War on Drugs: Day of Reckoning

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It is just after 8 a.m. on Sept. 23, 1985. Ken Kennedy, assistant special agent in charge of Miami's Drug Enforcement Administration office, is cruising down I-75, the Everglades Parkway, in his big blue Olds Delta 88. Over his two-way radio, Kennedy hears the squawk of an Air Force Black Hawk helicopter that is tracking a drug-laden plane from Colombia. The dope runner decides to land his plane on an unfinished section of I-75, not far from where Kennedy happens to be. "The copter guys are yelling, 'We have him!' " recalls Kennedy. "And I'm looking everywhere trying to find this guy."

Kennedy snaps on his blue roof light and hits the gas. Within minutes, he reaches the Cessna 441. Its props are still turning, but the pilot has fled into the dense, swampy undergrowth. Dressed for the office in a suit and loafers, Kennedy pulls a Walther PPK from his ankle holster and gamely wades in, immediately losing a shoe to the muck. Reinforcements soon join him, and the search goes on for hours. Though the pilot manages to evade them, Kennedy and his colleagues seize nearly a ton of cocaine from the abandoned plane.

They didn't know it then, but that was the start of one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of U.S. law enforcement: the capture and prosecution of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, head of the Panama Defense Forces and "Maximum Leader" of his country. The Cessna's pilot, captured four months later, provided the first testimony linking the strongman to drug running. On Sept. 3, almost six years after that steamy chase, Noriega will walk into downtown Miami's federal courthouse to face a 12-count indictment. He is charged with taking $4.6 million in payoffs between 1981 and 1986 and turning Panama into the ultimate full-service center for Colombian drug lords, offering everything from secure landing strips and labs to money laundering and passports for dealers on the run. If convicted on all 12 counts, Noriega faces 145 years' imprisonment and $1,145,000 in fines.

Noriega's court appearance will be all the more amazing because few expected to see him stand trial when the indictments first came down in 1988. The State Department, with President Reagan's approval, tried to negotiate his quick departure from power by offering to drop charges. But Noriega wouldn't budge. On Dec. 20, 1989, in what was probably the most destructive and expensive manhunt in history, George Bush launched a full-scale invasion of, Panama. Two weeks later, wearing a nondescript T shirt and handcuffs, Noriega was whisked to Miami, where his pockmarked face and glassy-eyed gaze were captured in a police mug shot of Prisoner No. 41586. For the first time in history, the U.S. was about to try the leader of a foreign country.

For the past 20 months, Noriega has been awaiting trial in what has been dubbed the Dictator's Suite, a two-room cell behind rows of barbed wire at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, south of Miami. In accordance with the Geneva Conventions, he is considered a prisoner of war and thus receives 80 Swiss francs (U.S.$50) a month from the U.S. government -- more than enough to pay for a steady supply of his favorite cookies, Oreos. He spends his time studying classified documents, talking on his government-tapped phone and watching Spanish-language soap operas. Like many a cornered scoundrel, he claims to have undergone a sudden religious conversion.