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THE
RISE AND FALL OF A
BY WILLIAM
NORRIS PREFACE Odyssey of an
Idiot Andrew Richard Barnes was a man who had everything: a
good education at an English public school, a fine physique, a beautiful wife
and a seemingly-assured future. He
was a skilled professional pilot who ran his own airline at the age of 21. Barnes was ultimately sentenced to seven years in the
federal prison at Lompoc, California. He
counted himself lucky to be there. As
the man who flew the very first shipment of cocaine for the Medellin Cartel into
the United States, and continued the dangerous trade for almost a full decade,
he survived crashes and gunfire, treachery and betrayal.
He also became the target of a determined assassination attempt by the
Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega - and lived to tell the tale. This is the story of Andrew Barnes' descent into hell;
how it happened, and what it was like to serve the cocaine barons whom he
ultimately betrayed. What
follows is the odyssey of an idiot. Albeit
an idiot with an I.Q. of 161. It is
a cautionary tale. CHAPTER 1 Andrew
and the flying pig Even
before the pig flew over the windshield, Andrew Barnes knew he had made a
mistake. This was not
the runway he was looking for. It wasn't a runway at all.
The brown strip rushing towards him in the landing lights of the twin-engined
Rockwell Turbo-Commander was nothing more than a rutted country lane.
The flickering lights that he had taken as threshold markers were
actually the headlamps of an ancient truck, jolting along and minding its own
business. "Oh, shit," said Andrew Barnes. There was no going back. Flaps
extended, nose high, the Turbo-Commander was committed to landing.
The engines screamed in fine pitch as they swallowed the last few gallons
of fuel in the tanks. The stall-warning horn blared in protest.
On the ground, an astonished Colombian farmer stood on his brakes and
lurched into a ditch as the monstrous shape skimmed the roof of his truck and
struck the road only yards ahead. "Hang on tight," shouted Barnes. Paralyzed with fear, his two passengers hardly needed
to be told. With a spine-
jarring jolt the main wheels touched and stayed down as the fully-stalled
aircraft fell out of the sky. The
nose dropped, and they watched with horrified fascination through the windshield
as the Turbo-Commander began a wild charge down the track. Barnes fought for control, stabbing at brakes and
rudder pedals, miraculously dodging the trees and bushes that flashed past the
wingtips. And then the
road turned. There was nowhere to
go. The aircraft left the path, crossed a ditch, smashed through a hedge, and
hurled itself into a farm yard. Startled
chicken scattered in all directions. And a pig flew over the windshield. With a final expensive crunch, the Turbo-Commander plunged its nose into a
wooden fence. And stopped.
* * * *
* Andrew Barnes told me that story on the first day we met.
It was not a chance encounter.
Some three weeks before I had had a telephone call from Michael Knipe,
then Foreign News Editor of The Times.
Michael, an old friend from my own days with that once-distinguished
newspaper, was calling to do me a favor.
At least, he hoped it was going to be a favor.
He sounded a trifle nervous. The Times man in New York, said Michael, had just been interviewing an odd
character who was one of the witnesses in the cocaine-smuggling trial of Carlos
Lehder, down in Miami. The
witness was an Englishman, now living in Pennsylvania, who had an extraordinary
tale to tell about the cocaine-smuggling business. Furthermore, he seemed to want it converted into a book, and
had asked the New York correspondent if he knew any good authors who might be
interested. The message had
been passed on to the Foreign Desk, and Michael had thought of me.
Nice of him. "What do you know about this guy?" I asked. Not a
lot, it turned out. Just that
his name was Barnes, that he had smuggled large quantities of cocaine for the
Medellin Cartel, and he was probably heading for a lengthy spell in prison.
From the sound of it, he deserved no less. At this point I knew no more about the Medellin Cartel than the next man;
merely what I had read in the press and seen on television.
But it was enough to induce revulsion. By all accounts, these were
unscrupulous crooks who had poisoned a continent and amassed a king's ransom in
the process. On the way they
had murdered scores of men who attempted to expose their conspiracy.
And some of those men, I now remembered with an odd churning in the pit
of my stomach, had been journalists.
From the tone of Michael's voice, clear across four thousand miles, I
could tell he was thinking the same thing. "Just thought you might be interested," he said rather lamely.
"I've got his telephone number if you want it." Why not? There was no
harm in having the option. I
scribbled down the number and sat looking at it pensively long after our
conversation ended. I
wondered about the personality of the man who lay behind that number, and I
wondered even more about his associates.
I had never met a drug smuggler; at least, not knowingly.
Curiosity did battle with prudence, and for the moment, prudence won. I pushed the slip of paper to one side and got on with
the rest of my life. It was not a good time for authoring in the Norris household.
In spite of splendid reviews for my last book and the sale of the film
rights to Hollywood, there was no prospect of a commission for the next one.
I was caught in the usual dilemma of the non-fiction writer: no publisher
will sign a contract and pay an advance without a fully-researched outline of
the project. But research involves
time and travel, and time and travel cost money.
That money ought to come from the publisher's advance - it is what
advances are supposed to be for - but in practice you cannot get one without
laying out large amounts of your own cash long before you see the check. Which is fine if you have it.
It was not the first time I had been in this Catch-22 situation, but try
as I might I could find no way out of it.
I ought, I thought, to give up the non-fiction trade and write novels
instead. The trouble was, I was not
very good at fiction. My passion of the moment was the Lindbergh kidnapping case.
Others, notably Ludovic Kennedy in his excellent book The
Airman and the Carpenter, had proved conclusively that Bruno Richard
Hauptmann was innocent of the crime, but no one had yet been able to identify
the true guilty party. I
believed I had a clue to his identity through newly-discovered evidence, but
believing it and proving it were two very different things. For months I had been chasing phantoms and spending money I could ill
afford in pursuit of the final truth.
I had even flown to Scotland to interview Betty Gow, the Lindbergh baby's
still-surviving nursemaid, only to have the door literally slammed in my face.
In the United States, too, hostility and evasion were greeting every
enquiry. I knew I was on the right trail, and that given sufficient
time and money, persistence would pay off in the end. Time, I had.
Money was a different matter.
As the days passed and the crock of gold at the end of my investigatory
rainbow grew no closer, I found my eyes drawn more and more to the scrap of
paper lying on my desk, and the telephone number of Andrew Richard Barnes.
Perhaps, after all, it was time to face reality; to put the Lindbergh
project on the back-burner and to tackle something which, on the face of it,
looked pretty straightforward.
Something, moreover, that ought not to cost an arm and a leg to research. My long-suffering agent in New York was mildly encouraging.
My wife, faced with the prospect of her middle-aged husband associating
with ruthless criminals, was appalled. Four
years of exposure to American television violence did not help.
"These people are worse than the Mafia," she said.
"You could get yourself killed." With some asperity, I pointed out that I had survived more dangerous
assignments in the past. I
had been under fire in Biafra, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique.
I had been in the thick of the Paris riots in May 1968.
By comparison, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with a drug smuggler was
pretty small beer. "You were younger and sillier then," she said. That did it. I rooted
out the scrap of paper and made the call.
Barnes seemed agreeable enough on the telephone, and more than willing to
meet with me. The time and
place could be of my choosing. I
pondered the question. Aside
from the fact that his house in Pennsylvania was a three hour drive from my home
in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, did I really want to stick my head in the
lion's mouth at this first meeting?
At least my own place boasted three large and faithful dogs of fearful
mien, plus, as a last resort, the family firearm.
There was the small problem of persuading my wife to accept a
drug-smuggler as a house guest but I hoped, correctly as it turned out, that
curiosity might win the day. "Come for the week-end," I said. During the intervening days, Betty and I speculated on what our guest
would look like. Suave and
sinister was the consensus of opinion.
Probably slim and dark-suited, with a palpable air of menace. We were certainly unprepared for the shy giant of a man
who unfolded himself from an ancient Ford Mustang in our driveway on that
Saturday in late April. Andrew Barnes was big. Very
big. He looked down at us from a
height of six foot three, and his chest strained at the buttons of his jacket.
There was some surplus fat there to be sure, but a hell of a lot of
muscle underneath it. The face was
bucolic. It was the
sort of face that belonged on an English farm-laborer; not on a drug smuggler.
The eyes were blue and, God damnit, they had a sort of innocence about
them. Barnes came towards us, a battered leather case in one hand, brushing the
hair from his eyes with the other. He
wore it long with a pronounced fringe, as though in memory of the Beatles, and I
became aware that the dogs had stopped barking. They were crowding round him, sniffing his legs
and showing every sign of pleasure as he bent down to pat them. Great, I thought.
The one time I invite a criminal to my home, and you silly bastards fawn
all over him. But they
were right. For all that he
had done, and it was plenty, there was no harm, no violence in Andrew Barnes.
A dog's judgement is not often wrong. We shook hands, and I made a mental note that his grip was firm and dry.
The hands themselves, though, were surprisingly small.
Smaller than my own. It
was as though they had stopped growing in his early teens, while the rest of his
physique burgeoned into manhood.
It was not the only thing about Andrew Barnes, I was to discover, that
betokened arrested development. His voice, too, was a surprise.
I had expected an English accent, perhaps similar to my own.
But what came out was a sort of mid-Atlantic twang, neither one thing nor
the other, but more American than not.
His speech, like his whole manner, was diffident.
Courteous and gentlemanly - an odd word to use in this context, but
totally appropriate - but with a sheepish air about him.
As we stumbled through the formalities and finally sat down in my study
to begin the first of many interviews, I came to realize that he was more
nervous than I. Every
few seconds he would take a comb and pass it through his perfectly-ordered hair,
like an errant schoolboy facing his headmaster and wondering what to do with his
hands. But he could talk. Oh
my, how he could talk. At
first, as names and dates and places poured out in an unrelenting stream, I
began to wonder if he was not too articulate.
Was it possible that this was a well-rehearsed tale being recounted for
my benefit; a fictional farrago concocted with the object of making big bucks
out of the book? If so, I thought
wryly, this guy is singularly ignorant about the rewards of authorship, let
alone the Son of Sam laws. Slowly, I came to realize two things.
First, his astonishing power of recall was largely due to the fact that
he had just spent weeks and months being grilled by agents from the FBI and the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, not to mention sundry lawyers while he stood on
the witness stand in Miami. Second, and more important, Andrew Barnes was using me as a confessor.
In terms of his atonement, going to jail and paying the price was not
enough. He was inwardly driven to tell the story of his misdeeds in
the utmost detail to the widest possible audience. There was no altruism in it.
He was not out to educate the young and prevent them falling into the
same trap. At root, he neither knew nor cared whether his revelations would have any
effect on the long term future of the drug trade. All that mattered to Andrew Barnes at this
point in time was to get the whole thing off his chest so that he might, one
day, make a fresh start.
In short, he needed to cleanse his soul. I am no psychologist, still less a priest, and the reader must judge as
the story unfolds whether such a public mea
culpa is justified. When
it comes to evil intent, having got to know Andrew Barnes rather well, I will
vouch for the fact that he is not in the same league as the man he met on a
Florida airfield on December 26, 1977...... (The
rest of this book is available on www.WordWrangler.com)
- Bill Norris |