March 16, 2023 • 51 mins
Ron Elliott spent the night before the crash at Lamar Chester’s farm in Cleveland, Georgia. He shared his memories and thoughts about the events leading up to Chester’s death with Phil.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio, previously on
Murder in Miami. Having been told by Chester that her
life was in danger, not knowing who was behind that threat,
Bickerton's fears are left to fester.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I have a contract all my life, so I did
reach out to the military guys and we kind of
figured out a game plan. I would marry one because
that would then they could legitimately bring me over to
the camp so that Lamar couldn't get near me.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
After the rushed and staged wedding, Bickerton would land in Houston,
the location of the Lone Star investigation.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The FEDS went to her soldier friends in Georgia said
where is she and they said she's in Houston, and
then they tracked her down.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
She said her knowledge of what the government agents and
prosecutors were willing to do made her fear them.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
If Chester started to sound baranoid about perceived threats to
his life, It's hard to know where they'd be coming from.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I'm back in DC for about a year, and I
get a call from Bob Adams down in Miami and
he says Lamar just died.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
On June twentieth of nineteen eighty five, drug smuggler Lamar
Chester was killed in a plane crash on his property
in rural northern Georgia. C. B. Hackworth, who was a
young newspaper reporter for the Gainesville Times at the time,
recalls how and when he heard the news.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
I was at the airport in Atlanta, about to get
on a plane to go to an IRI.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Conference For those not familiar, IRI stands for investigative Reporters
and editors, where.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
I was going to see other reporters covering different aspects
of the smuggling ring in which Lamar Chester had been implicated.
And my name was announced on the loud speakers, which
was somewhat unusual in those days. So I went to
(02:08):
the gate and took a phone call. It was from
my city editor, and he said that Lamar Chester had
been killed on a plane crash and I should come
back and write my story. Of course, it came as
a surprise, but I pretty quickly decided that the story
(02:30):
I could write just as well at the IRI conference,
I could write on the plane. So I said, no,
what was.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
The wash of emotions that went over you?
Speaker 4 (02:43):
There were two things, one is and meaning no disrespect
whatsoever to anyone. But a weight was lifted off of
my chest that I didn't even realize was on it.
Because a year and a half of dealing with Lamar
and keeping him at arm's length, I knew that there
(03:07):
were so many dangerous aspects and so much that I
didn't know. I knew there was more I didn't know
than what I did know. What I did know was
dangerous enough that I didn't have to worry anymore about
who was out there.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
But Chester's death and the way he died, remains less resolved.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
That really wasn't the ending that anybody had, anybody had expected.
He always always said that he would not be allowed
to testify, that something would intervene. I always took that
to mean one of two things. Either he would be killed,
(03:54):
and he implied that he was more scared of the
government than he was a drug smugglers. In fact, I
think he did more than imply it. I think that's
the flat out what he said. But the other was
that he thought that there would be some kind of
deal cut at the last minute to prevent him from testifying,
(04:18):
and Lamar Chester died in a very strange plane crash.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
I'm Lauren bred Pacheco and this is murder in Miami.
Speaker 5 (04:43):
Indicted drug smuggler Tilt and Lamar Chester crashed near his
five hundred acre Georgia farm Thursday, killing him and seriously injured.
Speaker 6 (04:50):
He charged with drug smuggling, was killed and his five
year old daughter seriously injured in a plane crash.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Crash has not been determined, but an investigator with the
Georgia Bureau of Investigegation said it was being handled as
a routine accident. I requested a copy of the report
from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. The summary reads quote
On Thursday, June twentieth, nineteen eighty five, Tilton Lamar Chester Junior,
along with his daughter, Artist Jewel Chester, five years of age,
(05:20):
apparently crashed a Piper Cub aircraft near the Chester residence.
Chester was dead at the scene. Chester was a primary
target in Operation Loan Star US Customs and Irs investigation
and has been under indictment for the last two years
for drug related offenses and was rumored to be cooperating
with authorities. Chester also alleged that he worked for the CIA.
(05:44):
Investigation continues. The report concludes a complete and thorough investigation
was conducted, no evidence of foul play. There will be
no coroner's inquest held. This investigation is closed. It's interesting
to note that the report was filed the day after
(06:06):
the crash, Friday, June twenty first, nineteen eighty five. Here's
Phil Stamford.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Their report was filed the day after, which is hardly
time to have had any sort of investigation. They did
not want to investigate this, and one of the reasons,
undoubtedly was that one of their agents, Frank Baker Junior,
was on the scene almost immediately. He had to be
there when the plane went down.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The report was indeed filed by Officer Baker.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
When you look back at a nonsensical really that they
could have come to any sort of conclusions about the
cause of the crash in less than twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
And also, I mean, why wouldn't you have a coroner's inquest,
particularly given the circumstances of what he was involved in.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Important thing to remember here is that his trial was
coming up, and he'd threatened to go public with a
laundry list of CIA misdeeds that he knew about and
he said would shake the nation to its core.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Frank Baker Junior's presence immediately at the crash, and the
fact that they turned around that report so quickly that
probably gave credence to a lot of people who doubted
the original version of the crash and considered it to
have been suspicious at best, but possibly murder. Were there
(07:34):
people at the time immediately who considered the crash suspicious?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Certainly among those who considered it more than just suspicious
was Lamar's best friend, Ron Elliott, who was at the
ranch at the Chicken Farm in North Georgia the night
before the crash.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Years later, Phil and Ron Elliott would communicate extensively about
Elliot's close friendship with Lamar Chester and the time period
leading up to and after the crash.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
I've been trying to make sense of this for some time,
and a few years ago decided to track down Ron Elliott,
who had found finally tracked down in Shanghai. Very energetic guy,
a real hard charger, and he was in Shanghai trying
to set up a seafood importation business with the cooperation
of the Chinese government. He didn't want to just make
(08:28):
his first million, He wanted to make his first ten million.
I told him what I wanted to talk about, you know,
thinking that he might shy away from me, but it
was just the opposite. He'd been holding this in for
so long, he'd suffered for it, really, and it all
came out in a rush.
Speaker 7 (08:44):
I never met him in person.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
We exchanged many emails over a period of several months,
and he told me about the night before the crash
and his business dealings with Lamar, how they had been
involved in what later became known as the Iran contru affair.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Unfortunately, Ron Elliott passed recently, but Phil has saved Elliott's
version of events, as depicted through their correspondence, which he shares.
Speaker 8 (09:12):
Now.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Okay, it's the night before the crash and I was
staying at Lamar's house outside Cleveland, big magnificent place built
over a large hangar that houses several airplanes.
Speaker 7 (09:26):
After dinner, I.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Played with the baby aj she's four or five at
the time, played a little fust ball with Lamar. Had
a good time, and after that I went to my room,
which opened up onto the tennis courts facing ease. It
was raining, My door to the tennis courts was opening.
I turned in about eleven PM. Was lying there, I
(09:48):
realized I could hear a motor running. But Lamar and
I had locked the gate at about ten, so.
Speaker 7 (09:56):
What was going on.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
I don't want to backlight myself, so I go down
towards the front of the house into the living room,
where there's a staircase going down to the hangar.
Speaker 7 (10:07):
The house was dark.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Across the front of the house there's about one hundred
feet of sliding glass doors opening onto a stone patio
with wide steps going down. I slide one door open.
There's no moon, but I can clearly see two cars
park next to my twin engine about one hundred and
fifty feet away. It's parked tail end to the house
on a hill.
Speaker 7 (10:30):
I did that so I.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Could leave early the next morning with only start up power.
Glide down the hill, go to the other end for
take off. I hear the door to the kitchen stairwell open.
I'm trapped standing there in my skivites. Whoever they are,
they're between me and my room and my gun. Lamar
slept with a gun, insisted I did too. He said
(10:51):
it was because the locals were bad and they'd rob you.
Sort Of instinctively, I yelled down to the hangar, freeze, motherfucker.
I'll blow your head off, Lamar answered from downstairs inside
the hangar. He'd heard something too and was already down here.
Hey boy, that's you, he said. I yelled to him,
be careful the two cars out there. The cars tore
(11:12):
off towards the gate. Lamar yelled at me to get
in the pickup. He was coming with a shotgun. The
cars easily beat us to the gate. I could see
them sliding one side to the other on the wet clay.
One car turned toward Cleveland, the other went west. The
car that turned west went off the road and down
(11:33):
into a swale. Lamar yelled at me to go for
that one. We were maybe one hundred feet behind it.
Lamar leaned out the window and fired two shots.
Speaker 7 (11:43):
Into the back window.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
I slammed onto the brakes, just stopped on the road,
got out my skivvies and told him go ahead. He's
screaming at me, calling me chicken shit. I say, you
think you can murder people just because they come on
your property, and he says, what the you think they
were there for? In our underwear. We drive into town.
(12:09):
It's deserted. As I approached the circle with the station
in the middle, there's a very loud whistle. It's the
chief of police whistling at us. He waves us to
come over. Lamar just smiles says, you gotta do what
you gotta do. It was like a fucking dream being
(12:30):
naked out there on the street. I put my arm
over the door and pull myself as close as I can.
At first, the chief says something like you boys just
out cruising. Then he could see that Lamar was in
his jockey shorts, and he looked at me as well
and just started laughing.
Speaker 7 (12:48):
Lamar knew him. Well.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Lamar just got this fake, sheepish grin and said we
sort of had to leave in a hurry.
Speaker 7 (12:56):
Lamar was a known womanizer everywhere.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Chief said, with a big smile, don't suppose you want
to give me a name? I didn't think so. Is
there maybe going to be a little bit of trouble
out of this? Lamar said, guy didn't know a thing.
Speaker 7 (13:12):
We were just too far from our clothes.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
We go back to the house and spend until daylight
going over every inch of my plane, removed every inspection plate, checked,
gas tanks, fuel lines, everything.
Speaker 7 (13:30):
Lamar was a master mechanic.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Then we went into the hangar and went over his
twin and his Cessina two oh six. The only plane
we didn't look at was the piper Cub, the one
he died in.
Speaker 7 (13:42):
I took off.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Early that morning, and when I arrived at my hotel
that night in Fort Myers, there was an urgent message
from my brother.
Speaker 7 (13:50):
I called him and he.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Said, your buddy's dead and AJ is probably not going
to make it either. It took me a year to
realize that we almost certainly had left the purp and
that goddamn hangars. Think about it, If he'd finished his job,
the cars would not have been sitting out there on
the lawn.
Speaker 7 (14:07):
They would have driven away.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
At the time. The initial explanation for the crash was
that the plane, a small Piper Cub, had run out
of fuel. Happy Miles was living in Oregon when he
got the news of Chester's death.
Speaker 9 (14:21):
It was Ron Elliott who called me.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
After you got the call and you heard that Chester
was dead, what was running through your head when you
hung up the phone.
Speaker 9 (14:34):
Well, I was really shut back by it because of
the way he died. I just couldn't fathom that he
had wrecked the airplane. He would never have run out
of fuel. He knew that airplane in and out, he
would have got in it. And that airplane, I think
(14:57):
had a float tank right in front of a with
a float on it. It showed how much fuel was
in it, so you couldn't miss the fact that it
didn't have fuel.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Happy Miles was further unsettled by Lamar Chester's funeral service.
Speaker 9 (15:14):
I went to the funeral. It was a solemn time.
It was in a mortuary. Ron Elliott was there, I
was there, artists. The baby had a broken back and
was in the hospital, and the kids were there.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
His grown kids from his first marriage.
Speaker 9 (15:36):
Yeah, they wanted to see the body before it was cremated.
And when they opened the casket, the body had already
been cremated.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
That's kind of bizarre.
Speaker 9 (15:52):
Very bizarre. The body had been cremated already. I mean,
that was totally totally, totally wrong.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Back to Phil reading ron Elliott's version of events.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Okay, after the funeral, I spent a considerable amount of
time talking to people trying to figure out what happened.
Miss Lily and her neighbor were sitting on the front
porch of an old ramshackle house across the road from
the farm, shilling Peas they saw the plane take off,
they could see that little five year old AJ was
(16:29):
on board. One of them said, there goes the little
princess taking flying lessons from her daddy. Then boom, they
looked up and the plane was falling. Lily threw down
her piece and started running towards the plane, almost ran
into an eighteen wheeler crossing the road, ran into a ditch,
hit a barbed wire fence, she couldn't see, lost her glasses,
(16:52):
wound up crawling to the airplane. She was bandaged from
her toes to way up under her dress. When I
talked to her, artist's father, who lived in a house
on the farm, was already there. She remembers him saying,
come on, man, come on, help me get the baby down.
The little baby AJ was hanging by her safety harness.
(17:13):
I thought he was talking to me, Miss Lilly said,
but he wasn't. There was another man there, Bobby, the
local Georgia Bureau of Investigations agent. But Bobby wasn't there
to help with the baby at all. He was running
towards his car with a piece of something he'd taken
from the plane.
Speaker 7 (17:29):
And then he came back and they took the baby down.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Just to clarify, So Bobby would be Frank Baker Junior,
the GBI agent who was the first on the scene,
first responder on the scene.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, for some reason, Ron called him Bobby, And maybe
that was a nickname that other people used, but it's
certainly the name Ron used for him, Bobby. His real
name was Frank Baker Junior. He was the GBI agent
in White County. His father, Frank Baker Sr. Was the sheriff,
had been for years, so the two of them had
(18:07):
the place pretty well wrapped up. I certainly don't have
any proof that there was more than just the ordinary
you wash my hands, I'll wash your hands corruption in
White County, but if there was, the CIA would have
had ample leverage on Bobby Frank Jr. To get him
(18:28):
involved in this plot to kill Lamar, which is what
I think actually happened.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Well, I do have to point out that C. B.
Hackworth does dispute that Bobby, you know, Frank Baker Junior,
would be capable of something like that, that they were friends,
and that he viewed him as a stand up guy.
Speaker 7 (18:48):
How he ended up at the Chrish.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Almost as the plane was going down Yeah, I'd like
to hear that one, and Ron is certainly entitled.
Speaker 7 (19:00):
To his opinion.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
This was Ron Elliott's remembrance.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Artist's father, mister Lawrence, was there within thirty seconds of
the crash, and Bobby was driving up just as her
father arrived. The third person was Miss Lily from across
the highway. He told me he was on the front
porch of the house Lamar built for him and his wife,
reading the paper when he heard the plane take off.
He heard the boom and looked up and it was
(19:26):
coming down. He jumped into his car raced to the site.
The other guy who helped him was already there, I
have to say. Mister Lawrence told me later he didn't
see Bobby put anything in his car. However, it was
because he'd already crawled into the plane and was trying
to get aj down.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
It was miss Lily who saw that.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Happy Miles says Ron Elliott had also spoken to him
about Baker well.
Speaker 9 (19:51):
He told me that Baker had been bragging the night
before that he was going to get Lamar in the
bar the night before, saying how he was going to
get the son of a bitch, and then the next
day Lamar was dead.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
And he was the guy who was the first on
the scene.
Speaker 8 (20:13):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
I requested a copy of the accident report from the
National Transportation Safety Board. The final report finding reads that
quote virtually no fuel was found in the tanks, lines,
and carburetor. No pre impact part failure or malfunction was found.
So the official reason for the crash was basically that
(20:47):
the Piper cub ran out of fuel, something that Happy Miles,
also a seasoned pilot, still finds preposterous.
Speaker 9 (20:55):
First off, he would have never crashed an airplane, you know.
Speaker 7 (21:01):
I mean, he was too good a.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Pilot even if it were out of fuel. Could a
pilot of Chester's stature have landed that in the fields
without crashing?
Speaker 9 (21:13):
Oh yeah, I mean in the field and the trees.
She could have put it anywhere and walked away. It
just it didn't add up. That airplane landed so slow,
probably down around thirty miles an hour. It wasn't heavily loaded,
(21:34):
just Seim and his daughter, and there were fields all
over the place. There were a lot of trees and
hills and stuff. But he would have landed it, no problem,
no problem. I'm one hundred percent share of that.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The ran out of fuel theory also clashes with an
eyewitness account shared with Phil Stanford eight years ago or so.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
When I started my own investigation into this, I went
down to northern Georgia. One of the places I stopped
was Cleveland. Ended up talking to a manager at the
local hardware store. He told me he'd been on the
volunteer fire department at that time, what we now called it,
a first responder. He was out there shortly after the
(22:24):
plane went down, and he said the plane was upside down.
And he said, no, the plane wasn't out of fuel,
it was dripping fuel from the wings.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
I've obtained multiple photos of the crashed plane. It is
indeed lying upside down. The nose of the piper cub
appears severely damaged, crumpled and torn by what one would
imagine was extreme force or speed. So, if the official
explanation was false and the plane was sabotaged, what exactly
(22:55):
did Ron Elliott think cause the crash?
Speaker 7 (23:00):
Asked Gron about that. Here's what he said.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
He said that it had to be a spring loaded
cable cutter electronically activated by a ground signal that would
have disconnected the plane's elevator control, causing the plane to
pitch nose down, which is what it did. But whatever
it was, he said, three people heard a loud boom.
(23:22):
Miss Lilly, her friend sellin Peas with her across the road.
An artist's father. Ron said he was convinced that there
would have been evidence of some explosive device in the plane.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
That's interesting, Phil because Ron mentions Miss Lily, saying that
Baker ran to the crash and then ran back to
put something in his car.
Speaker 7 (23:45):
Yeah, Ron takes that, and I do too.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
It was evidence that this explosive device was being removed
from the wreckage of the plane.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
So what happened to the plane the wreckage?
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Ron learned that the airplane had been taken to a
small town called Tacoa, It's about thirty miles east of
Cleveland and put in a locked and sealed hangar there
and he agreed to buy it, made a deal to
buy it from the insurance company, but first, he said
he wanted to see it, So he went over there,
cut the lock, walked inside, and the plane was gone
(24:24):
and all that was left was an oil spot on
the floor.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
How did the crash ultimately impact the Lone Star investigation.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Well, it pretty much ended Lamar's gray mail defense in
any case, and that's what everyone else was relying on.
There were about ten other defendants besides Lamar and Ron,
and the other ten eventually made their deals with the
irs with the government. That left Ron. Of course, they
approached him and asked him to be essentially a government witness,
(24:59):
and he said that's not what he wanted to do.
He knew that it would be an endless track from
one courtroom to the other, him testifying as the government
wished against other drug dealers, and he said no. He
ended up being convicted and sentenced to twenty years.
Speaker 7 (25:18):
In federal prison.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
But before he went, he figured he had some unfinished
business with Bobby, that GBI agent who had been on
the scene of the crash almost before the plane hit
the ground. The way Elliott saw it, there's no way
he couldn't have been involved one way or another.
Speaker 10 (25:39):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
I remember hearing that Bobby hung out in what was
a pretty nice bar in Helen. I was about to
start trial then, and I wanted to finish things up
in case I got convicted or maybe killed. He was
alone in the bar. He recognized me when I sat down.
He glared at me and moved over his seat. I
moved over a seat next to him. He told the
(26:06):
barkeeper I didn't want anything. I told her drinks were
on the house and the long man would pick. We
stared at each other, and he told me to leave,
and I said something high class like go fuck yourself, boy.
One thing led to another. People started looking and listening.
I stood up and told him in a loud voice,
(26:28):
to bring his candy ass outside and maybe we could
settle it. He just calmly drew a short barrow three
point fifty seven from his shoulder, holster, cocked it and
put it in my face. He told me if I
ever spoke to him again, he'd kill me. I said,
in a loud voice, you mean you'll kill again. I
(26:48):
told him the pieces were all in place. It would
be worth my life to have him just go ahead,
with all these people watching, pull the trigger. And then
I got weak. I thought he was going to do it.
I wanted it to be in my back end of story.
I never saw him again.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
So after that, I take it. Ron Elliott went off
to prison.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah, he wrote about that in his emails too. I
did fifteen years in twelve different federal prisons in twenty
six county jails. You know what diesel therapy is?
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Quick aside. Diesel therapy refers to a form of punishing
prisoners with relentless transfers. The term refers to the diesel
fuel used in prisoner transport vehicles.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
I went to prison for something that not only did
I not do, I didn't even know what happened. The
IRS fully intended to force my cooperation. It was the
IRS we had our problems with, not the DEA or
Customs or certainly the CIA. We had our deals with them.
As long as the money didn't come ashore into the
United States, everything was copasetic. That's where Lamar fucked up.
(27:58):
He started bringing his in country and the IRS wanted
its share.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
If it were the IRS who was making all of
this trouble for Chester, why couldn't the CIA just get
the case dropped for whatever reason? National security reason. It's
not like they hadn't intervened in cases like this before.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, and Ron told me that at one point Morgan
Cherry came to Lamar and told him that he had
tried to get the case dropped, but the IRS wouldn't permit.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
It, which explains why Chester was desperate enough to think
that the CIA had sent you to help him.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Well, it's hard to know what exactly the secret agency
was thinking at any given moment, but Lamar had made
such a big public fuss about it, although it had
just gone to come out in a couple smaller newspapers
in the South, that if they had publicly declare that
(29:02):
his case had to be dropped for national security reasons,
they would be admitting to what he had already said,
that he'd flown two hundred loads into the country with
the knowledge of the CIA and DEA.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
So in a way, Chester, opening his mouth so much
could have pushed himself in a corner.
Speaker 7 (29:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, he made it impossible for the CIA to help them.
Speaker 7 (29:29):
Yeah, he may have overstepped himself.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Well, let me ask you this, because Chester kept saying
that what he had, the information he knew, was going
to shake the US government to its core. Did you
ever find out or did Ron Elliott ever have any
idea of what he claimed was his ace in the hole?
Speaker 4 (29:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Ron told me that Chester told him that he had
information that the CIA was involved in.
Speaker 7 (29:59):
The Tallier murder.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Chileann diplomat who's killed in a car bomb by a
car bomb in Washington, d C. In nineteen seventy three.
Ron didn't ask any more questions about it. Ron said
himself he thought it was pretty far out, even for Chester,
But who knows it might have been true.
Speaker 7 (30:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
As for C. B. Hackworth, he doesn't believe avoiding a
crash would have necessarily led to a happier ending for Chester,
at least in terms of his legal woes. Do you
think there's a chance that with representation like Bobby Lee Cook,
he might have beaten the rap had it gone to trial.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
It's possible. Federal prosecutors don't indict people that they are
not positive they can convict. There's a whole bunch of
people who get it investigated federally and never prosecuted because
there's not enough evidence. So they feel like they've got
(30:57):
a ton of evidence indict anybody. Their conviction rate is
like ninety nine percent. Could Lamar Chester have been the
one percent that beats them? He had been doing a
pretty good job of putting them on the defensive for
the life of this case and, as it turned out,
(31:20):
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
But on some level, do you think that he was
just postponing the inevitable.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
I think that may have been reality. My feeling is
that it was not what was in his mind. I
think what was in his mind was some kind of strategy.
I don't think he intended to be dead. I don't
think he intended to be in jail. I think he
intended somehow to come out on top of that situation.
(31:49):
And no, I really don't think that he planned to
win at trial because of his number one statement that
he would never be allowed to testify. C. B.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Hackworth remains troubled by an interaction he had with Chester
shortly before he was killed in that crash.
Speaker 7 (32:10):
He was.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
Disheveled the last time I saw him. It was at
the farm. He was outside working on a plane. And
this was well before the crash, at least two weeks
before the crash, but again with the trial approaching, and
he was visibly disheveled, to my way of thinking, and
(32:34):
more so than just from working outside. And for some
reason I cannot remember why, but I do remember i'd
seen him the day before and he was wearing the
same shirt, and that just you know, I worn the
same shirt two days in a row. But I'd never
seen Lamar do it. I remember him as a good dresser.
(32:56):
I have not really been a snappy dresser myself health,
but I know one when I see one. He dressed
well normally. But I thought at the time that, well,
the trials coming up, it may be all these hearings
and everything may be taking a toll on him. And
then in the years since the crash, I've always thought
(33:19):
back to that day and to the fact he was
wearing that same shirt two days in a row.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Would you ever conceive that he could have been suicidal?
Speaker 4 (33:28):
I did consider that, and do consider that. It's one
of the scenarios that I run through my mind every
time I think of this. And there is part of
me that believes that Lamar was narcissistic enough that he
would rather be dead than to have to go to
(33:51):
federal prison. It wasn't merely being confined, it was having
authority over him. That's what he was resisting this higher time.
So I do think he was afraid of losing.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Would he have ever put his daughter in harm's way?
Speaker 4 (34:08):
Well, I don't believe that Lamar Chester would commit suicide
in a plane crash with his daughter in the plane
with him, so I really tend to rule out suicide.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I traveled with Cebe Hackworth to Cleveland, Georgia in July
of twenty two, and we spoke to a neighbor who'd
witnessed the crash nearly four decades ago while farming the
property adjacent to Chester's.
Speaker 5 (34:48):
It was a dramatic crash.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
How old would you have been around the time of the.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Crash, Oh, I was probably twenty twenty two something like that. Anyway,
I'd be on tractors and stuff out here in Lamar.
He would, you know, dark down at you with his plane.
Speaker 7 (35:08):
He was pretty good.
Speaker 5 (35:09):
I mean he would get down closer to the parallet.
Speaker 7 (35:11):
He'd kind of scare.
Speaker 5 (35:12):
You first if you didn't see him coming, and then
slip up on you like. And it was later this
in the evening, It's probably five thirty six o'clock. Well,
I was on my foreward and we've been hauling his
hay up all evening and he'd been flying around, flying
around that plane, and whenever I come out, it was Gurdo.
(35:35):
Then when I come out with my forewhether I looked
back up and if you're looking her out toward those rocks, right,
he had that plane like it was just sitting just
like this turned up sideways, I mean completely sideways, and
it was just like sitting there. And if I watched
it for ten more seconds, I'd probably say to go down.
Speaker 7 (35:55):
And it was like just sitting there. And then a
hour or two later we.
Speaker 5 (35:58):
Found out he cracks.
Speaker 7 (36:00):
That was the crowd shift, but he had that plane
turned up this.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
I mean, he was just barely moving and that's where
he crashed, right. He crashed on this side of the
main driveway going into the rock Quarrier. Sometimes there's aro
pockets up that hollow, and I wonder if he got
in an iron pocket the way he had it laid
up and it just went straight down.
Speaker 9 (36:23):
But then.
Speaker 5 (36:25):
He told us this two weeks before that. The next
week he was going to testify before the grand jury
or something in Gamesville about drugs, trafficking drugs or something.
He was going to testify the week or two before
he did say he was gonna bring some people down.
You know, I can't I ain't got it only recording
(36:46):
or anything. But I do remember him saying that I
don't know what all that was about. But it was
so strange that the first person on the scene was
the top GBI man. I mean that is strange.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
What was the take pretty much after the plane crash?
Do people have different theories?
Speaker 5 (37:07):
You know, a small town like is the's always rumors,
you know, but they never found, no gunshots, no nothing.
Speaker 7 (37:15):
You know.
Speaker 5 (37:16):
Someone said he committed suicide, but he thought too much
of that daughter to have done that. He thought way
too much of that daughter to have even considered doing that.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
That's how I always felt.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
The sprawling property Chester named My Goal Farm has now
been divided, but still sports an impressive amount of land
and the imposing a frame estate he built. After a
series of subsequent owners, the Cleveland compound was willed to
a church and is now a religious retreat.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
All this is documented as church land. Now never be,
no more taxes paid on it, never be, no more
taxes paid. Just puts more burden on those Redgord taxpayers.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Exactly oddly fitting in that there was the driving force
behind Operation Lone Star. But all these years later, Chester
and the crash are still salacious talk in this small town,
and not in any small part due to the salatious
talk of the man himself, well you.
Speaker 5 (38:16):
Know small towns. Whenever he first bought this rumors out,
and you know, he was probably a druge man. But
when he come, he spent a lot of money up here.
Speaker 7 (38:26):
When he first come, he spent a lot of money.
Speaker 5 (38:28):
And sometimes he would get to brag in a little bit,
you know, and he'd tell me there was four or
five different places to e land down are in Columbia.
That was the only place he'd land. Said he worked
for the CIA one time. That's where he learnes his connections.
And the only other thing he bragged about is when
Reagan was making a speech in Miami, that he was
(38:50):
flying over the top of him. He could have dropped
the package right in on the podium.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
But it's hard to stress just how out of the
realm of reality all of this would have seemed at
the time. Here's Phil Stamford.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Lamar was killed in June of nineteen eighty five. The
public was really not aware of any of the guns
for drug business that our government was involved in in
Central America. Of course, in nineteen seventy two, Alfred McCoy,
who's now recognized as the authority on the subject. He's
(39:28):
a professor at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in his
book Politics of heroin in Southeast Asia, about the CIA's
involvement with drug lords in Laos and in Vietnam and
in the Far East. But even that was sort of
dangerous knowledge. It wasn't acknowledged by the proper people in
(39:50):
the proper newspapers. More than a year after Lamar's plane
went down, a plane delivering weapons, they're being kicked out
of the play boxes, tied to parachutes over Nicaragua. I
think it was got shot down, and the surviving crew member,
Hasenfuss was captured and he went public saying, yeah, it
(40:12):
was a CIA operation, and that made the news.
Speaker 7 (40:15):
Of course, it couldn't be avoided.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
John Kerry in the Senate held hearings on the Iran
contract matter. But you have to remember that when Lamar
was killed, which I think he was, it was a deep,
dark secret.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Gosh, had Lamar Chester stretched his life, you know, his
legal proceedings a few years, it would have had a
very different ending. Probably.
Speaker 7 (40:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
But when the crash occurred in June of eighty five,
and the New York Times wrote a piece about how
this indicted drug smuggler was killed in a plane crash,
they somehow did not mention his claims that he did
it for the CIA.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
But given what has now been exposed, acknowledged, and proven,
Chester's claims are less far fetched today than they were
forty years ago. Documentarian and authority on national security and
intelligence Joseph Trento has been covering the CIA for decades
and has written multiple books on the subject, including The
(41:26):
Secret History of the CIA and Prelude to Terror. The
Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network
both cover the CIA's very documented involvement with overseas drug trafficking.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
Well, this goes back a long way, but really it
reached its height in the sixties and seventies when we
were using drugs to fund things that Congress won't approve.
Speaker 10 (41:52):
When Congress went to approve money for certain CI operations,
and it's not the Congress to know about it.
Speaker 6 (41:58):
It was sort of done as a wink in and
ie where the CIA would work with drug dealers, would
work with even law enforcement.
Speaker 10 (42:04):
And allow especially in Asia.
Speaker 6 (42:07):
Particularly in Vietnam, where we were funding operations using drug
money and using drugs, and that's how we paid the
gorillas to do various workforce and then it reached its
awful height in Central America when we were funding Commander zero.
Commander Zero was a character who was fighting a war
in Nicaragua force in order to get arms in order
(42:29):
to pay form the CIUS drug dealers.
Speaker 10 (42:32):
This was notorious because.
Speaker 6 (42:34):
It had been written about and people had done movies
about it.
Speaker 10 (42:37):
But we'd hire freelancers to fly planes back.
Speaker 11 (42:40):
And forth to Central America to bring the drugs, deliver
the drugs in the United States or along the border,
and it was one of the ugliest parts of the
CIS role in the sort of activity.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Trento also contends that this sort of illsted activity wouldn't
have been privy to other government agencies or law enforcement
actually during the years were covering.
Speaker 10 (43:02):
It's very true.
Speaker 6 (43:02):
For example, the DEA was going absolutely out of its
mind trying to control drugs coming into Miami in other areas,
but they were well aware that the agency was involved
in this activity and there was nothing they could do
about it. I mean, the show Narcos on Netflix, that
whole very sad story of how the narcotic trafficking went
(43:23):
in the eighties and nineties was absolutely accurate.
Speaker 10 (43:27):
That's how it went down.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
So what was the CIA doing in particular in terms
of the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. That sticks out
to you. In terms of Latin.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
America, this was a big area. I mean, this was
Chile seventy three. We were trying to overthrow.
Speaker 10 (43:44):
Aliende that time period.
Speaker 6 (43:47):
We were doing stuff all over Latin America, trying to
install our own people, working with Noriega. At this point,
Therego is one of ours, and he was controlling the
drug trade in Central America. The Agency was in business
with these guys. They thought it was to their advantage.
Turned out not to be in the end, but they
thought it was. They worked with dictators like the head
(44:09):
of Nicarago, who was this awful guy who was completely
controlled by the Agency, but he was just destroying his country.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
It's interesting with Nicaragua because Lamar Chester, who was the
former Eastern Airlines pilot and self acknowledged dope smuggler, he
claimed the two had been running guns into Nicaragua in
the seventies.
Speaker 6 (44:34):
That makes sense, that makes but remember who we were
backing in the seventies, who was in charge of Nicaragua
in the nineteen Seventiesmosa.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Chester also claimed to have flown his son into Miami
and back out.
Speaker 10 (44:50):
Now that makes sense.
Speaker 6 (44:51):
Let me tell you about so Mosa used to come
into Miami constantly and get drunk and pick up women.
I mean he was notorious. That kind of thing does
make sense. I think I wrote about that one of
my books. Actually, Simos was notorious. They all love coming
to Miami. I mean, that was the big thing. And
what would happen is the CIA people here would entertain
(45:13):
him when they were visiting. Sometimes a chief of operations
or even the director of the CI would come down
and have a drink or dinner with him, had him
on the head for being cooperative. That was not unusual.
Speaker 7 (45:26):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Lamar Chester mounted a gray mail defense when he was indicted,
claimed that he had been flying missions for the CIA
into Nicaragua in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 6 (45:41):
Right, I understand, and I have no doubt that he did.
What I do doubt is that he was doing it
directly for the CIA. My guess is, what was the
guy's name?
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Morgan, Morgan, Cherry, Morgan Cherry.
Speaker 6 (45:52):
I tried to find that name do some research on
it after you sent me the email, and I have
not been.
Speaker 10 (45:58):
Able to find him.
Speaker 6 (46:00):
My guess is he, unfortunately probably did not know who
he was actually dealing with.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
He didn't. The thought that Chester wasn't exactly sure who
his connection actually was does align with his mistaken belief
that Phil Stanford was a CIA operative and would have
weakened his graymal defense.
Speaker 10 (46:21):
When did he make the defense? When did you first
go to public with us?
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Nineteen eighty two, eighty three, eighty.
Speaker 10 (46:28):
Yeah, he was.
Speaker 6 (46:29):
That would have been early on because Iran Contra really
broke after that. The way you use gray mill by
the ways you threaten. If they were threatened to bring
in a diabete, threat to expose it like playing poker.
But it's not done through lawyers. It's done in other words.
He'll say to the FBI said, I need to see
your boss, and then once the boss got in there,
then he'd say, you know, you really want to do this.
(46:49):
So greymeal does work, but you really have to have
the goods.
Speaker 10 (46:53):
For a tour.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
I think that he overplayed his hand.
Speaker 10 (46:57):
That's what I think he I think they got tired
of him.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yes, and he was very loud, very vocal, very public.
Speaker 6 (47:04):
Let's not you do that, you absolutely destroy any chance
you have of actually getting something for your gray maya.
Speaker 10 (47:11):
That's the problem. With that, I mean you kind of
do it quietly. You got to handle it.
Speaker 6 (47:15):
Because people are afraid of you, and you've got to
keep that fear up.
Speaker 11 (47:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
I think that he kind of realized that he didn't
know who to call, and they stopped calling him. So
he started giving very public interviews to people like Forrest Sawyer,
and in one interview for Georgia Station, he bragged that
he had flown over Reagan giving a speech and could
(47:46):
have dumped a bail of marijuana and had it land
at his feet.
Speaker 10 (47:53):
Well, Lenny was just out of control, it sounds.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Like, yeah, which would back to what you were saying.
He was probably panicked at that point that he didn't
have any protection and that he had alienated any chance
of having it. So thought if he made a public
enough stink.
Speaker 10 (48:12):
Right, I think he thought he knew something that was valuable.
It was less valuable than he thought it was, and.
Speaker 6 (48:20):
He never knew who really recruited him, which was quite
common by the way.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
So in terms of the basic broad stroke outline of
this of having a former airlines pilot claim that he
had been approached and.
Speaker 10 (48:36):
Absolutely absolutely credible. That's credible. All that makes absolute sense.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Which leads us back to the mysterious Morgan Cherry, a
man Chester claimed first approached him in an Atlanta airport.
Chester claimed when he testified at the inquiry in the
Bahamas after the nineteen eighty three Brian Roster Port aired
they put together that inquiry. Morgan Cherry's name comes up
(49:05):
in the inquiry where Flee Bailey is questioning, and Chester
claimed that Morgan Cherry told him that he was the informant, Cherry.
Speaker 10 (49:19):
Claiming to be a person who the agency broadcast to get.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
It was clients were profit by an investigation. Did anything
strike you as interesting in what you had the chance
to scan in terms of the Bahamas and peddling, Well.
Speaker 6 (49:37):
Pendling worked for the agency and Mike Yes, is what
happened for us. He started working for some other drug dealers.
The money was too good and the agency didn't want
to deal.
Speaker 7 (49:49):
With them anymore.
Speaker 6 (49:50):
I mean it really had the ring of just wanting
to get rid of him.
Speaker 10 (49:53):
He was just too public.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
That's exactly what my take.
Speaker 6 (49:57):
Yeah, you're right, and that lawyer, by the way, Nigel
bow elbame what a.
Speaker 10 (50:02):
Piece of francis Nigel bow I looked him up, What
a piece of work, he was.
Speaker 6 (50:06):
I mean, look, all the money lining the agency did
was all all in the region of the Bahamas and
the Caicos and so forth.
Speaker 10 (50:16):
This is where we set up all these offshore accouncils.
If I were you, I really focus on the Morgan
Cherry stuff.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
On the final episode of Murder Miami, Clay Williams files
are found.
Speaker 5 (50:30):
It gives the horrifying look of a torstal that has
been mutilated by alligators.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
And the legacy of Lamar Chester continues to reverberate.
Speaker 7 (50:39):
It was down in kay Largo that Lamar shows up.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Ending in a surprising twist for all involved.
Speaker 10 (50:46):
What a Rat?
Speaker 9 (50:48):
What a Rat?
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Murder Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are
Lauren Brai Pacheco, Taylor Chicogne, and Bill Stanford. Written by
Phil Stamford and Lauren Bright Pacheco, Audio editing and sound
designed by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tyre and Taylor Chaqoyne, featuring
music by Evan Tyre, Phil Mayer, John Murchison and Taylor Chaqoine.
(51:13):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get the stories. That move you
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio, previously on
Murder in Miami. Having been told by Chester that her
life was in danger, not knowing who was behind that threat,
Bickerton's fears are left to fester.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I have a contract all my life, so I did
reach out to the military guys and we kind of
figured out a game plan. I would marry one because
that would then they could legitimately bring me over to
the camp so that Lamar couldn't get near me.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
After the rushed and staged wedding, Bickerton would land in Houston,
the location of the Lone Star investigation.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The FEDS went to her soldier friends in Georgia said
where is she and they said she's in Houston, and
then they tracked her down.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
She said her knowledge of what the government agents and
prosecutors were willing to do made her fear them.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
If Chester started to sound baranoid about perceived threats to
his life, It's hard to know where they'd be coming from.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I'm back in DC for about a year, and I
get a call from Bob Adams down in Miami and
he says Lamar just died.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
On June twentieth of nineteen eighty five, drug smuggler Lamar
Chester was killed in a plane crash on his property
in rural northern Georgia. C. B. Hackworth, who was a
young newspaper reporter for the Gainesville Times at the time,
recalls how and when he heard the news.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
I was at the airport in Atlanta, about to get
on a plane to go to an IRI.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Conference For those not familiar, IRI stands for investigative Reporters
and editors, where.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
I was going to see other reporters covering different aspects
of the smuggling ring in which Lamar Chester had been implicated.
And my name was announced on the loud speakers, which
was somewhat unusual in those days. So I went to
(02:08):
the gate and took a phone call. It was from
my city editor, and he said that Lamar Chester had
been killed on a plane crash and I should come
back and write my story. Of course, it came as
a surprise, but I pretty quickly decided that the story
(02:30):
I could write just as well at the IRI conference,
I could write on the plane. So I said, no,
what was.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
The wash of emotions that went over you?
Speaker 4 (02:43):
There were two things, one is and meaning no disrespect
whatsoever to anyone. But a weight was lifted off of
my chest that I didn't even realize was on it.
Because a year and a half of dealing with Lamar
and keeping him at arm's length, I knew that there
(03:07):
were so many dangerous aspects and so much that I
didn't know. I knew there was more I didn't know
than what I did know. What I did know was
dangerous enough that I didn't have to worry anymore about
who was out there.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
But Chester's death and the way he died, remains less resolved.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
That really wasn't the ending that anybody had, anybody had expected.
He always always said that he would not be allowed
to testify, that something would intervene. I always took that
to mean one of two things. Either he would be killed,
(03:54):
and he implied that he was more scared of the
government than he was a drug smugglers. In fact, I
think he did more than imply it. I think that's
the flat out what he said. But the other was
that he thought that there would be some kind of
deal cut at the last minute to prevent him from testifying,
(04:18):
and Lamar Chester died in a very strange plane crash.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
I'm Lauren bred Pacheco and this is murder in Miami.
Speaker 5 (04:43):
Indicted drug smuggler Tilt and Lamar Chester crashed near his
five hundred acre Georgia farm Thursday, killing him and seriously injured.
Speaker 6 (04:50):
He charged with drug smuggling, was killed and his five
year old daughter seriously injured in a plane crash.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Crash has not been determined, but an investigator with the
Georgia Bureau of Investigegation said it was being handled as
a routine accident. I requested a copy of the report
from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. The summary reads quote
On Thursday, June twentieth, nineteen eighty five, Tilton Lamar Chester Junior,
along with his daughter, Artist Jewel Chester, five years of age,
(05:20):
apparently crashed a Piper Cub aircraft near the Chester residence.
Chester was dead at the scene. Chester was a primary
target in Operation Loan Star US Customs and Irs investigation
and has been under indictment for the last two years
for drug related offenses and was rumored to be cooperating
with authorities. Chester also alleged that he worked for the CIA.
(05:44):
Investigation continues. The report concludes a complete and thorough investigation
was conducted, no evidence of foul play. There will be
no coroner's inquest held. This investigation is closed. It's interesting
to note that the report was filed the day after
(06:06):
the crash, Friday, June twenty first, nineteen eighty five. Here's
Phil Stamford.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Their report was filed the day after, which is hardly
time to have had any sort of investigation. They did
not want to investigate this, and one of the reasons,
undoubtedly was that one of their agents, Frank Baker Junior,
was on the scene almost immediately. He had to be
there when the plane went down.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The report was indeed filed by Officer Baker.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
When you look back at a nonsensical really that they
could have come to any sort of conclusions about the
cause of the crash in less than twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
And also, I mean, why wouldn't you have a coroner's inquest,
particularly given the circumstances of what he was involved in.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Important thing to remember here is that his trial was
coming up, and he'd threatened to go public with a
laundry list of CIA misdeeds that he knew about and
he said would shake the nation to its core.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Frank Baker Junior's presence immediately at the crash, and the
fact that they turned around that report so quickly that
probably gave credence to a lot of people who doubted
the original version of the crash and considered it to
have been suspicious at best, but possibly murder. Were there
(07:34):
people at the time immediately who considered the crash suspicious?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Certainly among those who considered it more than just suspicious
was Lamar's best friend, Ron Elliott, who was at the
ranch at the Chicken Farm in North Georgia the night
before the crash.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Years later, Phil and Ron Elliott would communicate extensively about
Elliot's close friendship with Lamar Chester and the time period
leading up to and after the crash.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
I've been trying to make sense of this for some time,
and a few years ago decided to track down Ron Elliott,
who had found finally tracked down in Shanghai. Very energetic guy,
a real hard charger, and he was in Shanghai trying
to set up a seafood importation business with the cooperation
of the Chinese government. He didn't want to just make
(08:28):
his first million, He wanted to make his first ten million.
I told him what I wanted to talk about, you know,
thinking that he might shy away from me, but it
was just the opposite. He'd been holding this in for
so long, he'd suffered for it, really, and it all
came out in a rush.
Speaker 7 (08:44):
I never met him in person.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
We exchanged many emails over a period of several months,
and he told me about the night before the crash
and his business dealings with Lamar, how they had been
involved in what later became known as the Iran contru affair.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Unfortunately, Ron Elliott passed recently, but Phil has saved Elliott's
version of events, as depicted through their correspondence, which he shares.
Speaker 8 (09:12):
Now.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Okay, it's the night before the crash and I was
staying at Lamar's house outside Cleveland, big magnificent place built
over a large hangar that houses several airplanes.
Speaker 7 (09:26):
After dinner, I.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Played with the baby aj she's four or five at
the time, played a little fust ball with Lamar. Had
a good time, and after that I went to my room,
which opened up onto the tennis courts facing ease. It
was raining, My door to the tennis courts was opening.
I turned in about eleven PM. Was lying there, I
(09:48):
realized I could hear a motor running. But Lamar and
I had locked the gate at about ten, so.
Speaker 7 (09:56):
What was going on.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
I don't want to backlight myself, so I go down
towards the front of the house into the living room,
where there's a staircase going down to the hangar.
Speaker 7 (10:07):
The house was dark.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Across the front of the house there's about one hundred
feet of sliding glass doors opening onto a stone patio
with wide steps going down. I slide one door open.
There's no moon, but I can clearly see two cars
park next to my twin engine about one hundred and
fifty feet away. It's parked tail end to the house
on a hill.
Speaker 7 (10:30):
I did that so I.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Could leave early the next morning with only start up power.
Glide down the hill, go to the other end for
take off. I hear the door to the kitchen stairwell open.
I'm trapped standing there in my skivites. Whoever they are,
they're between me and my room and my gun. Lamar
slept with a gun, insisted I did too. He said
(10:51):
it was because the locals were bad and they'd rob you.
Sort Of instinctively, I yelled down to the hangar, freeze, motherfucker.
I'll blow your head off, Lamar answered from downstairs inside
the hangar. He'd heard something too and was already down here.
Hey boy, that's you, he said. I yelled to him,
be careful the two cars out there. The cars tore
(11:12):
off towards the gate. Lamar yelled at me to get
in the pickup. He was coming with a shotgun. The
cars easily beat us to the gate. I could see
them sliding one side to the other on the wet clay.
One car turned toward Cleveland, the other went west. The
car that turned west went off the road and down
(11:33):
into a swale. Lamar yelled at me to go for
that one. We were maybe one hundred feet behind it.
Lamar leaned out the window and fired two shots.
Speaker 7 (11:43):
Into the back window.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
I slammed onto the brakes, just stopped on the road,
got out my skivvies and told him go ahead. He's
screaming at me, calling me chicken shit. I say, you
think you can murder people just because they come on
your property, and he says, what the you think they
were there for? In our underwear. We drive into town.
(12:09):
It's deserted. As I approached the circle with the station
in the middle, there's a very loud whistle. It's the
chief of police whistling at us. He waves us to
come over. Lamar just smiles says, you gotta do what
you gotta do. It was like a fucking dream being
(12:30):
naked out there on the street. I put my arm
over the door and pull myself as close as I can.
At first, the chief says something like you boys just
out cruising. Then he could see that Lamar was in
his jockey shorts, and he looked at me as well
and just started laughing.
Speaker 7 (12:48):
Lamar knew him. Well.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Lamar just got this fake, sheepish grin and said we
sort of had to leave in a hurry.
Speaker 7 (12:56):
Lamar was a known womanizer everywhere.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Chief said, with a big smile, don't suppose you want
to give me a name? I didn't think so. Is
there maybe going to be a little bit of trouble
out of this? Lamar said, guy didn't know a thing.
Speaker 7 (13:12):
We were just too far from our clothes.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
We go back to the house and spend until daylight
going over every inch of my plane, removed every inspection plate, checked,
gas tanks, fuel lines, everything.
Speaker 7 (13:30):
Lamar was a master mechanic.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Then we went into the hangar and went over his
twin and his Cessina two oh six. The only plane
we didn't look at was the piper Cub, the one
he died in.
Speaker 7 (13:42):
I took off.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Early that morning, and when I arrived at my hotel
that night in Fort Myers, there was an urgent message
from my brother.
Speaker 7 (13:50):
I called him and he.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Said, your buddy's dead and AJ is probably not going
to make it either. It took me a year to
realize that we almost certainly had left the purp and
that goddamn hangars. Think about it, If he'd finished his job,
the cars would not have been sitting out there on
the lawn.
Speaker 7 (14:07):
They would have driven away.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
At the time. The initial explanation for the crash was
that the plane, a small Piper Cub, had run out
of fuel. Happy Miles was living in Oregon when he
got the news of Chester's death.
Speaker 9 (14:21):
It was Ron Elliott who called me.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
After you got the call and you heard that Chester
was dead, what was running through your head when you
hung up the phone.
Speaker 9 (14:34):
Well, I was really shut back by it because of
the way he died. I just couldn't fathom that he
had wrecked the airplane. He would never have run out
of fuel. He knew that airplane in and out, he
would have got in it. And that airplane, I think
(14:57):
had a float tank right in front of a with
a float on it. It showed how much fuel was
in it, so you couldn't miss the fact that it
didn't have fuel.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Happy Miles was further unsettled by Lamar Chester's funeral service.
Speaker 9 (15:14):
I went to the funeral. It was a solemn time.
It was in a mortuary. Ron Elliott was there, I
was there, artists. The baby had a broken back and
was in the hospital, and the kids were there.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
His grown kids from his first marriage.
Speaker 9 (15:36):
Yeah, they wanted to see the body before it was cremated.
And when they opened the casket, the body had already
been cremated.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
That's kind of bizarre.
Speaker 9 (15:52):
Very bizarre. The body had been cremated already. I mean,
that was totally totally, totally wrong.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Back to Phil reading ron Elliott's version of events.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Okay, after the funeral, I spent a considerable amount of
time talking to people trying to figure out what happened.
Miss Lily and her neighbor were sitting on the front
porch of an old ramshackle house across the road from
the farm, shilling Peas they saw the plane take off,
they could see that little five year old AJ was
(16:29):
on board. One of them said, there goes the little
princess taking flying lessons from her daddy. Then boom, they
looked up and the plane was falling. Lily threw down
her piece and started running towards the plane, almost ran
into an eighteen wheeler crossing the road, ran into a ditch,
hit a barbed wire fence, she couldn't see, lost her glasses,
(16:52):
wound up crawling to the airplane. She was bandaged from
her toes to way up under her dress. When I
talked to her, artist's father, who lived in a house
on the farm, was already there. She remembers him saying,
come on, man, come on, help me get the baby down.
The little baby AJ was hanging by her safety harness.
(17:13):
I thought he was talking to me, Miss Lilly said,
but he wasn't. There was another man there, Bobby, the
local Georgia Bureau of Investigations agent. But Bobby wasn't there
to help with the baby at all. He was running
towards his car with a piece of something he'd taken
from the plane.
Speaker 7 (17:29):
And then he came back and they took the baby down.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Just to clarify, So Bobby would be Frank Baker Junior,
the GBI agent who was the first on the scene,
first responder on the scene.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, for some reason, Ron called him Bobby, And maybe
that was a nickname that other people used, but it's
certainly the name Ron used for him, Bobby. His real
name was Frank Baker Junior. He was the GBI agent
in White County. His father, Frank Baker Sr. Was the sheriff,
had been for years, so the two of them had
(18:07):
the place pretty well wrapped up. I certainly don't have
any proof that there was more than just the ordinary
you wash my hands, I'll wash your hands corruption in
White County, but if there was, the CIA would have
had ample leverage on Bobby Frank Jr. To get him
(18:28):
involved in this plot to kill Lamar, which is what
I think actually happened.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Well, I do have to point out that C. B.
Hackworth does dispute that Bobby, you know, Frank Baker Junior,
would be capable of something like that, that they were friends,
and that he viewed him as a stand up guy.
Speaker 7 (18:48):
How he ended up at the Chrish.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Almost as the plane was going down Yeah, I'd like
to hear that one, and Ron is certainly entitled.
Speaker 7 (19:00):
To his opinion.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
This was Ron Elliott's remembrance.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Artist's father, mister Lawrence, was there within thirty seconds of
the crash, and Bobby was driving up just as her
father arrived. The third person was Miss Lily from across
the highway. He told me he was on the front
porch of the house Lamar built for him and his wife,
reading the paper when he heard the plane take off.
He heard the boom and looked up and it was
(19:26):
coming down. He jumped into his car raced to the site.
The other guy who helped him was already there, I
have to say. Mister Lawrence told me later he didn't
see Bobby put anything in his car. However, it was
because he'd already crawled into the plane and was trying
to get aj down.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
It was miss Lily who saw that.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Happy Miles says Ron Elliott had also spoken to him
about Baker well.
Speaker 9 (19:51):
He told me that Baker had been bragging the night
before that he was going to get Lamar in the
bar the night before, saying how he was going to
get the son of a bitch, and then the next
day Lamar was dead.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
And he was the guy who was the first on
the scene.
Speaker 8 (20:13):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
I requested a copy of the accident report from the
National Transportation Safety Board. The final report finding reads that
quote virtually no fuel was found in the tanks, lines,
and carburetor. No pre impact part failure or malfunction was found.
So the official reason for the crash was basically that
(20:47):
the Piper cub ran out of fuel, something that Happy Miles,
also a seasoned pilot, still finds preposterous.
Speaker 9 (20:55):
First off, he would have never crashed an airplane, you know.
Speaker 7 (21:01):
I mean, he was too good a.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Pilot even if it were out of fuel. Could a
pilot of Chester's stature have landed that in the fields
without crashing?
Speaker 9 (21:13):
Oh yeah, I mean in the field and the trees.
She could have put it anywhere and walked away. It
just it didn't add up. That airplane landed so slow,
probably down around thirty miles an hour. It wasn't heavily loaded,
(21:34):
just Seim and his daughter, and there were fields all
over the place. There were a lot of trees and
hills and stuff. But he would have landed it, no problem,
no problem. I'm one hundred percent share of that.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The ran out of fuel theory also clashes with an
eyewitness account shared with Phil Stanford eight years ago or so.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
When I started my own investigation into this, I went
down to northern Georgia. One of the places I stopped
was Cleveland. Ended up talking to a manager at the
local hardware store. He told me he'd been on the
volunteer fire department at that time, what we now called it,
a first responder. He was out there shortly after the
(22:24):
plane went down, and he said the plane was upside down.
And he said, no, the plane wasn't out of fuel,
it was dripping fuel from the wings.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
I've obtained multiple photos of the crashed plane. It is
indeed lying upside down. The nose of the piper cub
appears severely damaged, crumpled and torn by what one would
imagine was extreme force or speed. So, if the official
explanation was false and the plane was sabotaged, what exactly
(22:55):
did Ron Elliott think cause the crash?
Speaker 7 (23:00):
Asked Gron about that. Here's what he said.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
He said that it had to be a spring loaded
cable cutter electronically activated by a ground signal that would
have disconnected the plane's elevator control, causing the plane to
pitch nose down, which is what it did. But whatever
it was, he said, three people heard a loud boom.
(23:22):
Miss Lilly, her friend sellin Peas with her across the road.
An artist's father. Ron said he was convinced that there
would have been evidence of some explosive device in the plane.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
That's interesting, Phil because Ron mentions Miss Lily, saying that
Baker ran to the crash and then ran back to
put something in his car.
Speaker 7 (23:45):
Yeah, Ron takes that, and I do too.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
It was evidence that this explosive device was being removed
from the wreckage of the plane.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
So what happened to the plane the wreckage?
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Ron learned that the airplane had been taken to a
small town called Tacoa, It's about thirty miles east of
Cleveland and put in a locked and sealed hangar there
and he agreed to buy it, made a deal to
buy it from the insurance company, but first, he said
he wanted to see it, So he went over there,
cut the lock, walked inside, and the plane was gone
(24:24):
and all that was left was an oil spot on
the floor.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
How did the crash ultimately impact the Lone Star investigation.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Well, it pretty much ended Lamar's gray mail defense in
any case, and that's what everyone else was relying on.
There were about ten other defendants besides Lamar and Ron,
and the other ten eventually made their deals with the
irs with the government. That left Ron. Of course, they
approached him and asked him to be essentially a government witness,
(24:59):
and he said that's not what he wanted to do.
He knew that it would be an endless track from
one courtroom to the other, him testifying as the government
wished against other drug dealers, and he said no. He
ended up being convicted and sentenced to twenty years.
Speaker 7 (25:18):
In federal prison.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
But before he went, he figured he had some unfinished
business with Bobby, that GBI agent who had been on
the scene of the crash almost before the plane hit
the ground. The way Elliott saw it, there's no way
he couldn't have been involved one way or another.
Speaker 10 (25:39):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
I remember hearing that Bobby hung out in what was
a pretty nice bar in Helen. I was about to
start trial then, and I wanted to finish things up
in case I got convicted or maybe killed. He was
alone in the bar. He recognized me when I sat down.
He glared at me and moved over his seat. I
moved over a seat next to him. He told the
(26:06):
barkeeper I didn't want anything. I told her drinks were
on the house and the long man would pick. We
stared at each other, and he told me to leave,
and I said something high class like go fuck yourself, boy.
One thing led to another. People started looking and listening.
I stood up and told him in a loud voice,
(26:28):
to bring his candy ass outside and maybe we could
settle it. He just calmly drew a short barrow three
point fifty seven from his shoulder, holster, cocked it and
put it in my face. He told me if I
ever spoke to him again, he'd kill me. I said,
in a loud voice, you mean you'll kill again. I
(26:48):
told him the pieces were all in place. It would
be worth my life to have him just go ahead,
with all these people watching, pull the trigger. And then
I got weak. I thought he was going to do it.
I wanted it to be in my back end of story.
I never saw him again.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
So after that, I take it. Ron Elliott went off
to prison.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah, he wrote about that in his emails too. I
did fifteen years in twelve different federal prisons in twenty
six county jails. You know what diesel therapy is?
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Quick aside. Diesel therapy refers to a form of punishing
prisoners with relentless transfers. The term refers to the diesel
fuel used in prisoner transport vehicles.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
I went to prison for something that not only did
I not do, I didn't even know what happened. The
IRS fully intended to force my cooperation. It was the
IRS we had our problems with, not the DEA or
Customs or certainly the CIA. We had our deals with them.
As long as the money didn't come ashore into the
United States, everything was copasetic. That's where Lamar fucked up.
(27:58):
He started bringing his in country and the IRS wanted
its share.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
If it were the IRS who was making all of
this trouble for Chester, why couldn't the CIA just get
the case dropped for whatever reason? National security reason. It's
not like they hadn't intervened in cases like this before.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, and Ron told me that at one point Morgan
Cherry came to Lamar and told him that he had
tried to get the case dropped, but the IRS wouldn't permit.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
It, which explains why Chester was desperate enough to think
that the CIA had sent you to help him.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Well, it's hard to know what exactly the secret agency
was thinking at any given moment, but Lamar had made
such a big public fuss about it, although it had
just gone to come out in a couple smaller newspapers
in the South, that if they had publicly declare that
(29:02):
his case had to be dropped for national security reasons,
they would be admitting to what he had already said,
that he'd flown two hundred loads into the country with
the knowledge of the CIA and DEA.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
So in a way, Chester, opening his mouth so much
could have pushed himself in a corner.
Speaker 7 (29:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, he made it impossible for the CIA to help them.
Speaker 7 (29:29):
Yeah, he may have overstepped himself.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Well, let me ask you this, because Chester kept saying
that what he had, the information he knew, was going
to shake the US government to its core. Did you
ever find out or did Ron Elliott ever have any
idea of what he claimed was his ace in the hole?
Speaker 4 (29:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Ron told me that Chester told him that he had
information that the CIA was involved in.
Speaker 7 (29:59):
The Tallier murder.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Chileann diplomat who's killed in a car bomb by a
car bomb in Washington, d C. In nineteen seventy three.
Ron didn't ask any more questions about it. Ron said
himself he thought it was pretty far out, even for Chester,
But who knows it might have been true.
Speaker 7 (30:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
As for C. B. Hackworth, he doesn't believe avoiding a
crash would have necessarily led to a happier ending for Chester,
at least in terms of his legal woes. Do you
think there's a chance that with representation like Bobby Lee Cook,
he might have beaten the rap had it gone to trial.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
It's possible. Federal prosecutors don't indict people that they are
not positive they can convict. There's a whole bunch of
people who get it investigated federally and never prosecuted because
there's not enough evidence. So they feel like they've got
(30:57):
a ton of evidence indict anybody. Their conviction rate is
like ninety nine percent. Could Lamar Chester have been the
one percent that beats them? He had been doing a
pretty good job of putting them on the defensive for
the life of this case and, as it turned out,
(31:20):
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
But on some level, do you think that he was
just postponing the inevitable.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
I think that may have been reality. My feeling is
that it was not what was in his mind. I
think what was in his mind was some kind of strategy.
I don't think he intended to be dead. I don't
think he intended to be in jail. I think he
intended somehow to come out on top of that situation.
(31:49):
And no, I really don't think that he planned to
win at trial because of his number one statement that
he would never be allowed to testify. C. B.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Hackworth remains troubled by an interaction he had with Chester
shortly before he was killed in that crash.
Speaker 7 (32:10):
He was.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
Disheveled the last time I saw him. It was at
the farm. He was outside working on a plane. And
this was well before the crash, at least two weeks
before the crash, but again with the trial approaching, and
he was visibly disheveled, to my way of thinking, and
(32:34):
more so than just from working outside. And for some
reason I cannot remember why, but I do remember i'd
seen him the day before and he was wearing the
same shirt, and that just you know, I worn the
same shirt two days in a row. But I'd never
seen Lamar do it. I remember him as a good dresser.
(32:56):
I have not really been a snappy dresser myself health,
but I know one when I see one. He dressed
well normally. But I thought at the time that, well,
the trials coming up, it may be all these hearings
and everything may be taking a toll on him. And
then in the years since the crash, I've always thought
(33:19):
back to that day and to the fact he was
wearing that same shirt two days in a row.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Would you ever conceive that he could have been suicidal?
Speaker 4 (33:28):
I did consider that, and do consider that. It's one
of the scenarios that I run through my mind every
time I think of this. And there is part of
me that believes that Lamar was narcissistic enough that he
would rather be dead than to have to go to
(33:51):
federal prison. It wasn't merely being confined, it was having
authority over him. That's what he was resisting this higher time.
So I do think he was afraid of losing.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Would he have ever put his daughter in harm's way?
Speaker 4 (34:08):
Well, I don't believe that Lamar Chester would commit suicide
in a plane crash with his daughter in the plane
with him, so I really tend to rule out suicide.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I traveled with Cebe Hackworth to Cleveland, Georgia in July
of twenty two, and we spoke to a neighbor who'd
witnessed the crash nearly four decades ago while farming the
property adjacent to Chester's.
Speaker 5 (34:48):
It was a dramatic crash.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
How old would you have been around the time of the.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Crash, Oh, I was probably twenty twenty two something like that. Anyway,
I'd be on tractors and stuff out here in Lamar.
He would, you know, dark down at you with his plane.
Speaker 7 (35:08):
He was pretty good.
Speaker 5 (35:09):
I mean he would get down closer to the parallet.
Speaker 7 (35:11):
He'd kind of scare.
Speaker 5 (35:12):
You first if you didn't see him coming, and then
slip up on you like. And it was later this
in the evening, It's probably five thirty six o'clock. Well,
I was on my foreward and we've been hauling his
hay up all evening and he'd been flying around, flying
around that plane, and whenever I come out, it was Gurdo.
(35:35):
Then when I come out with my forewhether I looked
back up and if you're looking her out toward those rocks, right,
he had that plane like it was just sitting just
like this turned up sideways, I mean completely sideways, and
it was just like sitting there. And if I watched
it for ten more seconds, I'd probably say to go down.
Speaker 7 (35:55):
And it was like just sitting there. And then a
hour or two later we.
Speaker 5 (35:58):
Found out he cracks.
Speaker 7 (36:00):
That was the crowd shift, but he had that plane
turned up this.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
I mean, he was just barely moving and that's where
he crashed, right. He crashed on this side of the
main driveway going into the rock Quarrier. Sometimes there's aro
pockets up that hollow, and I wonder if he got
in an iron pocket the way he had it laid
up and it just went straight down.
Speaker 9 (36:23):
But then.
Speaker 5 (36:25):
He told us this two weeks before that. The next
week he was going to testify before the grand jury
or something in Gamesville about drugs, trafficking drugs or something.
He was going to testify the week or two before
he did say he was gonna bring some people down.
You know, I can't I ain't got it only recording
(36:46):
or anything. But I do remember him saying that I
don't know what all that was about. But it was
so strange that the first person on the scene was
the top GBI man. I mean that is strange.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
What was the take pretty much after the plane crash?
Do people have different theories?
Speaker 5 (37:07):
You know, a small town like is the's always rumors,
you know, but they never found, no gunshots, no nothing.
Speaker 7 (37:15):
You know.
Speaker 5 (37:16):
Someone said he committed suicide, but he thought too much
of that daughter to have done that. He thought way
too much of that daughter to have even considered doing that.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
That's how I always felt.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
The sprawling property Chester named My Goal Farm has now
been divided, but still sports an impressive amount of land
and the imposing a frame estate he built. After a
series of subsequent owners, the Cleveland compound was willed to
a church and is now a religious retreat.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
All this is documented as church land. Now never be,
no more taxes paid on it, never be, no more
taxes paid. Just puts more burden on those Redgord taxpayers.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Exactly oddly fitting in that there was the driving force
behind Operation Lone Star. But all these years later, Chester
and the crash are still salacious talk in this small town,
and not in any small part due to the salatious
talk of the man himself, well you.
Speaker 5 (38:16):
Know small towns. Whenever he first bought this rumors out,
and you know, he was probably a druge man. But
when he come, he spent a lot of money up here.
Speaker 7 (38:26):
When he first come, he spent a lot of money.
Speaker 5 (38:28):
And sometimes he would get to brag in a little bit,
you know, and he'd tell me there was four or
five different places to e land down are in Columbia.
That was the only place he'd land. Said he worked
for the CIA one time. That's where he learnes his connections.
And the only other thing he bragged about is when
Reagan was making a speech in Miami, that he was
(38:50):
flying over the top of him. He could have dropped
the package right in on the podium.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
But it's hard to stress just how out of the
realm of reality all of this would have seemed at
the time. Here's Phil Stamford.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Lamar was killed in June of nineteen eighty five. The
public was really not aware of any of the guns
for drug business that our government was involved in in
Central America. Of course, in nineteen seventy two, Alfred McCoy,
who's now recognized as the authority on the subject. He's
(39:28):
a professor at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in his
book Politics of heroin in Southeast Asia, about the CIA's
involvement with drug lords in Laos and in Vietnam and
in the Far East. But even that was sort of
dangerous knowledge. It wasn't acknowledged by the proper people in
(39:50):
the proper newspapers. More than a year after Lamar's plane
went down, a plane delivering weapons, they're being kicked out
of the play boxes, tied to parachutes over Nicaragua. I
think it was got shot down, and the surviving crew member,
Hasenfuss was captured and he went public saying, yeah, it
(40:12):
was a CIA operation, and that made the news.
Speaker 7 (40:15):
Of course, it couldn't be avoided.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
John Kerry in the Senate held hearings on the Iran
contract matter. But you have to remember that when Lamar
was killed, which I think he was, it was a deep,
dark secret.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Gosh, had Lamar Chester stretched his life, you know, his
legal proceedings a few years, it would have had a
very different ending. Probably.
Speaker 7 (40:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
But when the crash occurred in June of eighty five,
and the New York Times wrote a piece about how
this indicted drug smuggler was killed in a plane crash,
they somehow did not mention his claims that he did
it for the CIA.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
But given what has now been exposed, acknowledged, and proven,
Chester's claims are less far fetched today than they were
forty years ago. Documentarian and authority on national security and
intelligence Joseph Trento has been covering the CIA for decades
and has written multiple books on the subject, including The
(41:26):
Secret History of the CIA and Prelude to Terror. The
Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network
both cover the CIA's very documented involvement with overseas drug trafficking.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
Well, this goes back a long way, but really it
reached its height in the sixties and seventies when we
were using drugs to fund things that Congress won't approve.
Speaker 10 (41:52):
When Congress went to approve money for certain CI operations,
and it's not the Congress to know about it.
Speaker 6 (41:58):
It was sort of done as a wink in and
ie where the CIA would work with drug dealers, would
work with even law enforcement.
Speaker 10 (42:04):
And allow especially in Asia.
Speaker 6 (42:07):
Particularly in Vietnam, where we were funding operations using drug
money and using drugs, and that's how we paid the
gorillas to do various workforce and then it reached its
awful height in Central America when we were funding Commander zero.
Commander Zero was a character who was fighting a war
in Nicaragua force in order to get arms in order
(42:29):
to pay form the CIUS drug dealers.
Speaker 10 (42:32):
This was notorious because.
Speaker 6 (42:34):
It had been written about and people had done movies
about it.
Speaker 10 (42:37):
But we'd hire freelancers to fly planes back.
Speaker 11 (42:40):
And forth to Central America to bring the drugs, deliver
the drugs in the United States or along the border,
and it was one of the ugliest parts of the
CIS role in the sort of activity.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Trento also contends that this sort of illsted activity wouldn't
have been privy to other government agencies or law enforcement
actually during the years were covering.
Speaker 10 (43:02):
It's very true.
Speaker 6 (43:02):
For example, the DEA was going absolutely out of its
mind trying to control drugs coming into Miami in other areas,
but they were well aware that the agency was involved
in this activity and there was nothing they could do
about it. I mean, the show Narcos on Netflix, that
whole very sad story of how the narcotic trafficking went
(43:23):
in the eighties and nineties was absolutely accurate.
Speaker 10 (43:27):
That's how it went down.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
So what was the CIA doing in particular in terms
of the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. That sticks out
to you. In terms of Latin.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
America, this was a big area. I mean, this was
Chile seventy three. We were trying to overthrow.
Speaker 10 (43:44):
Aliende that time period.
Speaker 6 (43:47):
We were doing stuff all over Latin America, trying to
install our own people, working with Noriega. At this point,
Therego is one of ours, and he was controlling the
drug trade in Central America. The Agency was in business
with these guys. They thought it was to their advantage.
Turned out not to be in the end, but they
thought it was. They worked with dictators like the head
(44:09):
of Nicarago, who was this awful guy who was completely
controlled by the Agency, but he was just destroying his country.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
It's interesting with Nicaragua because Lamar Chester, who was the
former Eastern Airlines pilot and self acknowledged dope smuggler, he
claimed the two had been running guns into Nicaragua in
the seventies.
Speaker 6 (44:34):
That makes sense, that makes but remember who we were
backing in the seventies, who was in charge of Nicaragua
in the nineteen Seventiesmosa.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Chester also claimed to have flown his son into Miami
and back out.
Speaker 10 (44:50):
Now that makes sense.
Speaker 6 (44:51):
Let me tell you about so Mosa used to come
into Miami constantly and get drunk and pick up women.
I mean he was notorious. That kind of thing does
make sense. I think I wrote about that one of
my books. Actually, Simos was notorious. They all love coming
to Miami. I mean, that was the big thing. And
what would happen is the CIA people here would entertain
(45:13):
him when they were visiting. Sometimes a chief of operations
or even the director of the CI would come down
and have a drink or dinner with him, had him
on the head for being cooperative. That was not unusual.
Speaker 7 (45:26):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Lamar Chester mounted a gray mail defense when he was indicted,
claimed that he had been flying missions for the CIA
into Nicaragua in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 6 (45:41):
Right, I understand, and I have no doubt that he did.
What I do doubt is that he was doing it
directly for the CIA. My guess is, what was the
guy's name?
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Morgan, Morgan, Cherry, Morgan Cherry.
Speaker 6 (45:52):
I tried to find that name do some research on
it after you sent me the email, and I have
not been.
Speaker 10 (45:58):
Able to find him.
Speaker 6 (46:00):
My guess is he, unfortunately probably did not know who
he was actually dealing with.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
He didn't. The thought that Chester wasn't exactly sure who
his connection actually was does align with his mistaken belief
that Phil Stanford was a CIA operative and would have
weakened his graymal defense.
Speaker 10 (46:21):
When did he make the defense? When did you first
go to public with us?
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Nineteen eighty two, eighty three, eighty.
Speaker 10 (46:28):
Yeah, he was.
Speaker 6 (46:29):
That would have been early on because Iran Contra really
broke after that. The way you use gray mill by
the ways you threaten. If they were threatened to bring
in a diabete, threat to expose it like playing poker.
But it's not done through lawyers. It's done in other words.
He'll say to the FBI said, I need to see
your boss, and then once the boss got in there,
then he'd say, you know, you really want to do this.
(46:49):
So greymeal does work, but you really have to have
the goods.
Speaker 10 (46:53):
For a tour.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
I think that he overplayed his hand.
Speaker 10 (46:57):
That's what I think he I think they got tired
of him.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yes, and he was very loud, very vocal, very public.
Speaker 6 (47:04):
Let's not you do that, you absolutely destroy any chance
you have of actually getting something for your gray maya.
Speaker 10 (47:11):
That's the problem. With that, I mean you kind of
do it quietly. You got to handle it.
Speaker 6 (47:15):
Because people are afraid of you, and you've got to
keep that fear up.
Speaker 11 (47:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
I think that he kind of realized that he didn't
know who to call, and they stopped calling him. So
he started giving very public interviews to people like Forrest Sawyer,
and in one interview for Georgia Station, he bragged that
he had flown over Reagan giving a speech and could
(47:46):
have dumped a bail of marijuana and had it land
at his feet.
Speaker 10 (47:53):
Well, Lenny was just out of control, it sounds.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Like, yeah, which would back to what you were saying.
He was probably panicked at that point that he didn't
have any protection and that he had alienated any chance
of having it. So thought if he made a public
enough stink.
Speaker 10 (48:12):
Right, I think he thought he knew something that was valuable.
It was less valuable than he thought it was, and.
Speaker 6 (48:20):
He never knew who really recruited him, which was quite
common by the way.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
So in terms of the basic broad stroke outline of
this of having a former airlines pilot claim that he
had been approached and.
Speaker 10 (48:36):
Absolutely absolutely credible. That's credible. All that makes absolute sense.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Which leads us back to the mysterious Morgan Cherry, a
man Chester claimed first approached him in an Atlanta airport.
Chester claimed when he testified at the inquiry in the
Bahamas after the nineteen eighty three Brian Roster Port aired
they put together that inquiry. Morgan Cherry's name comes up
(49:05):
in the inquiry where Flee Bailey is questioning, and Chester
claimed that Morgan Cherry told him that he was the informant, Cherry.
Speaker 10 (49:19):
Claiming to be a person who the agency broadcast to get.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
It was clients were profit by an investigation. Did anything
strike you as interesting in what you had the chance
to scan in terms of the Bahamas and peddling, Well.
Speaker 6 (49:37):
Pendling worked for the agency and Mike Yes, is what
happened for us. He started working for some other drug dealers.
The money was too good and the agency didn't want
to deal.
Speaker 7 (49:49):
With them anymore.
Speaker 6 (49:50):
I mean it really had the ring of just wanting
to get rid of him.
Speaker 10 (49:53):
He was just too public.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
That's exactly what my take.
Speaker 6 (49:57):
Yeah, you're right, and that lawyer, by the way, Nigel
bow elbame what a.
Speaker 10 (50:02):
Piece of francis Nigel bow I looked him up, What
a piece of work, he was.
Speaker 6 (50:06):
I mean, look, all the money lining the agency did
was all all in the region of the Bahamas and
the Caicos and so forth.
Speaker 10 (50:16):
This is where we set up all these offshore accouncils.
If I were you, I really focus on the Morgan
Cherry stuff.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
On the final episode of Murder Miami, Clay Williams files
are found.
Speaker 5 (50:30):
It gives the horrifying look of a torstal that has
been mutilated by alligators.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
And the legacy of Lamar Chester continues to reverberate.
Speaker 7 (50:39):
It was down in kay Largo that Lamar shows up.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Ending in a surprising twist for all involved.
Speaker 10 (50:46):
What a Rat?
Speaker 9 (50:48):
What a Rat?
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Murder Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are
Lauren Brai Pacheco, Taylor Chicogne, and Bill Stanford. Written by
Phil Stamford and Lauren Bright Pacheco, Audio editing and sound
designed by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tyre and Taylor Chaqoyne, featuring
music by Evan Tyre, Phil Mayer, John Murchison and Taylor Chaqoine.
(51:13):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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