U.S. Facing Trial to Build Case Against Alleged Drug Lord

It took U.S. authorities more than a decade to bring Vivian Blake to trial: five years to find him in his native Jamaica and another five in court fighting for the extradition of the man they say headed a brutal Jamaican drug posse.

Now comes the hard part.

As federal prosecutors here prepare to try Blake, who was finally extradited from Jamaica last month, they face the daunting task of rebuilding an old case against him without their star witness--a man who has become the subject of a U.S. extradition campaign himself.

According to federal court records in Fort Lauderdale, the case against Blake and other alleged members of the Shower Posse--so named because it sprayed its many victims, from Los Angeles to New York, with machine-gun fire--turns on the testimony of convicted drug trafficker Cecil Connor, who was instrumental in helping to win the convictions of posse members in past trials.

“He was brilliant,” defense attorney Seymour Gaer said of Connor, recalling his performance on the witness stand against members of the posse whom Gaer was defending in a 1989 trial here. “If the government had a witness like that in every case, they’d never lose.”

But the government doesn’t have Connor anymore. In fact, law enforcement agents say Connor has become an even worse nightmare for U.S. prosecutors than Blake, the last accused leader to face trial among 34 posse members indicted in 1988.

In the years since that 1989 trial, Connor entered the U.S. witness-protection program, legally changed his name to Charles Miller and moved back to his homeland, St. Kitts, where U.S. and British anti-drug agents say he has become one of the Caribbean’s biggest cocaine smugglers.

Miller was indicted on cocaine trafficking charges in Miami in 1995 and has been the target of a U.S. extradition bid ever since.

Without Miller, “I don’t think they have a case against Vivian Blake,” contended Blake’s defense lawyer, David P. Rowe, who stressed that his client, unlike Miller, has never been convicted of any crime here or in Jamaica.

Officially, federal prosecutors in Miami declined comment on how Miller’s fugitive status will affect their case against Blake, who is charged with racketeering, drug trafficking and murder. Privately, U.S. law enforcement agents have insisted that Miller will never be offered another deal in exchange for his testimony.

Sources familiar with the posse cases say there are other potential witnesses against Blake. But they concede that none would have the impact of Miller, who, as Connor, testified in chilling detail about the Shower Posse’s drug trafficking and killing.

As both sides prepare for trial, attorney Rowe fired the opening salvo in a motion filed in court this week, alleging that the government’s evidence “lacks credibility, in that it comes from alleged co-conspirators or from persons who have been convicted of serious criminal offenses in the United States.”

Rowe added that Blake, 44, who has spent the past five years in a Jamaican prison while fighting extradition, is neither a murderer nor a drug dealer but rather “a businessman and a screenplay writer” who has completed more than 15 plays.

In half-page ads that Blake himself bought in Jamaican newspapers shortly before his extradition, the former jeweler stated that the entire case against him hangs on Miller, who “is a free man, [while] I am suffering in my own country, where I have never done anything wrong.”

Describing himself as a community leader in the Tivoli Gardens slum of the capital, Kingston, Blake added that his only offense was growing up with and befriending killers and drug dealers.

Blake would appear to have found at least one sympathetic ear, however unlikely--that of the federal judge who presided over the 1989 posse trial.

Commenting out of earshot of the jury during Connor’s testimony in that trial, U.S. District Court Judge Jose Gonzalez, who officially recused himself from the Blake case without explanation this week, said of the witness-turned-fugitive now known as Miller:

“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 too. But I always find that amazing.”