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