is taking too long.
He doesn't think it's good use of the time. And
if I don't come up with something pretty quick on
the Amy Billy case, we would have to reassess our arrangement.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
And I say, Gloria, but I have a new lead.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
And I tell her about that phone call and how
I want to go out to Seaman, Oklahoma, and all
I need is an airline ticket and money for a
rental car. Come on if it works out as Pulletzer
prize material. And she says, okay, but I'm telling you.
So I get my ticket and I get all packed
and ready to go, and the night before I'm with
(18:27):
my girlfriend Ruth in the Prying Pub.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
That's where we hung out.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Who was Ruth? Did you meet her in Miami?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (18:33):
She was Gloria's secretary and we sort of took up
together after I started working at the News. It's a
very talkative, cute redhead who'd spend some time hanging around
with country bands in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
So she had no problem attracting mail attention, none at all.
And Stanford's not exaggerating. I tracked down a candid photo
of the couple at the time, and it actually looks
like a paparazzi shot. It's in black and white, and
the two appear to be arriving at some sort of event.
Phil's glancing back towards Ruth. He's wearing a blazer and
a collared shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal a disco
(19:10):
era amount of tanned chest, and Ruth is smiling broadly
at the camera from underneath thick bangs, her face framed
in a wavy mane that just falls past her shoulders.
Her vibe is as cool and confident as the silky
top that accentuates her slim, yet pronounced curves. They made
a stunning couple. Here's Ruth, that former girlfriend recollecting Phil Well.
Speaker 7 (19:35):
I met him in the newsroom Miami News. My first
impression was he was basically kind of an explosing personality.
Most of our reporters and all were kind of laid
back and all that, but Phil was always on charge,
very verbal and outspoken. Dolly's traveling at one hundred miles
(19:58):
an hour, there was no down mellow time would fail that.
He was so smart and interesting. Our conversations were just
so different than you have with most guys. You know,
and Bill was very good looking. Oh yeah, and he
(20:19):
had a great body.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Okay, back to Phil and Ruth. In that bar in Parime, we.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Were sitting in the bar there, the big horseshoe shaped bar,
and she's telling the bartender about how I'm going out
to Oklahoma and I was going to solve the Amy
Billy kicks. And one of the things she's saying to
the bartender is that the theory at that time was
that Amy Billy had been snatched off the street by
(20:47):
some bikers who were coming through tent and down at
the end of the bar a few places away, there's
this guy, long hair, sort of good looking guy who says, say,
I'm going to be talking to some bikers here over
the weekend.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Maybe I can help.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
And it turns out he's a private investigator, hands me
his card, says Clay Williams Intercept Detective Agency.
Speaker 7 (21:15):
I remember a guy doing that, but he didn't register
with me that much, you know, because people, when they
knew you were reporters, are always giving you their cards.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
While the offering of the card wasn't noteworthy, Ruth recalls
the guy offering it was.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
I remember he was kind of unusual for that bar.
You know what I'm saying. The way he looked and
dressed and everything.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Do you remember him?
Speaker 8 (21:41):
What way?
Speaker 7 (21:41):
Well, he was just a little more high rent than
most of the customers there, well dressed and all that which.
The Parime Pub was the kind of bar you go
in and your pajamas if you wanted to. There's nothing
about it sophisticated or chic.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
And it was very small.
Speaker 7 (22:03):
It wasn't a big bar at all.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
That card and the man it belonged to, Clay Williams,
would end up having an enormous impact on Stanford.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
And this story, okay, Well, to make a short story short,
I'd fly out to Seam in Oklahoma, get a rental car,
go to this little town, just two thousand population, find
the address, knock on the door, and the woman there,
(22:33):
of course doesn't look anything like Amy Belling. Her husband's there.
And the story is they have parties all the time,
people coming in and out of the house, and on
this particular night when a mother got the call, they
were having one of those big parties. They have no
idea who is there. In other words, it was a
complete flop. I go back to the airport, get on
the plane, go back to Miami, and I know I'm
(22:56):
in trouble.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Stanford figured he was likely to lose his job at
the paper. Then he remembered that stranger from the bar,
Clay Williams, the private investigator who'd offered to ask the
bikers about Amy Billig.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
So I get out the card for Clay Williams, which
I thought I'd never have to use because I was
so sure that this was going to be it, and
I called the number on it. Intercept secretary answers. I
asked for Clay Williams and she says, I'm sorry, we
don't have a Clay Williams here.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And I said what she said? No.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
At this point, Stanford's not only desperate, he's confused and annoyed.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
So I jump in my car drive out there.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
They're actually in Perne too. They have nice offices in
the Bank of Parne, third floor. And barge into the
office and I'm waiving this card and the secretary and
I said, look, I have his card.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
It says he works here.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
And this big burly guy comes out of the office,
introduces himself Bob Adams. He's an inventor scept going in
and let's talk and so we go into his office.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
The first thing we noticed there's.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
This big poster of Casablanca behind his desk. Turns out
he's something of a romantic. So we talk and he says,
sorry about the confusion, but we didn't know who you
were when you called. You know, we get all sorts
of calls from all sorts of people, but yeah, Clay
Williams did some work for us, and we haven't been
able to get in touch with him for two or
(24:29):
three days. I guess it was. And we're worried about
him too. And I say, I'm worried about him because
I think I may be responsible.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Worried Williams wound up in trouble after asking bikers about
Amy Billig. Stanford fears it's his fault. The guy's gone missing.
When he conveyed that to Bob Adams, Adams offered to
assist Stanford in his search for Clay Williams.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
The next few days, they sort of squire me around
as a dog and pony show. We're looking for Clay Williams,
and of course we don't find him.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Did he ever turn up?
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
About two weeks later, got a call from Bob. He
said they found Clay.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
He's dead. They found his body in the Everglades.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Suddenly Stamford is really regretting that exchange in the bar.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Now I am quite convinced I'm responsible for Clay Williams's death.
I told Bob too that I was worried that I'd
caused Clay's death because he was doing research for me.
And he says, well, look, you're still working for the newspaper,
right And I said yeah, And he said, well, why
don't you go down to the Sheriff's office talk to
(25:42):
the detectives working on this case and see what they know.
And so I go down Miami Dade Sheriff's Office tell
the person at the entrance that I'd like to talk
to the detectives from the Miami News and I might
have some information that's useful on Clay Williams. One of
the detectives comes out, tall, lanky guy, sort of detective
(26:04):
issue suit, and leads me back to the room where
his partner is and I sit in front of their
desk and I tell them about the Amy Billy case.
I think I might be responsible for this death, and
they say right away, no, this has nothing to do
with the missing girl. They think it's drugs, and I
said no, no, no, no. So we go back and forth,
(26:26):
and at a certain point they start pulling out pictures
of Clay Williams's body, polaroids taken out in the Everglades,
and he's just this is after two weeks now. He's
a skeleton with long hair down to his shoulders. Most
of the flesh has gone from his face, and the
alligators have taken off an arm and part of a leg.
(26:49):
And they show me more photos of the body and
they say, you better watch what you're getting into. I
said no, no, I'm fine, and so they just sort
of throw up their hands escort me to the.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Door, but not without offering Phil a final warning.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
They said, look, you're involved with some dangerous people here.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And I report back to Bob. I call and tell
them what I found out.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
They said, good work, good work, And so that was
sort of my first job for.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Intercept as a private detective.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
As a newspaper reporter slash private detective.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Yes, as gruesome as Clay Williams's death may sound, apparently
it didn't even make news. I couldn't find any information
(27:48):
about it online or in any of the newspaper archives,
but that could be because it was just one of
an avalanche of murders in that year. In nineteen eighty alone,
Miami had a record five hundred and seventy three murders.
The Miami Dade Morgue was so overwhelmed with corpses that
the Medical Examiner's office had to lease a refrigerated truck
(28:11):
to keep the cascades of bodies on ice, and Miami
earned the dubious distinction of being the nation's murder capital,
largely as a result of shootouts among cocaine cowboys and
violent crimes committed by Mariolito's crime games of mostly male
Cubans who'd poured into Miami at the time straight from
the prisons in Cuba. It was a recipe for violence
(28:34):
and volatility. Here's how Ruth Phil's then girlfriend, who also
worked at the Miami News at the time, remembers it.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
During those years in Miami, there were so many people
that turned up dead because anybody crossed the cartails and
any white. They just killed everybody that was home. One
of the people that got arrested even said that we
just killed everybody that was at home, And there were
so many murders that were just inexplicable. Back then, it
(29:07):
was a crazy time in.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Miami and a time when drug money fueled the mayhem, as.
Speaker 7 (29:12):
We say in the South, money tops and bullshit walks,
because I had millions of millions of dollars that I
were making from.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
That money made on supply and demand during the eighties.
Speaker 5 (29:26):
The number of Americans abusing cocaine has skyrocketed. In the
early part of the decade, this white powder was considered
a white collar drug. Coke was it. Coke was chic,
and at one hundred dollars a gram, it had the
high price tag to match cocaine his big business. Americans
(29:50):
are spending over thirty billion dollars a year on it.
Both suppliers and users are a formidable adversary in the
war on drugs.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
And in nineteen eighty Miami was the undisputed ground zero
in that battle.
Speaker 9 (30:06):
I tell people that that was our capolan era because
it was just crazy with all the achilles.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
That's Israel reeis a former Circuit court judge of the
eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Today, he runs his own
law firm. After nearly thirty years of public service as
a judge and assistant State's Attorney. I sought him out
because from nineteen eighty until nineteen ninety five he was
also a police officer detective with the Miami Dade Police Department,
(30:36):
where at various times he worked in the Homicide Bureau,
Media Relations Section, and Special Investigations divisions Criminal Conspiracy and
Racketeering squads. So he was no stranger to drug related violence.
Speaker 9 (30:50):
My first exposure to that was when I was still
a patrol officer in nineteen eighty or eighty one, when
I was dispatched to a shooting in the New part
of Miami Les, Florida. I mean Lakes is now an
incorporated town, but back then it was just an unincorporated
area of Day County.
Speaker 10 (31:05):
As I arrived on the scene, I was the first
officer on the scene.
Speaker 9 (31:08):
That was the victim was lying in his driveway and
he had been peppered with either a Mac ten or
a Mac eleven, which is a small panheld submachine gun
that was used a lot by the Colombian pitman.
Speaker 6 (31:21):
I remember he was lying in his driveway there and
the garage store was behind him in the five story
was just littered with holes because they just kept shooting
at this guy with this automatic submachine gun.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
In that era, most if not all, of Miami's violent
crimes were meant to serve as messages or warnings to
those who'd crossed the drug cartels or even considered it.
Speaker 10 (31:44):
We would just hear about these different cases people just
being killed. I think there was like eight or nine
people killed inside a housing Kendall, which was, you know,
the South Date area, a nice middle class area. Eight
or nine people killed there. There were a lot of
kidnappings for ransom.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
I mean, it was just.
Speaker 7 (32:00):
Day in and day out.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Former detective Jeff Lewis, who is now a private investigator,
started out as a uniformed officer in the Liberty City
area of Miami in nineteen eighty before going on to
become an undercover detective, robber detective, and homicide detective in
Miami Dade. He also gave me his take on the times.
Speaker 11 (32:21):
I would categorize it as the wild will left. Every
day somebody was getting shot, murdered, robbed, victimized. The crime
was definitely out of control in that particular time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Buyed by the influx of drug related conflicts, the crime
wave hit with a gruesome severity not before seen in
the US, and.
Speaker 11 (32:42):
Then started in Miami because that's what the money was
and that's what the people that wanted to make money came.
The term home invasion robbery was coined in Miami. You
didn't have all invasion robberies in la or Chicago or
New York like we did in Miami. That's where it started,
because that's where a drug trade really started and blew up.
One of our sergeants coined the term home nation robbery.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Wow. And so that was a direct result of the
influence of the violence that the cartels brought with the business.
Speaker 11 (33:12):
Absolutely. I mean, you know, between the Columbians and Mary
Elitos and a lot of those Cubans that came over.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Everybody saw the movie Star Base.
Speaker 11 (33:19):
I mean, that's what would happened if you were a
criminal and you came to Miami from Maryelle. If you
didn't become a drug dealer, you became a drug robin,
and then you would recruit those to work for you,
and usually those were the people you were in prison
with inquboat. So it was a big vicious cycle and it.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Was a business.
Speaker 10 (33:35):
You had two businesses with that.
Speaker 11 (33:37):
You had the drug dealers and then you had the
people that were robbing a drug dealer. So our hands
were full because we had to deal with both both groups,
and they were vicious and they were nasty. I mean,
these guys were ruthless. Victims were hurt so bad they
had to call the police or an ambulance or go
to the hospital, and otherwise they probably wouldn't even call
the police. We would have on cooperative viness and that
(33:57):
was a problem as a robbin detective was very prevalent.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
And so it was also pretty prevalent that many of
these crimes went unsolved, especially ones involving discarded bodies like
the body of Clay Williams.
Speaker 11 (34:13):
During that specific time, and they had what they would
call body dumps out in the redlands or out in
the swamp areas or anywhere outside of the cities. Sometimes
they would get the individual identified, sometimes they wouldn't. But
a lot of those cases turn out to be drug related,
and they didn't get the assistance from the Vickers family
because they were either too afraid or they were also
involved in the drug trade. So a lot of those
(34:35):
cases went unsolved. But it was basically drug dealers killing
other drug dealers.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
And if the rise in drug dealing was linked to
the rise in body counts. So was the violence those
bodies endured before being found.
Speaker 11 (34:48):
And you just don't kill a lot of times. Either
that person stole from you, lie to you, it's something
to your family in regards to drugs, or they knew
where big stash was or whatever. So they're going to
torture you. They're going to kill you. Now they've got
to get rid of the body out there in the Everglades.
You go out there where nobody goes, and middle of
(35:11):
the night, dump the body and leave no id. Sometimes
you might pull the teeth, cut the fingers off, maybe
the head. You know, you don't want the body to
get identified, or you put it in there and hope
the gators will get it. That's not a myth. I mean,
there's been plenty of bones found in the Everglades even today.
I'm sure there's bones still out there. I'd say that's
part of the deal. Cost of doing business in the
(35:31):
drug trade and crossing somebody.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Phil Miami and the situation you were walking into sounded
outright dangerous. Didn't you realize any of this?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Well, sure I did.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
When I was at the News, I had written a
front page story about how Miami had become the murder
capital of the United States. I just looked at the
FBI crime statistics and did the necessary arithmetic, and it
had the highest per capita rate of murders in the
United States clips Houston, New York City was murder City USA.
(36:05):
Kind of interesting that after it appeared on the front page.
I mean it was a banner headline across the front page.
The delegation from the Chamber of Commerce came in and
there were hush meetings with the editors back behind those
little glass cubicles, and they were upset that newspaper would
be pointing this out.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
When Bob Adams made Phil Stanford and offered a work
at Intercept Agency, basically replacing Clay Williams, Phil didn't suspect
Intercept and its activities may actually have been responsible for
Clay Williams being murdered and left to the alligators in
the Everglades.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
At this point, I don't know exactly what it was
that got him killed.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
So after his gruesome death, being warned by police detectives
that you're getting involved with dangerous people, taking the job
of a man who was just murdered dumped in the
Everglades and half eaten by alligators.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah, I suppose you could look at it that way.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
And you realize that the murder of Clay Williams has
never been solved.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, apparently that's the case.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So after you gave me his name, I put in
a formal request for information on the case months ago
in January with the Miami Dade Sheriff's Office, and to
date they can't seem to find the file. I mean,
they're still looking for it, but they believe it may
have been misfiled or even lost.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Now that's ridiculous. A cold case murder, and they think
maybe they lost the file.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
But you must have realized even at the time that
something wasn't right.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
I wasn't thinking about that.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
I was at a point in my life where I
was just sort of throwing my fate to the wind.
It's one of those times when all your plans are
coming to nothing, when nothing's working.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Maybe the best player of all is no plan at all.
And I ended up working for Intercend What could go.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Wrong more, it turns out than Phil could have ever imagined.
Because Intercept, that private investigation firm. Phil now worked for
wasn't exactly what it seemed, But of course.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
I had no way of knowing the detective Agency would
turn out to be a front for a major drug
operation that was about to be indicted in federal court.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
And when the indictment came down, the guy they were
working for, this dashing drug pilot by the name of
Lamar Chester, would claim he did it all.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
For this CIA. Did he have proof, he said, if they.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Put him on trial, he was going to spill the
beams on the CIA and it would shake the foundations
of the government to its core.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Did he give you any idea of what kind of
secrets he had?
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Well, that's where things start to get interesting and maybe
a little bit dangerous too.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
So Clay wasn't the only person who oh no on
the next murder in Miami. Months of researching the mysterious
death of Clay Williams raises more questions than answers.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
It was a strange funeral anyway.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Standing in the back end of the trailer were about
four or five very big guys, obviously detectives. They were
there to send a message.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Stanford was all too willing to dive into the new
role of private investigator.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I'm just there to handle the stuff that comes in
from the Yellow Pages.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So the rest of the.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Guys contend to the real business, which was the drug business.
Of course, this is Miami, and there was no big
secret at all that their biggest client at the time
was this dashing dope pilot by the name of Lamar Chester.
Speaker 8 (39:52):
He introduced me to Bob Adams and another fellow there,
and I had understood from that these were former intelligence
people from the federal government, whether it's CIA, Army intelligence,
they were all associated. I think that's how Clay got
to know these people.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Murder Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are
Lauren Brei Pacheco, Taylor Chackoine, and Phil Stamford. Written by
Bill Stamford and Lauren bred Pacheco, Audio editing and sound
design by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tyer, and Taylor Chackoine, featuring
music by Evan Tyre, Phil Mayer, John Murchison and Taylor Chackoine.
(40:37):
Archival elements provided by Lennon Lewis Wolfson, the Second Florida
Moving Image Archives and phil Archives Incorporated. For more podcasts
from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or
wherever you get the stories that matter to you.
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