No. -Vulture.com, Yes. Oct. 10, 1986 12 AM PT. Author Del Hahn, a former FBI agent who wrote the book about Seal titled Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal, told Vice, "Seal thought he was smarter and cleverer than the Ochoas," who are one of the founding families of the Medelln Cartel. He ultimately escaped prosecution, and some believe this was because he was secretly working as an informant for the CIA, though there is no real proof that he ever worked for the agency. [6] Also, after his release from prison Seal met William Roger Reaves on the flight back to the U.S. Seal told friends that the judge "made me a clay pigeon. 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. 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 . [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. Some stories are stranger than fiction. WASHINGTON . 'Barry Seal - Traficante Americano' estreia em Portugal esta quinta-feira, dia 31 de agosto. He wasn't. Barry Seal's smuggling operation began in Louisiana, and like in the American Made movie, he sometimes pushed packed duffel bags full of drugs out of his plane and into the Atchafalaya basin, to be collected by associates on the ground. He didn't meet Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers in person until 1984, after his arrest when he was working as an informant for the DEA on an undercover operation. . [42], Following his testimony in the Miami trials, Seal appeared in Florida court again over his second indictment in the Big Screamer operation. His non-active duty was served in the 245th Engineer Battalion, where his MOS was radio telephone operator. If not, they would continue on to drop sites over the Louisiana bayou, where duffel bags full of cocaine were tossed into the swamp. This operation involved a long, complicated cocaine shipment from Bolivia, refueling in Colombia, refueling again in Texas, and delivering the cocaine in Las Vegas. American Made (2017) The Real Barry Seal (Universal Pictures) . 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. [59], In January 2023, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards denied Vsquez's request for clemency. Yes. [33], A more detailed account of American efforts in Nicaragua appeared on July 17 in an article by reporter Edmond Jacoby, published on the front page of the Washington Times. The second marriage, to Lynn Ross, lasted from 1971 to 1972. 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. Yet, some believe that Seal was working for the CIA in the 1980s to fly guns and money to Nicaraguan rebels, a detail that the movie embraces. [30] Unfortunately, the driver was arrested by local police, and the circumstances of the seizure raised the suspicions of the cartel. Yes. When shot down Sunday, the plane reportedly was carrying 50,000 rounds of ammunition for Soviet-made AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, dozens of automatic rifles, boots and other supplies . He made more than $50 million smuggling drugs into the United States from South America between 1977 and 1986. . The story included the photograph Seal had taken of Escobar handling the cocaine. Hed get in his plane and hed go down there and throw 1,000 kilos on the plane and come back to Louisiana.. It was probably shortly before the operation or thereabouts when he was enlisted to give us proof that the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was actually . [44], When Seal received only time served and probation, Louisiana state and federal drug investigators were faced with a dilemma. Covers; Columnists; . As a progressive group, we believe that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information. 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. Barry Seal liked to use pay phones. -The Independent, Not likely. A Baton Rouge, Louisiana native, Barry Seal was eventually forced to move his drug smuggling operation after he drew the attention of Louisiana authorities. "We're talking about one of the largest drug smugglers in America, and these agents loved him." This led to photos of key Nicaraguan government officials . When it did, the overloaded plane crashed at the Colombia airfield on takeoff. He was murdered on February 19, 1986 by contract killers hired by the cartel. It was in 1973, the year that followed the end of his second marriage that Seal got married to Deborah DuBois and they . No one has been able to tell us". His first marriage, to Barbara Dodson, lasted from 1963 to 1971. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, . [59] Another eyewitness saw Quintero-Cruz outside the car, handing the MAC-10 to the car driver through the window after the murder. 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. [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. -Daily Mail Online, No. New York, NY 10001. "I helped rig that camera on the 123." (The C-123 "Fat Lady" was the aircraft Seal used on a government-sanctioned drug run to Nicaragua.) When faced with criminal prosecution, Seal turned snitch for the DEA, but he continued to smuggle drugs into the US. 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. [60] All three men's fingerprints were found in the vehicle. 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. Seal made important connections while in prison in Honduras, including Emile Camp, a fellow Louisiana pilot and smuggler who became one of Seal's closest associates, and Ellis McKenzie, a local Honduran smuggler. In American Made, facts matter less than fiction. [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 case against the cartel had been engineered by Barry Seal, a convicted drug dealer turned informant who worked closely with Vice President George Bush's anti-drug task force in Washington. "One day Barry came in and said there was a contract on him - half a million dead, a million alive," says widow Debbie Seal. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 February 19, 1986) was an American commercial airline pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel. Embracing his entrepreneurial spirit, as a teenager he started a small business flying ads from his airplane. Soon, Seal caught the attention of none other than Pablo Escobar and his Medelln cartel. 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. Helicopters would pick up the contraband and transport it to off-loading sites and then on to Ochoa distributors in Miami by car or truck. In reality, there is no evidence that Seal was ever involved with the CIA. 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). Despite differences in body type To mCruise is not the 300-pound man that the Medelln cartel referred to as El Gordo, or Fat Man Seal was just as charismatic and took many of the extreme risks portrayed in the film. They agreed to a sentence for Seal's Louisiana activities no greater than the sentence he received for his Florida smuggling, with both sentences to run concurrently. Starring Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Copyright 2023 HistoryvsHollywood.com, CTF Media, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. "Barry Seal, the charismatic narcotics air smuggler of the early . [65] In an interview with Frontline, North said he was told by his superiors on the National Security Council to brief Senator Paula Hawkins about the operation, but he denied leaking the report. ", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barry_Seal&oldid=1141963050, Drug Enforcement Administration informants, People murdered by Colombian organized crime, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Seal is portrayed by the actor Sebastin Snchez in, Seal is portrayed by theater director Thaddeus Phillips under his real name also of his nickname Ellis McKenzie in the 2013 TV series, This page was last edited on 27 February 2023, at 20:01. Seals career as a pilot for Trans World Airlines crashlanded in 1974 when he was caught trying to smuggle explosives to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. Set in the year 1978, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) works as a pilot for Trans World Airlines. No. As a child in the 1950s, Seal worked odd jobs around the citys old airport in exchange for flight time. The plane Seal acquired was a C-123K, a large aircraft used primarily for military transport. This leads to the CIA recruiting him to take reconnaissance photos in Central America. Hed work at the drop of a hat, and he didnt care, a fellow smuggler later recalled of Seal. It is believed that the Colombians put a hit out on Barry after they learned he was going to help the feds with the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain, one of the heads of the Medelln Cartel. Hahn was part of the task force that pursued Seal in the 1980s. Yes. -Daily Mail Online. The Nicaragua drug story first appeared in the Washington Times (7/17/84) and was immediately given big play by all the major papers, wire services and TV networks. [14], By 1981, DEA agents in Florida were aware of Seal's smuggling activities. [34] Although not a complete account, it gave enough information to spell an end to Seal's work with the cartel, and to the DEA's hopes of capturing the cartel leaders outside of Colombia. Although Seals first foray into smuggling failed, by 1975, he had started trafficking marijuana between the U.S. and Central and South America. Despus de haber trabajado como piloto de TWA, la mayor. What is certain is that Barry Seal did work for Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas as a drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel and single-handedly had one of the largest impacts on the cocaine epidemic in the U.S. in the early 1980s. Seal frequently smuggled 1,000 to 1,500 kilos of the illicit substance between Nicaragua and Louisiana, and he quickly earned a reputation in the world of drug trafficking. Things became worse when a report in the Washington Times on July 17 . Watch President Ronald Reagan's address to the nation on Nicaragua and Central America, delivered from the Oval Office on November 13, 1986. 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 . Soon, Seal relocated his smuggling operations to Mena, Arkansas. Barry Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, 1986), was a drug smuggler and aircraft pilot who flew covert flights for the FBI, . All three were found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. (Barry) Seal was a key player at Mena. [1] In this capacity, he worked for both the CIA and Pablo Escobar. Barry Seal, at the time he died, may have been the . Adler "Barry" Seal's third wife and the three children she had with him did not violate the slain drug smuggler-turned-government informant's privacy rights when they sold the story of his life to . "[47], The probation conditions prohibited Seal from leaving Baton Rouge without written permission from Judge Polozola, who ordered Seal to spend every night at a halfway house from 6PM to 6AM for the first six months of his probation. Though hed done his job as an informant, Seal was still sentenced to six months of house arrest at a Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge. A July 17, 1984 front-page Washington Times article by Edmund Jacoby described a link between Nicaragua's Sandinista government and the Medelln drug cartel. "Tom did all his own flying in the movie," says director Doug Liman, who is a pilot himself (Vulture.com). [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. 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. Esta nota contiene spoilers de la pelcula Barry Seal: solo en Amrica.. Barry Seal fue un piloto estadounidense que vivi 46 aos.Lo mataron a balazos en 1986 tres sicarios contratados por el cartel de Medelln, mientras cumpla una probation en el Ejrcito de Salvacin, en Baton Rouge, Luisiana.. La corta vida de Seal -el capitn ms joven en volar un Boeing 707 y un 747 para la . Indeed, at age 26, Seal became one of the youngest pilots to ever fly for Trans World Airlines. "Doug and I are both aviators, so we both love to fly.". [50] Before Mermelstein had located Seal, however, he was arrested by a federal task force in June 1985. Seal's Drug Enforcement Administration file also supports this, noting that he was smuggling marijuana as early as 1976, then adding cocaine to his resume in 1978. 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. 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. He stated that IranContra figure Oliver North had attended two meetings about the sting operation and had the motivation to release the information. In total, he had illegally imported $3 to $5 billion worth of drugs and an estimated 56 tons of cocaine into the U.S., making over 100 flights. Featured Image:The low-res image of Frederico Vaughn (in the striped shirt) that Ronald Reagan offered as proof of Sandinista drug trafficking. No. "Tom Cruise doesn't look like Barry Seal. 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. 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. The explosives were supposedly going to anti-Castro Cuban fighters. Barry Seal made a killing selling drugs for the Ochoa brothers, but after being outed as a key DEA informant, he was a marked man. He hands wads of cash to a kid on a bike, telling the boy, "You never saw me." The lawsuit claims that the pilots were overworked and that the crash happened after a 12-hour workday. To muffle the sound, Seal turned on all the planes generators and he got his photographic evidence. He once said in an interview, The exciting thing to me is to get yourself into a life threatening situation. [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. Barry Seal was able to get photos of Pablos Escobar himself loading cocaine onto Barry's cargo plane in Nicaragua. The ultimate hope was to arrest the cartel leaders in a jurisdiction where it would be easy to extract them. And it was there, according to The Gentlemans Journal, that he was arrested by the DEA in 1984 with 462 pounds of Escobars cocaine on his plane. -The Hollywood Reporter, Debbie Seal insists that she was unaware of what her husband was up to. Through his cartel contacts in Miami, Seal arranged a meeting using the name Ellis McKenzie (the real name of another Seal associate). The DEA felt this would be impossible to explain away, and Seal returned to the U.S. without cargo. UPI reported: "By linking the Sandinistas with drug traffic aid to the rebels accused of human rights violations might seem more palatable". 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.