Informant a Thorn in Justice Dept.’s Side

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts and Nevis —  Back in the heady ‘70s, when alleged drug baron Charles “Little Nut” Miller was living in Jamaica’s slums, he was Cecil Connor, a political enforcer.

That was more than a decade before the U.S. government indicted him, then protected him as a key federal witness who helped put two gang leaders in prison for life, only to have him emerge nearly a decade later as one of Washington’s worst nightmares.

Today, Miller is the target of one of the U.S. Justice Department’s most intensive and frustrating extradition efforts--a two-year court battle in this tiny Caribbean island nation that is made all the more confounding for U.S. law enforcement officials because, they acknowledge, Miller was once one of theirs.

Now an influential local soft-drink and chicken distributor, Miller is cast by U.S. official sources as an ingenious former federal witness-turned-fugitive who has learned the inner workings of U.S. anti-drug intelligence, law enforcement and judiciary.

It was a crash course that climaxed on the witness stand in January 1989 when, at age 28 and testifying for the U.S. government as Connor, he told a Miami federal jury his life’s story.

Working for what he called “the underworld section” of Jamaica’s Labor Party in Kingston, he stated, he stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated voters, shot and wounded a clerk during a robbery and spent years in prison.

He also testified, according to court records and documents, that he escaped the Jamaican prison using political connections in 1983 and came to the United States, where he became a trusted member of a brutal Jamaican drug gang known as the Shower Posse. The gang’s trademark was spraying victims--from California to Miami to New York--with machine-gun fire, often killing and maiming bystanders.

As Connor, he told the jury, he smuggled marijuana and cocaine, attended gangland executions and laundered drug money.

“The only reason he stopped . . . was because he was put in jail in Jamaica. Then he escapes,” defense attorney Seymour Gaer declared in the Miami courtroom as Connor testified that day for the prosecution. “And guess what happens? He follows the same criminal pattern.”

Nine years later, in a criminal case filed in Miami, U.S. prosecutors and anti-drug agents accused Miller of following the same pattern.

Miller, born in this sleepy Caribbean resort nation of St. Kitts and Nevis 37 years ago, has been indicted in Miami federal court on charges of conspiring to use St. Kitts as a staging ground to ship hundreds of pounds of Colombian cocaine to the United States.

Miller insists that he has been targeted in a political plot after working for the U.S. government for years.

He would not confirm or deny during a telephone interview last week that he was once Connor. Asked about his testimony at the Shower Posse trial, Miller replied: “I was used by the Americans originally in Jamaica and all the politics stuff there in Miami, and I just don’t want to talk about it.”

Islands Become Haven for Drug Trafficking

But U.S. officials confirm that Miller is the man they once used as an informant and witness. And records on file at the legal registry in St. Kitts show that Cecil Connor officially changed his name to Charles Miller in July 1991.

U.S. officials said Miller slipped away from the U.S. federal witness-protection program several years ago.

In recent years, detectives from Scotland Yard, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and St. Kitts Royal Police have asserted that he has used knowledge he gained while working with U.S. law enforcement to corrupt this sleepy two-island nation and transform it into a haven for international drug trafficking--a charge Miller has denied in court appearances and several recent interviews.

“Drugs infiltrate everything,” said Police Commissioner Brian Reynolds, a Scotland Yard detective who was brought in by the St. Kitts government to run the department after its police superintendent was murdered in 1994. And Miller, he said, “is the lead individual.”

Added one U.S. official familiar with the case: “Miller is the most formidable of enemies. He is an incredibly manipulative, Machiavellian force. He knows all the angles. And he has brilliant intelligence about how our system works.”

The official, who asked not to be named, said Miller’s entry and apparent exit from the Justice Department’s highly secretive witness-protection program is “the exception to the rule,” adding: “If you fashion the rules to cater to the exceptions, you’re going to have bizarre and Byzantine rules.”

Details about Miller’s years in that program are, by law, secret. But official documents and court transcripts in New York, Florida, Jamaica and St. Kitts offer rich detail of how he--whether as Miller or as Connor--apparently played on both sides of the law to become what U.S. law-enforcement agencies now consider one of the Caribbean’s wiliest wanted men.

‘He Was a Smooth, Slick Individual’

Those transcripts show that when he took the stand in Miami nine years ago, he was clearly one of the U.S. government’s most valued witnesses--a prosecutors’ dream.

Just three weeks after Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Reich confirmed in a court document dated Jan. 5, 1989, that convicted drug trafficker Cecil Connor and his immediate family had been placed in the federal witness protection program, Connor delivered a windfall in return. He was the key to dismantling one of the most vicious Jamaican posses, heavily armed drug gangs that U.S. officials blamed for at least 1,000 murders in U.S. cities at the time.

Convicted and sentenced to five years in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine in upstate New York in August 1986, Connor testified that he started cooperating with U.S. authorities the following year. From the witness stand on Jan. 26, 1989, he gave daylong testimony that was instrumental in putting two leaders of one of the most notorious posses in federal prison for life.

“He was a smooth, slick individual. He was brilliant,” defense attorney Gaer recalled of Connor’s 1989 testimony in an interview last week. “He handled every question, everything we threw at him. He blew us out of the water. He devastated us. If the government had a witness like that in every case, they’d never lose.”

Connor testified in detail about how the posse shipped drugs into the Florida cities of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and West Palm Beach, then on to California, New York, Michigan and Washington, D.C.

He said he was present the day posse leaders opened fire with machine guns in a Florida crack house, killing five people--including a pregnant woman found in a praying position--and shooting the sole survivor in the mouth.

But District Court Judge Jose Gonzalez, who presided over the posse jury trial, allowed defense lawyers to probe deeply into Connor’s past.

At one point out of earshot of the jury, the judge noted from the bench: “It’s not uncommon to find in federal prosecutions that the government’s star witness is worse than the people on trial. But that’s a fact, and we have to live with that.”

Violent Past Readily Admitted

Under cross-examination, Connor readily admitted to his violent past in Jamaica, where, at 17, he was convicted of a jewelry store robbery in which he shot and wounded a clerk in the chest. He stated that he worked for an armed underground faction in the Labor Party of former Prime Minister Edward Seaga, a close U.S. ally in the fight against Cuba-inspired communism.

Asked by one defense attorney whether he was “a cold-blooded murderer,” Connor stated: “Well, if you want to put it that way, I have done certain things back in Jamaica while I was there. We all did. This was part of the things we do.”

Another defense attorney prodded: “You will never know what the electric chair feels like, will you?”

“Obviously not,” Connor said.

Soon after, Cecil Connor disappeared from public view.

On July 30, 1991, Connor’s name reappeared in an official document, perhaps for the last time. The legal registry in St. Kitts shows that on that date Cecil Emanuel Connor officially changed his name to Charles Emanuel Miller. He then became a budding entrepreneur.

He started distributing Pepsi products on the island and soon built a small business empire that now includes hotels and restaurants.

But three years after the name change, U.S. prosecutors in 1994 accused Miller of crossing to the wrong side of the law.

The federal case filed in Miami in 1995 charges Miller and three other men with conspiring to ship as much as a ton of cocaine into the United States between August and October 1994, using air-cargo companies they controlled in St. Kitts and Miami.

One of the four defendants pleaded guilty and testified last year against a second, Clifford Henry, who was convicted by a federal jury and sentenced to life in prison last February.

But Miller and the fourth man have successfully fought dogged U.S. efforts to extradite them in a case that has become a major political issue and polarized St. Kitts--one of several eastern Caribbean islands that the DEA has targeted as major new transshipment points for Colombian cocaine and heroin.

Throughout Miller’s weeklong extradition hearing here in August 1996, one of his four defense lawyers cast the U.S. government as a bully that considers its laws superior to those of St. Kitts.

In his own nation, Miller has been cleared of drug and jury-tampering charges and 1994 charges that he killed the son of a former deputy prime minister. Police say Miller also was implicated but never charged in the subsequent killing of the St. Kitts police superintendent who investigated the earlier murder.

“What do we have here, a crucifixion?” defense lawyer Fenton Ramsohoye asked the local magistrate during the extradition hearing.

Presenting the U.S. case, prosecutor Frederick Smith, a Barbadian lawyer and judge and one of the most experienced jurists in the Caribbean, called it “straightforward.”

He introduced hundreds of pages of witnesses’ affidavits and wiretap transcripts in an attempt to show that Miller owned half a ton of cocaine that landed on the island in September 1994, destined for the United States.

Praising local government officials for supporting the extradition bid, Smith closed his case by declaring: “The government of St. Kitts has shown courage and determination to clean this up. . . . I pray that you will get rid of this scourge.”

After two months of deliberation, Magistrate Haynes Blackman denied extradition and ruled Miller a free man in St. Kitts.

The magistrate said he found the transcripts “incomprehensible” and the affidavits weak. Yet much of that same evidence convinced a federal jury in Miami to convict Henry last year.

‘Death to the DEA’ Graffiti in Town

Blackman’s verdict is now under judicial review. But the case has left deep scars in St. Kitts, where Miller appears to be as respected as he is feared.

On the third anniversary of the police superintendent’s slaying last month, two decapitated dogs’ heads appeared on his grave, according to DEA officials, who added that they have seen “Death to the DEA” graffiti around town.

Local authorities and community leaders added that the case has sent the wrong signals to the islands’ youth.

“We’ve got some people here who are a law unto themselves,” Police Commissioner Reynolds said. “The youngsters see their lifestyles, and they want to emulate them.”

A DEA official in the region added that the appearance of impunity in the case “is what feeds and fosters the larger than life image that attracts the youngsters.”

“Our only hope,” he added, “is the court of public opinion.”