MIAMI – Luis Garcia-Blanco, a Cuban who had arrived in Miami on the Mariel boatlift, was accused of shooting his ex-girlfriend Maricel Gutierrez in the head with a machine gun in 1980, in Miami-Dade. He had allegedly also cut off her finger and kept it in a Bible.
In 1981, Garcia-Blanco was working as a bodyguard for Rafael Leon Rodriguez, who police knew as the Venezuelan son of a cop, and as a marksman-turned-hitman and a cocaine distributor. A law-enforcement task force pounced on them.
June Hawkins, a former Metro-Dade police analyst, told Netflix Tudum that day she was holding a phone with one hand and a police radio with the other to help catch Rodriguez — who was better known as “Amilcar” — and was a wanted murder suspect.
“It was crazy! Everybody’s talking — trying to advise where he is — and at one point, one of our detectives even rammed the car that Amilcar and this other guy were driving,” Hawkins told Tudum.
Since Rodriguez used payphones, Hawkins said they used a “trap and trace device,” which identified the phone number of the payphone he was using. With the number, the phone company provided the location, and she shared it with operatives in the field.
There was a shootout when police officers tried to arrest Rodriguez and Garcia-Blanco. While Garcia-Blanco fired at police officers and was arrested, Rodriguez ran away. A man nearby told police Rodriguez offered him his luxury Rolex watch in return for his car and sped away.
Hawkins told Tulum that she found Rodriguez hiding behind a washing machine and described him as “soft-spoken” and “very calm.” When he was in handcuffs, he was wearing a brown velvet blazer, a white long-sleeve collared shirt, a brown leather belt, and brown aviator sunglasses.
The luxury wasn’t a surprise. The feds knew he had lived in posh apartments in the Miami Brickell area and at Turnberry in Aventura. The cocaine business had gotten him rich fast.
FRUSTRATION BY LAW ENFORCEMENT
Rodriguez’s arrest was the result of a task force that aimed to improve teamwork between local and federal law enforcement. This has expanded to cooperation with authorities in Colombia.
During Local 10 News Reporter Mark Potter’s interviews for the 1982 “Colombian Drug Wars” series on Local 10 News, law enforcement expressed frustration.
Metro-Dade Sgt. Jim Ryder and Lt. Raul Diaz said they lacked the resources and training to catch the foreign criminals on their own.
“We are dealing with crimes which have international repercussions and for which the men that work on local police departments in the United States are not trained to deal,” Diaz said.
Metro-Dade Detective Bobby Fiallo, who was born in Cuba and moved to Miami when he was four, said he worried about the innocent victims. At one crime scene, officers found six dead in a house in Miami-Dade — most of them strangled.
“You can walk in. You are going to be sitting there with your family eating and some guy is going to come in and they going to start machine gunning the place because they want to get to somebody that you are sitting next to,” Fiallo said.
Atlee W. Wampler 3d, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, said the federal government needed to do more to put an end to the narcotics trade that had already become a threat to national security.
“It’s a national crisis and a national disgrace that we are not meeting this major problem,” Wampler told Potter.
DIRTY MONEY TRAIL
William P. Rosenblatt, a U.S. Army veteran who worked in federal law enforcement, was dedicated to targeting the way dirty money was flowing from the pockets of cocaine users in the U.S. to a supply chain of dealers, distributors, foreign traffickers, kitchens, and farmers.
“You can take a large corporation, take the top executive away, the financial structure is still there,” Rosenblatt told in 1982. “You take the financial structure away from a legitimate or legal organization, it crumbles.”
Rosenblatt had worked for the U.S. Customs Service in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco before meeting Potter as the Special Agent-in-Charge in Miami. He was part of the feds Operation Greenback, which focused on the cartel’s strategy to make “dirty money” appear “clean.”
Rosenblatt said the operation was meant to bring “pressure to bear on the financial side of these narcotics organizations.” Investigators relied on the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which established requirements for recordkeeping and reporting.
In 1982, the operation also resulted in a case against The Great American National Bank of Dade County on four counts of failure to file currency transaction reports with the Internal Revenue Service. In 1984, a group was arrested for buying cashier’s checks and money orders in amounts less than $10,000 to avoid transaction reports and deposit them in banks in Miami.
INTERNATIONAL NATURE
At a crime scene in 1982, Metro-Dade Sgt. Skip Pearson, who focused on narcotics, told Potter the violence was a sign of trouble to come.
“You are going to see South Florida not only the base for drug distribution and cocaine distribution for the Colombians,” Pearson said. “You are going to see it for every South American country that has the capability of either manufacturing cocaine or the coca paste.”
Sen. Lawton Chiles told Potter in 1982 that the U.S. State Department needed to make sure foreign relations were dependent on the country’s law enforcement.
“Letting every country know, where drugs are coming from that we are going to assess our relationship with them based on what they are doing to clean up those drugs,” Chiles said.
DEA Special Agent Dave Wilson said the Colombian and American authorities were stuck in a supply-and-demand blaming game that resulted in inaction.
“If the American public would stop putting it up their nose, then Colombians would stop shipping it to us, but the American public thinks it’s neat ... Stop buying cocaine, stop accepting cocaine money into your banks and your real estate agencies and into your car agencies,” Wilson said.
Over four decades later, U.S. authorities have identified Rodriguez’s native Venezuela as “a major” money laundering country. Other countries of concern include Haiti and Panama.
The new challenge: Money laundering through cryptocurrencies — untraceable by design — and new synthetic drugs easily found online and manufactured anywhere there is a lab.
TIMELINE OF FEDERAL LAWS
Federal anti-money laundering laws evolved slowly after the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, and the technology for recordkeeping and auditing has evolved.
- In 1986, the Money Laundering Control Act introduced civil and criminal forfeiture for BSA violations. In 1988, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act expanded the definition of financial institution to include car dealers and real estate closings and required the verification of identity for monetary instruments over $3,000.
- In 1992, The Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act strengthened the sanctions for BSA violations, it required suspicious activity reports and verification for wire transfers. In 1994, the Money Laundering Suppression Act required banks to enhance procedures for referring cases to law enforcement.
- In 1998, The Money Laundering and Financial Crimes Strategy Act required banking agencies to develop anti-money laundering training for examiners and created specialized task forces. The 911 attack also revealed a need to strengthen laws and law enforcement.
- The 2001 PATRIOT Act criminalized the financing of terrorism, prohibited financial institutions from engaging in business with foreign shell banks, required due diligence procedures, and improved information sharing between financial institutions and the U.S. government.
- The Intelligence Reform & Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 required the Secretary of the Treasury to regulate cross-border electronic transmittals of funds.
Source: U.S. Treasury