Black Tuna Gang

Black Tuna Gang
Type	Marijuana smuggling ring
Base	Miami, Florida, United States
Scope	Colombia to the United States, 1974–1978
Focus	Importing marijuana from Colombia into the United States

The Black Tuna Gang was a ring based in Miami that imported marijuana from Colombia into the United States in the mid-1970s. A federal appeals court described it as "a marijuana smuggling organization which called itself the 'Black Tuna' enterprise".^: 985 Its partners, Robert Platshorn and Robert Meinster, bought from a Colombian supplier from late 1976 and brought the marijuana into Florida and other states by air and by sea.^: 987 The ring worked at the Florida end of the bonanza marimbera, the export of marijuana from northern Colombia to the United States between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s.

A grand jury in Miami indicted the ring's members on 1 May 1979.^: 112 After a trial that ran from September 1979 to February 1980, Platshorn and Meinster were convicted of racketeering, running a continuing criminal enterprise and federal drug offences, and were sentenced to 64 and 53 years in prison.^{: 985, 985 n. 2} A House of Representatives report of 1984 cited the case as an example of drug proceeds the government had failed to recover through forfeiture.

Supply from Colombia

The ring's earliest loads, in 1974 and 1975, came through a Florida dealer whose own source was a Colombian, Raúl Dávila Jimeno.^: 985–986 Until the summer of 1976 it bought most of its marijuana from a Latin American organisation based in Miami.^: 986 In the autumn of 1976 Platshorn travelled to Colombia and arranged to buy directly from Dávila, at about 60 dollars a pound.^: 987

Accounts of Dávila differ. The historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner describes him as a landowner of Santa Marta who also grew cotton and coffee and raised cattle.^: 113 The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) called him a "Colombian sugar grower and drug dealer" and the organisation's major supplier, and wrote that he presented himself as an exporter of sugar, coffee and petroleum. He was indicted with the ring, stayed in Colombia and was never tried.^{: 985 n. 1}

Platshorn told a witness that soldiers arrested him in Colombia on his first buying trip and held him until Dávila paid 300,000 dollars, and on at least two other occasions the army arrested the ring's pilots, whom Dávila ransomed.^{: 987 n. 6} Sáenz Rovner's account of an arrest on Platshorn's second trip has Dávila paying the soldiers 40,000 dollars.^: 113 The ring also set up a business to send cars to Dávila in Colombia, and shipped a Cadillac in July 1977.

The appeals court found that Dávila and his associates used the phrase "Black Tuna", in English or Spanish, as the signal for aircraft arriving in Colombia and for boats meeting his cargo ships at sea; Dávila himself was called the Black Tuna, and the enterprise eventually came to be known by the same name.^: 987 Platshorn gave members a medallion in the shape of a dark fish, worn around the neck.^: 987 In the DEA's account the medallions were solid gold. Sáenz Rovner writes that the authorities gave the group the name.^: 113 The prosecutor's closing argument at the Miami trial spoke of "the Meinster-Platshorn organization, the organization that is dubbed The Black Tuna Gang".

Shipments and losses

The marijuana travelled north by air and by sea. In November 1976 a plane flown from Colombia landed in Florida with about 3,800 pounds (1,700 kg).^: 987 Most loads came by sea: boats met cargo ships offshore and carried the marijuana to the American coast.^: 986 The ring used luxury yachts for this work rather than shrimp trawlers, to attract less suspicion. A co-defendant told a recruit in 1977 that the ring owned five vessels and could listen to DEA radio traffic. In the DEA's account, trucks fitted with radios kept the ring in touch with the freighters and listened in on police and customs channels.

Several shipments were lost. In April 1977 police seized 16,000 pounds (7,300 kg) of marijuana at a house the ring used to store it. A shipment meant for North Carolina over the Labor Day weekend of 1977 was lost when the yacht carrying it, with 36,000 pounds (16,300 kg) on board, ran aground in the Bahamas; the ring lost a million dollars on it. In December 1977, 11 tons were transferred at sea from one of Dávila's ships to a boat whose owner was working for the government, and customs officers seized the load while it was being unloaded in North Carolina. In January 1978 several attempts to bring marijuana directly from Dávila failed.

One of the defendants said that the ring brought more than a million pounds of marijuana into the United States between October 1976 and shortly after September 1977.^: 985 A co-defendant told the same recruit in 1977 that its income the year before had been about 12 million dollars, and Platshorn confirmed the figure to him. By the DEA's count the ring brought in 500 tons over 16 months. A House of Representatives report of 1984 estimated its gross takings at about 300 million dollars over 16 months.

Organisation in Florida

Platshorn and Meinster began in 1974, when a Florida dealer trucked loads of marijuana to Meinster in Philadelphia, where he ran two dress shops as fronts.^: 985–986 In Sáenz Rovner's account the two men began by buying a long ton of Colombian marijuana from a wholesaler in Wisconsin while both lived in Philadelphia.^: 113 By 1975 deliveries were going to Platshorn's house in Miami.^: 985–986

In the spring of 1976 Platshorn leased a property in Miami for an automobile auction, which served as cover for importing and distributing the marijuana.^: 985–986 The DEA called its leaders "partners in a Miami used car agency". Until March 1977 the ring's headquarters was a suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, and from April a houseboat moored nearby. Other businesses served as covers too, among them an aviation company with a private airstrip, run by Eugene Arter Myers, who became a full partner in 1977. Others in the ring worked as a pilot who brought loads ashore from the cargo ships, as its head of security and as brokers who found buyers.

Investigation and trials

The DEA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the ring through Operation Banco, an inquiry into Florida banks begun in 1977. In the DEA's account the investigators followed the ring's money through South Florida banks until its members made a large cash deposit in a Miami Beach bank, and the case was the first joint DEA and FBI investigation of the profits of the marijuana trade. A man the ring had recruited in North Carolina surrendered to federal authorities in early 1978 and then cooperated with the DEA.

Platshorn and Meinster were first tried in North Carolina over the December 1977 shipment. They were convicted of aiding and abetting the importation of marijuana, and the Fourth Circuit upheld the convictions on 18 April 1980.

Sáenz Rovner counts 14 people indicted in Miami on 1 May 1979.^: 112 The superseding indictment on which the case was tried named 12 defendants in 36 counts and covered August 1974 to April 1978.^: 985 The trial ran from September 1979 to February 1980. On 6 December 1979 the government obtained two further indictments: one charged a defendant with bribing a juror, and the other charged several defendants with conspiring to obstruct justice, alleging a plot to disrupt the trial and to kill the judge. The jury was then sequestered for a week, and three alternate jurors in all replaced regular ones before the verdicts.^: 985 Two defendants absconded during the trial.^{: 985 n. 1} One of them, whose trial was completed in his absence, was caught nearly three years later.

The defendants who appealed had been convicted under the racketeering statute (RICO), the Travel Act and the federal drug laws. Platshorn, Meinster and Myers were also convicted of running a continuing criminal enterprise.^{: 985, 985 n. 2} The court gave Platshorn 64 years in prison and fines of 325,000 dollars, Meinster 53 years and 270,000 dollars, and Myers 33 years and 100,000 dollars. Of those terms, 34, 31 and 22 years were for the continuing-enterprise counts, which carry no parole.^{: 985 n. 2} The Fifth Circuit upheld every conviction on 28 December 1981, except one defendant's racketeering conviction.^: 985 Sáenz Rovner writes that Platshorn served 29 years of his sentence.^: 113

Forfeiture

A House of Representatives report of 1984 on the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act used the case to show why federal forfeiture procedures were "found wanting". It called the prosecution "one highly publicized case" and set out what forfeiture had achieved: the government had sought to forfeit two residences worth 750,000 dollars, the auction business and five yachts; the auction business was worthless, the yachts were never found, and the government received 16,000 dollars. The report concluded that "a considerable amount of the 'proceeds' of this drug operation are elsewhere". A dissenting judge in the Second Circuit's United States v. Monsanto (1988) quoted the passage at length, in a case over whether the act allowed the government to freeze money a defendant needed to pay his lawyer.

See also

• Bonanza marimbera
• Santa Marta Gold
• Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta