When Seal was convicted of smuggling charges, he became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and testified in several major drug trials. In 2017, Seal's life became the subject of a second Hollywood adaptation titled American Made and starred Tom Cruise. In the American Made movie, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) crash lands a plane in a suburban neighborhood in an effort to escape the DEA who ordered him to land. Plumlee also said he is in the infamous "Mexico City" picture, seated across the table from Seal and peering out from behind his jacket. . They were all sentenced to life in prison. Set in the early 1980s, to combat the spread of communism . At Guste's request, Meese launched an investigation to determine whether or not attorneys in Louisiana, Miami, and Washington had mishandled the case, and to determine whether or not Seal should have been forced into protective custody. "Tom did all his own flying in the movie," says Liman. He was murdered on February 19, 1986 by contract killers hired by the cartel. FAIRs work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. [52], Six Colombians were quickly arrested in connection with the murder. All three trials resulted in convictions for all defendants. A witness identified Vlez as the driver of the vehicle in the halfway house parking lot. No other name is perhaps more associated with the Iran-Contra affair than Oliver North, but his involvement in exposing Barry Seal's mission and blowing his cover is unknown and entirely speculation. September 29, 2017 12:18 PM EDT. In Tom Cruise's latest film he plays the pilot, drug smuggler, and informant Barry Seal. Seal was assigned to the Salvation Army's Community Treatment Center in Baton Rouge.[48]. Questioned about the identity of the source, DEA agent Ernst Jacobson replied, "I heard that the leak came from an aide in the White House". [32], However, the Nicaragua undercover operation came to an end soon after Seal's return from his second trip when it was reported in the press. The second marriage, to Lynn Ross, lasted from 1971 to 1972. And though the tale of Barry Seal - drug smuggler, double-crosser, pilot extraordinaire - has now been transformed into a raucous Hollywood caper with Tom Cruise at the helm, the true story would be too . Embracing his entrepreneurial spirit, as a teenager he started a small business flying ads from his airplane. We rely on your support to keep running. In American Made, facts matter less than fiction. Wouldn't it be fun if they were fooling around in a plane and the plane went into the same kind of parabolic arc and they got pinned against the ceiling?" It was Reaves who provided Seal with his first connection to the Medelln cartel. Despus de haber trabajado como piloto de TWA, la mayor. In the least, his exploits with the CIA and agent Monty Schafer in the movie are largely fictional and based on speculation. Cruise's Seal gathers intelligence by flying low over Guatemala and Nicaragua and snapping photos from his plane. "Barry Seal was a friend of mine," Plumlee says. Adler Berriman Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, 1986), better known as Barry Seal, was a United States drug smuggler and aircraft pilot who flew covert flights for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Medelln Cartel. When you see the photos, you will understand why. Synopsis. The state narcotics agents who were investigating Seal in Baton Rouge sued over their depiction in the series, but the lawsuit was dismissed. It alleges, explicitly and implicitly, that an aircraft operated by a CIA front company in 1984 used the airfield at Mena, Arkansas, as a stating point for weapons supply flights to the Contras in Nicaragua; on the return flights from Honduras, the aircraft allegedly carried illegal narcotics to Mena. The movie's loose interpretation of the true story is echoed in the trailer when a voice-over by Tom Cruise as Barry Seal tells us that only "some of this sh*t really happened." American Made is a fascinating biopic about Barry Seal, a commercial pilot who worked with the CIA to run drugs and guns in South America. Barry Seal was an ace pilot and a drug smuggler of such proportions that he has been called "the biggest drug smuggler in American History". Both rejected any deals, even though Seal told them a little about his involvement with the Ochoa family. Hahn was part of the task force that pursued Seal in the 1980s. Seal was originally introduced to the Medelln cartel members as a pilot named Ellis McKenzie. The incredible story of Barry Seal - the man who worked for both the CIA and Pablo Escobar. Barry met Debbie while he was on his way to a hearing after he was caught in 1972 trying to smuggle military explosives out of the country. Despite the heat surrounding Seal, he made a drug run to Nicaragua in 1984, where he picked up 1,465 pounds of cocaine and took photos of Sandinista soldiers loading the drugs. If he had in fact been working for the CIA at the time, his connections didn't get him off the hook. Later, the CIA turns a blind eye to his drug smuggling in exchange for his delivery of . . According to the Washington Post, Seal earned as much as $1.5 million per flight, and by the end, he had accumulated up to $100 million. 4 - July/August, Iran-Contra Affair. From the get-go, he was a talented aviator, and before he graduated from high school in 1957, Seal had earned his private pilot wings. [23], These arrangements were not yet complete, so Seal's first shipment was to be a direct flight to the U.S. Among other things, the panel sought to determine if top leaders of the Colombian cocaine cartel escaped arrest because the much ballyhooed war on drugs took a back seat to a covert operation designed to discredit the Nicaraguan government this at a time when the administration was seeking additional aid to the Contras. -Vulture. [37], In February, Seal also played a central role in an undercover operation against Norman Saunders, chief minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a former British colony south of the Bahamas. This operation involved a long, complicated cocaine shipment from Bolivia, refueling in Colombia, refueling again in Texas, and delivering the cocaine in Las Vegas. The Charmed, Doomed Life of Barry Seal. The DEA had been informed before the publication of the Jacoby article, so they were still able to have Seal set up a meeting with the chief cartel supervisor in Miami, Carlos Bustamonte, and arrested him on July 17, along with other cartel employees. In his address, Reagan talks about a photo taken by a hidden camera on Barry Seal's plane. American Made (2017) The Real Barry Seal (Universal Pictures) . On Feb. 19, 1986, Barry Seal, a very prominent CIA drug smuggler and ace pilot, was murdered outside his halfway house in Baton Rouge, LA. "Doug and I are both aviators, so we both love to fly.". On his return to the U.S., Seal landed at Homestead Air Force Base and the drugs were transferred into a Winnebago camper, which Seal turned over to his Colombian contact. He carries it around and begins spending it, which attracts the attention of the local authorities. The Haunting Story Of How Sylvia Plath Died And The Tragic Events That Led Up To It, Amateur Metal Detectorist Unearths A 500-Year-Old Pendant Celebrating Henry VIII's First Marriage, What Stephen Hawking Thinks Threatens Humankind The Most, 27 Raw Images Of When Punk Ruled New York, Join The All That's Interesting Weekly Dispatch. The film stars Tom Cruise as Barry . Barry Seal with his Wife Deborah DeBois and their kids. In 1961, he joined the Louisiana Army National Guard and served with the 20th Special Forces Group for six years. [4], Seal admitted that he started smuggling small amounts of marijuana by air in early 1976. Unfortunately, this meant that angry cartel members would know exactly where to find him. [18] Jacobsen was impressed with Seal's connections, especially the ones with the Ochoa family, and on March 28, Seal signed a letter agreeing to serve as a DEA informant. This, transporting cocaine for the Ochoa brothers, Pablo Escobar's associates who helped him found the Medelln Cartel. Particularly suspicious is the role of Federico Vaughn, the supposed Sandinista official, who appears to have been a US spy all along. Barry arrived that evening at approximately 6 p.m. and backed his white Cadillac into a parking space. The ultimate hope was to arrest the cartel leaders in a jurisdiction where it would be easy to extract them. Polozola took the occasion to say that people like Seal were "the lowest, most despicable people I can think of." No one has been able to tell us". He took it out for a test flight and never came back." CBS Evening News (7/28/88), the only major network to cover the proceedings, reported on the testimony of DEA agent Ernest Jacobsen, who said that White House officials undermined a DEA probe of the Colombian cocaine kingpins by blowing an undercover informants cover when they leaked information in an attempt to link Nicaragua to the drug trade. An FBI sting. However, some still allege the opposite, that the government turned a blind eye to Seal's drug running in order to use him to deliver weapons to the Nicaraguan rebels. No. [39] Seal attempted to push back against the investigation by appearing in a television news series broadcast by WBRZ in Baton Rouge in November 1984. The gunman was later identified as Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz. Liman has referred to the film as "a fun lie based on a true story" (TIME). For example . Alder Berriman, or Barry Seal, was one of America's most notorious drug smugglers. The photo was in a cardboard frame of the kind used by nightclubs and tourist attractions, with the date it was taken, January 22,1963, stamped on the back. And Tomas Borges, the Ortega brothers equivalent of the Gestapo chief, was one of the overseers of drug shipments of planeloads destined to Mena air strip, in Arkansas, in 1983. -Daily Mail Online. . He testified that in January 1986, he was ordered by Jorge Ochoa to kill Seal. He ultimately offered to act as an informant, passing along information about Escobar, the Medelln cartel, and high-level government officials in Central America who were involved in trafficking drugs to the U.S. As author Del Hahn states in his book about Barry Seal's life, Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal, there is no evidence to support claims that Barry Seal worked for the CIA. -Daily Mail Online. After refueling, Seal left Los Brasiles flying without lights, and when he came close to Managua, he was fired on by Nicaraguan military units. In 1981, he was making daily deposits of $50,000 into an account at a bank in the Bahamas. Yes. The unnamed embassy official, according to Hughes, was among the group of U.S. officials recently expelled by the Nicaraguan government after a violent political demonstrations in July. The most important witnesses were Max Mermelstein and Luis Carlos Uribe-Munera. [7], To expand his smuggling capacity, Seal also hired William Bottoms, his ex-brother-in-law, as a pilot. Seal took a blurry snapshot which purported to show himself with a high-level Nicaraguan official named Federico Vaughn, and a Colombian drug czar unloading bags of cocaine at an airstrip in Nicaragua. Pablo . . In court documents, the family alleged that "lapses in planning, coordinating, scheduling, and flight safety" contributed to the fatal crash in the mountains of Colombia. Vasquez was identified as the purchaser of the halfway house vehicle by the car agency salesman and paid for hotel rooms and rental cars using his name. Mermelstein, who had told the DEA of the murder contract after his arrest in 1985, testified that Ochoa, Escobar, and Cardona had asked him to take the contract and provided him with money and weapons to do the job. In yet another conspiracy-stoking morsel, the C-123 used by Seal was the same one later piloted by Eugene Hasenfus when he was shot down over Nicaragua while piloting illegal U.S. arms shipments . But the 1984 investigation got derailed when Seal told his handlers that cocaine was being trans-shipped through Nicaragua with the permission of high-level government officials. Regardless, Jacoby's article led to the abandonment of the final piece of Barry Seal's undercover operation. In 1973, he married Deborah DuBois. President Reagan displayed Seals photo in a nationally televised speech in March 1986. There is no real-life Monty. Watch an interview with the real Barry Seal where he discusses his undercover mission, and listen to President Ronald Reagan talk about the photos Seal obtained on the mission. Basically, Seal would fly over the guns and smuggle back drugs on his return trip. He soon told the task force about the contract, and Seal was informed that the cartel was offering $500,000 for his death. The flight, in January 1985, was successful and led to arrests and convictions. This past weekend, American Made lost out on the top box office spot in a neck and neck race with It, missing first place by a scant $300,000 . What Journalists, Scholars and Activists Are Saying, The State Department Versus US Reporters in El Salvador, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. The Original Documentary By Barry Seal Uncovering His Work With The Cartels & The US Government. When asked who his source was, Jacoby implied that it was "an aide in the White House" and that Oliver North had the most motivation to release the information. No of Kids with Barry: Dean, Aaron, and Christina Seal. Undercover cameras installed on Seal's plane captured photos on the tarmac of a Nicaraguan airport. This leads to the CIA recruiting him to take reconnaissance photos in Central America. Universal Pictures. She is a brunette, not a blond like Sarah Wright's character in the movie. I was young and it was impressive." A principio de los aos 80 comenz a estar al servicio del Cartel de Medelln para transportar la cocana y en 1984 le . [31], The DEA plan was to keep Seal working with the cartel on other parts of the supply chain, such as moving cocaine base into Nicaragua from Colombia and inspecting smuggling airfields in Mexico and the U.S. 1988 Ed. [2] He was assassinated in 1986, a hit rumoured to have been ordered by George H. W. Bush, whose personal telephone number was found on . When Seal landed in the airfield, he was immediately surrounded by armed soldiers. Watch President Ronald Reagan's address to the nation on Nicaragua and Central America, delivered from the Oval Office on November 13, 1986. [30] Unfortunately, the driver was arrested by local police, and the circumstances of the seizure raised the suspicions of the cartel. The DEA agreed to put surveillance equipment on Barry Seals plane and track him on his next flight to Central America. [50] He had seen Cardona test-fire the murder weapon in Mermelstein's garage and bullets that matched the murder weapon were later extracted from the garage wall by FBI forensics. Facing a heavy sentence, and having been rejected by regional drug task forces in both Florida and Louisiana, Seal decided to try contacting the Vice President's Drug Task Force, a special program in the office of then-Vice President George Bush. Tom Cruise got his pilot's license in 1994. It turns out Barry flew the plane all the way back to the United States. No. He was the primary witness in three trials: the trial of Saunders and the other Turks and Caicos officials in July; the trial of the cartel distributors in Miami in August; the trial of the cartel distributors who had arranged the shipment of cocaine from Bolivia to Las Vegas, also in August. The box housing the camera was supposed to be soundproof, but when he took the first picture, it was loud enough for everyone to hear. He also provided testimony that led to drug charges against high-level government officials in Nicaragua and Turks and Caicos. Daniel Rennie is a freelance writer residing in Melbourne, Australia. And by 1978, according to The Gentlemans Journal, he had moved on to cocaine. [38], While Seal had come to an agreement with the DEA and the Florida drug task force in March 1984, he was still under active investigation by state and federal authorities in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Little Rock, Arkansas. He stated that IranContra figure Oliver North had attended two meetings about the sting operation and had the motivation to release the information. Wikimedia CommonsTom Cruise portrays Barry Seal in the 2017 film American Made.. He hands wads of cash to a kid on a bike, telling the boy, "You never saw me." Also, before the agreement was reached, the Louisiana task force investigation had been looking into Seal's involvement in smuggling thousands of kilograms of cocaine. Three of them, Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz, Miguel Vlez, and Bernardo Antonio Vsquez, were indicted on state charges for capital murder. He received a phone call from Fabio Ochoa and Escobar, who both thanked him for his help, and was given $100,000 for any costs he incurred. [22] The Colombian government had recently conducted a major raid on the cartel's manufacturing facilities at a remote jungle location called Tranquilandia, and they told Seal that they were making arrangements to set up shipping and production facilities in Nicaragua, where they had struck a deal with the Sandinista government. He is familiar with Barry's work as a pilot, but . -Daily Mail Online, No. An "extensive joint investigation" by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for "smuggling activity" from late 1980 until March 1984, according to . WASHINGTON . -Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal, Yes. Yes. Barry Seal was one of the biggest drug smugglers in America in the 1970s and 80s. That film finds Seal (portrayed by Michael Par) being assassinated in a motorcycle drive-by shooting while he is driving and Robert Mazur (Cranston) is his passenger. The real Barry Seal claimed he had been working for agencies . In the movie, Lucy's brother JB (Caleb Landry Jones) steals money from Barry (Tom Cruise). Discerning fact from fiction about Barry Seal, who was killed Feb. 19, 1986, in Baton Rouge by machine gun-wielding Colombian hit men, is a difficult endeavor. . Seal's exploits brought him into close contact with infamous figures like Medelln cartel kingpins Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa and Panama dictator Manuel Noriega and he was . In 1988, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing that looked into how Seal's 1984 trip to Nicaragua was leaked to the press. "I fly airplanes. The White House saw the pictures as proof of the communist Sandinista government's corruption and believed that the photos would help to convince the public of the need to support and arm the rebels (Contras) in Nicaragua. But the CIA were determined. The Nevada aviator killed when a cargo plane was shot down in Nicaragua last weekend served as one of the CIA's chief pilots in . In fact, it was Seal who provided the DEA with the photos of Escobar that exposed him as a major drug kingpin. American Made is one of many "so crazy, it must be real" stories that have hit Hollywood in the form of a major action movie in recent years. [28], Seal returned to the Los Brasiles airfield in Nicaragua on June 25. Their operation proved so successful that Seal was at one time considered the biggest drug smuggler in Louisiana state. On June 29, General Paul F. Gorman, US Military Commander Southern Command, made a speech stating the US had evidence that elements of the Nicaraguan government were involved in drug smuggling, though Gorman did not mention Seal or the undercover flights. As part of his reduced sentence, the judge had ordered Barry to spend his nights, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., at a Salvation Army halfway house for six months. [20], The Florida Task Force plan called for Seal to set up a cocaine purchase with the Ochoas and other cartel members, providing the basis for indictments in the U.S. Seal had previously dealt with the cartel through another associate so that they were unaware of his real name. They married in 1974. MIAMI (AP) _ The plane downed in Nicaragua had been used in Vietnam, a TV movie and possibly in an undercover drug sting that led to the indictment of a Sandinista official, newspapers reported today. . [55] The trial began in April 1987. However, when a drug shipment was seized by the DEA, the Medellin Cartel blamed Seal for the loss. "He would tell me, 'I'm going to such and such places,' and I wouldn't see him for days. [3] Seal's career with TWA ended in July 1972, when he was arrested for involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle a shipment of plastic explosives to Mexico using a DC-4. Two weeks after his argument with Vice President GHW Bush, Barry Seal was pumped full of bullets and murdered outside his Baton Rouge halfway house on Feb. 19, 1986. Considering . Ochoa was arrested in Spain on a U.S. warrant, but due to pressure from the cartel was never extradited to the U.S. -Court Documents (STATE of Louisiana v. Miguel VELEZ, Bernardo Vasquez, and Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz), Yes. The photograph taken by Barry Seal that outed Pablo Escobar as the Medelln cartels drug kingpin. [29], The drugs could not be distributed, and the immediate arrest of those handling the vehicle would suggest to the Colombians that Seal had betrayed them, so DEA agents staged an accident with the camper, allowing the driver to escape. I never saw drugs, that's for sure." [56] Mermelstein also knew the defendant Vlez. Barry Seal. Saunders was videotaped paying a bribe to Seal in Miami, and was also successfully prosecuted. Concurrently, they had to make sure not to raise the suspicions of the ruthless Colombian drug lords. Doug Liman had previously modeled Chris Cooper's villain in The Bourne Identity after North, which reveals Liman's feelings about the controversial figure North. Barry Seal's apparent piloting of a JFK assassin getaway plane points, again, to Bush Sr. and his cronies (the Biderman part of the DuPont family, Rockefellers, and more). . [60] All three men's fingerprints were found in the vehicle. TwitterBarry Seal, the drug smuggler-turned-DEA informant who helped take down Pablo Escobar. Adler Berriman Seal, o como era mejor conocido Barry Seal, naci en Baton Rouge, Louisiana, el 16 de julio de 1939.Sus padres fueron Mary Lou y Benjamin Curtis Seal. In exploring the American Made true story, we discovered that Doug Liman's father, lawyer Arthur L. Liman, ran the Senate investigation into Iran-Contra. [40], Soon after the broadcast, the heads of the Florida and Louisiana task forces met to work out an agreement that would allow Seal to continue working with the Florida task force and testify as a witness at trial. Not all of Barry Seal's heirs were happy with the making of the movie. According to Del Hahn's book Smuggler's End, Barry Seal was not chummy with the cartel bosses. The story included the photograph Seal had taken of Escobar handling the cocaine. Barry Seal (Photo: Facebook) . Source - educationforum.ipbhost.com "Texas Gov. A DC-4 was seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport loaded with almost seven tons of plastic C-4 explosives, 7,000 feet of explosive primer cord and 2,600 electric blasting caps. While there, he had a chance meeting with Jorge Ochoa's New Orleans business manager. -The Independent, In the movie, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) starts working for the Medelln Cartel after they abduct him while he is refueling his plane and then make him an offer he can't refuse. The Florida sentence meant no jail time for Seal in Louisiana, yet Seal was pleading guilty to buying 200 kilograms of cocaine, already more serious than the Florida charges. All three were found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. Tom Cruise is moving on from his Mummy -fied adventures in 2017, with his next big release, American Made, hitting theaters soon. [15] The investigation into Seal was part of a major undercover operation called Operation Screamer in which over 80 pilots were eventually indicted. They had anticipated Seal would serve substantial time in Florida and were now bound by the agreement Florida and Louisiana drug task forces had made in December 1984.