abrahamhyatt.com

[This post originally ran in September, 2008. I'm reposting it following the death of an Army journalist in Afghanistan last month.]

When the Iraq War began, I was sitting in a small steakhouse in rural Central California, and as the television screens lit up with grainy, phosphorescent splashes of color, the people around me began clapping. We all knew it was coming; the build up to the war had been years in the making. But I was the one stunned into silence, amazed by the satisfaction and appreciation on the faces of the people around me.


Yusafiyah, Iraq, 9/7/07. Photo by Senior Master Sgt. Brian L. Boone, U.S. Air Force.

The next day, the Department of Defense released its first press photo (stock photos shot by the DoD for media outlets to use) of the war — an image of Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference. Since then, the agency’s collection of media photos has grown into the hundreds. They’re fairly uniform: Soldiers run to helicopters that are blowing up walls of dust. Soldiers with guns search homes. They stand in streets having pleasant conversations with Iraqis and they peer around brick walls with their guns at the ready. There are never any dead bodies; the smiling Iraq children are always hugging smiling soldiers — the photos are propaganda at its most transparent and banal.
…continue reading The war in negative

…Continued from: Empty: The story of a boat, an abandoned town and $17 million worth of pot, pt. 1

Night is falling. The tugboat towing the Saja is slowing down. They’re 22 miles up the Columbia River, and in the dim light the crew can see a forest of pilings sticking out of the water on the south shore. This is a ghost town. This is Bradwood Landing.

Bradwood Landing, 1954. Photo via Clatsop County Board of Commissioners.

For over 100 years, Bradwood Landing was a teeming, isolated knot of timber industrialism. Stacks of cut wood lines the docks. New ships arrive every two days. The millpond is choked with logs. The town is filled with hundreds of men. In 1962 a plan to expand the mill fails and the town is abandoned. By 1985 all that remains are rotting pilings sticking out of the river — that, and on a few of those pilings, a brand new dock. The Saja ties up. The tugboat leaves. Silence descends.

Almost 20 years later, an Texas company called NorthernStar Natural Gas will propose tearing out those pilings and building a plant that will turn liquefied natural gas into normal gas, which the company will then pipe to the rest of Oregon. A massive project. A genuine need for natural gas. But there are some in the state who say there are environmental concerns and safety concerns and the company will spend countless dollars fighting a public relations battle that stretches from the empty banks of Bradwood Landing to the desk of a state governor intent on fighting the project.

NorthernStar Natural Gas' artist rendition of the plant. Photo via NorthernStar Natural Gas.

I’ve driven the old road from the highway down to Bradwood Landing several times. It twists and turns, and aside from the road, a locked gate and a rusted line of railroad tracks, the land shows very little signs of human contact. The paved road stops at the gate. On the other side it turns to gravel and leads to an empty beach. And to a half-buried metal warehouse the smuggling crew built in the days before the Saja arrived. When the ship ties up at the dock, a crew of eight men, several pickup trucks and two rented moving vans are waiting for them. Night has fallen. In one of the trucks is a generator and lights. But they don’t take them out.

I know why. I’ve stood in the middle of the old pilings at dusk on a low tide. On the far shore, lights twinkle and reflect off the river. It’s a home, one with a broad view of what’s happening on the river. Back then there is only one home, one  twinkling light. But the men aren’t taking chances. Instead of the generator and the lights, they line the dock with flashlights and go to work. They transfer burlap coffee sacks filled with bales of marijuana into the pickup trucks. The trucks drive down the dock to the moving vans in the warehouse. Pound after pound; ton after ton; the same weight as about 12 full-size pickup trucks. And when they’re finished, the trucks sit in the warehouse, waiting for daylight to drive away.

Bradwood Landing, 2008. Photo by Abraham Hyatt.

It takes the feds 2 1/2 years and many almost-misses to build a case against the men behind the Saja. Investigators are able tie together three different smuggling operations in Boston, Miami and Bradwood Landing. Ten men from five countries are indicted; most are caught. Acquilino gets 10 years; his bother gets six. The South Korean captain disappears as does the Spaniard who bought the Saja in the Canary Islands. Ownership of the Saja is never determined and no one comes forward to claim it. One of Arnold’s clients becomes a government witness and is in the Federal Witness Protection Program. One man shoots himself in the chest and dies. Goldman gets 15 years and then sleeps with a member of the prosecution in hopes of getting a reduction in sentence. He goes to jail just the same.

But that’s long after the Saja ties up at Bradwood Landing. As the sun rises on May 29, the trucks drive off to a 40-acre plot of land the crew has purchased in the hills west of Hillsboro, Ore. In the days leading up to May 28, the men had monitored the local highways, talking back and forth on hand-held radios, analyzing traffic. It was a needless precaution. The trucks arrive at the property without problem and the buying and selling begins.

Buyers around the country phone in an order to a motel room near Tigard, about 15 miles southeast of Hillsboro. Price: $345 a pound. A representative of the buyer shows up at the hotel and pays half the money up front. Then they drive to Hillsboro and pay the rest of the money. The property has been outfitted with a loading bay so that buyers can use semi trucks if needed. In a single day, somewhere around $17.2 million changes hands. And within a few days, everyone is gone. The feds are years too late in stopping the biggest drug deal in Oregon history. The marijuana disappears into thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hands across America. The smugglers make millions and then have years to spend it. The Saja operation is, in many ways, a massive success.

On May 31, three days after she landed in Astoria, the Saja is spotted at Bradwood Landing. By the time the Customs Service, Coast Guard, National Marine Fisheries and all their dogs and guns board the boat, the Saja sits empty and listing, gently rocking against pilings set by long-dead loggers and mill men.

Bradwood Landing today. The warehouse the smugglers built -- visible in the center of the photo -- is nearly covered in sand from a dredging operation that took place a few years later in the Columbia River. Photo via the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners.

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Sources:
United States of America v. David Carlton Arnold and Armando Coto, 117 F.3d 1308 (11th Cir. 1997).
Interviews with Paul Benoit, City of Astoria, city manager; Charles Deister, NorthernStar Natural Gas, spokesman.
“Phase I Environmental Site Assessment – Revised.” Prepared by AMEC Earth & Environmental, Inc. for NorthernStar Natural Gas, August, 2005
“Summary of Bradwood Industrial Site,” presentation to Clatsop County Board of Commissioners by NorthernStar Natural Gas, Oct 19, 2007.
The Oregonian, August 4, 1988, “10 Face Federal Charges In ’85 Smuggling Scheme”
The Oregonian, August 17, 1988, “Investigators Detail Big Marijuana-Smuggling Operation”
The Oregonian, February 19, 1989, “Drug Case Figure Gets Protection”
The Oregonian, September 12, 1989, “Drug Smuggler Admits To Charges”
The Oregonian, March 20, 1990, “New Yorker Draws 15-Year Term In Record Oregon Narcotics Case”

The captain is South Korean. The drug lords are brothers from Miami. The fixer is a drunk and his lawyer knows too much. And when everything is said and done, when the all the drugs are sold and all the arrests have been made and everyone is in jail, no one — no one — will admit to owning the ship.

This is the day: May 28, 1985. The weather off the mouth of the Columbia River is warm and a little windy. The ship is named the Saja. She’s a refrigerator ship and end to end is as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall. This is end of a 10,000 mile trip. The black grouper the captain and his crew bought in Senegal are frozen in the hold. The 23 tons of marijuana they picked up in Columbia — the biggest smuggling job in Oregon’s history — is safely hidden.

Mouth of the Columbia River. Photo via U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In a few years, the Saja will become a footnote in a sprawling criminal investigation marked by suicide, sexual scandal and countless near-misses by the federal government. And then, twenty years later, an energy giant will fight to build a $650 million liquefied natural gas plant, coincidentally, on the site of the Saja’s remote landfall in Oregon. But in 1985, history has yet to be written. And the Saja is pulling up to the docks in Astoria, just inside the mouth of the Columbia River.

The town the Saja arrives in is still a frontier town. The heady days of logging and fishing are coming to an end. Downtown is filled with decaying businesses and prehistoric bars. It will take another decade before city officials and Chamber of Commerce types begin to reclaim the city as their own. Charles Goldman, the fixer for the smuggling operation, had paid a Portland, Ore. company to help clear the Saja through customs on the docks in Astoria. But he forgot to take into account simple geography: Black grouper is from the South Atlantic. Which is a long way away. When the Saja unloads the fish, the questions begin. Enter the U.S. Customs Service. They detain the South Korean crew. They search. And search. But all they find is ice.

Tolonen Boat Shop, Astoria, Ore. 1987. Photo via Historic Fishing.

The ice is the secret. There is a secret hold in the ship. After filling it with the marijuana, the smugglers let ice form over its access hatch. Then they board over the hatch and let ice form over the boards. “Absolutely undetectable” is how a Customs agent would describe it three years later. And with that, the Saja is free to go.

This isn’t Goldman’s first smuggling job, nor his last. As the Saja arrives in Astoria, he’s 38 years old, splitting his time between New York City and Portland, and trying to figure out ways to get rid of the grouper once it’s offloaded. Goldman’s the main smuggling distributor for a guy named Acqulino Melo, who’s 41 and lives in Miami with his brother. The Melo’s are big shit.  Between 1982 and 1985, they’ll smuggle somewhere around 88 tons of marijuana into the U.S. How much is that worth? About $116 million wholesale in today’s dollars. Goldman is well paid; he’ll walk away with about $5 million. But that doesn’t mean the Melo’s like him. They think he’s a drunk and a druggy. After major smuggling operations, Acqulino sends his enforcer to Goldman’s house to pick up the earnings from the deal. And then, in one case, he gives his enforcer permission to strong-arm $75,000 in cash from Goldman to pay for the enforcer’s “services.”

Fish cannery, Astoria, Ore. Photo via Jody Miller/Flickr.

Goldman’s biggest problem isn’t the Melos. He’s busy trying figure out what to do with all of his cash. And he’s screwing up pretty badly. He keeps some at his mom’s house and some with his lawyer. His lawyer, David Arnold, helps him buy houses and cars under different names — a bumbling attempt at money laundering. Goldman gives Arnold power of attorney when Goldman flees to France and the Philippines as the feds are closing in after the Saja deal. Every clumsy step he takes at hiding money is fodder for investigators. Arnold’s mistakes are, too. Prosecutors will eventually try and convict Arnold of money laundering and aiding in racketeering. Thanks to Goldman that case will bounce from court to court. Because by then Goldman has turned on his fellow smugglers and is the government’s lead witness. But he’s also sleeping with an IRS agent who’s part of the prosecution. Mistrials abound.

That’s getting ahead of the story. Today is May 28, 1985. And Goldman is not screwing anything up. The opposite, in fact. He and the rest of the smuggling network are watching from their respective viewpoints across the country as their plan continues to unfold: The ice is opaque. The agents’ search is done. And so a tugboat begins towing the Saja up the Columbia. It’s going, the crew says, somewhere for “repairs.” Its destination: an abandoned mill town named Bradwood Landing.

Next week, part 2: The town, the Texans and how the deal went down.

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Sources:

United States of America v. David Carlton Arnold and Armando Coto, 117 F.3d 1308 (11th Cir. 1997)

Interviews with Paul Benoit, City of Astoria, city manager; Charles Deister, NorthernStar Natural Gas, spokesman

“Phase I Environmental Site Assessment – Revised.” Prepared by AMEC Earth & Environmental, Inc. for NorthernStar Natural Gas, August, 2005

“Summary of Bradwood Industrial Site,” presentation to Clatsop County Board of Commissioners by NorthernStar Natural Gas, Oct. 19, 2007

The Oregonian, Aug. 4, 1988, “10 Face Federal Charges In ’85 Smuggling Scheme”

The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 1988, “Investigators Detail Big Marijuana-Smuggling Operation”

The Oregonian, Feb. 19, 1989, “Drug Case Figure Gets Protection”

The Oregonian, Sept. 12, 1989, “Drug Smuggler Admits To Charges”

The Oregonian, March 20, 1990, “New Yorker Draws 15-Year Term In Record Oregon Narcotics Case”