Pubdate: Sun, 27 Aug 2000
Source: Salt Lake Tribune (UT)
Copyright: 2000 The Salt Lake Tribune
Contact:  143 S Main, Salt Lake City UT 84111
Fax: (801)257-8950
Website: http://www.sltrib.com/
Forum: http://www.sltrib.com/tribtalk/
Author: Tom Hays, The Associated Press

PARTY GIRL MADE MOCKERY OF THE U.S. WAR ON DRUGS

FORT WORTH, Texas -- The colonel's wife loves cocaine.

You can hear it in her voice -- part party girl, part drama queen -- as she 
recounts the time she bought a one-pound brick of the pure stuff.

After snorting two lines, Laurie Hiett says, "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I am so 
wired.' . . . It was this beautiful thing, you know?"

Her escapade wouldn't mean much if she were just another coke addict.

But Hiett sampled her brick inside the women's restroom of the fortresslike 
U.S. embassy in Bogota, Colombia, where her husband, Col. James Hiett, was 
in charge of the Army's high-stakes antidrug operation.

Two years later, Laurie Hiett, 37, is in a federal prison, serving 5 years 
for a cocaine and heroin smuggling scheme so amateurish that investigators 
found her name on shipping records.

Her husband will begin a 5-month prison term in January for joining his 
wife on a drug-money spending spree.

Aside from ruining Hiett's spotless 24-year military career, the case 
embarrassed the Pentagon at a time when the White House was pitching a 
billion-dollar plan to back Colombian forces battling cocaine and heroin 
producers.

James Hiett, 48, has declined to talk to reporters while he waits to see if 
the Army will let him quietly retire. But court documents and a prison 
interview with his wife reveal a story mixing romantic tragedy with 
international scandal.

Laurie Hiett said her husband felt his last shred of honor stripped away 
when a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced him to jail last month. 
Prosecutors had predicted he would get probation, if only so he could care 
for the couple's two young sons.

After the sentencing, the colonel told his wife, he pulled his car into a 
rest stop and spent the night there, contemplating suicide.

"My husband hasn't done anything wrong in his life," Laurie Hiett said in 
the visiting room in a women's prison on a former Air Force base in Fort 
Worth, Texas. As she spoke, she showed flashes of the vivaciousness that 
had charmed an older man into giving her the same devotion he once only 
gave the military.

Free Spirit and the Military: The femme fatale of the War on Drugs was a 
single woman living with her parents when she met James Hiett in the late 
1980s.

The daughter of a Panamanian mother and an American engineer, she worked as 
a secretary in the Canal Zone. Into her life walked a career military 
officer, newly assigned to the U.S. Southern Command and friendly enough to 
help her fix a broken printer.

"He was so sweet," she said. "And he had his life together."

At the time the pair married in 1989, Laurie Hiett had experimented with 
drugs and alcohol, but not to excess. Still, compared with her by-the-book 
husband, she was a free spirit, not cut out for the role of military wife.

"I had to cook -- I didn't know how to cook. I had to entertain -- I didn't 
know how to entertain," she said. "I never fit in."

During Col. Hiett's tours in Fayetteville, N.C., and Panama in the early 
1990s, his impulsive spouse found comfort in a fast crowd and hard drugs. 
Her partying, once confined to weekends, spiraled out of control.

As time passed, she also battled manic-depression -- "Believe me, I'm 
mostly manic" -- and was prescribed medications including lithium, but 
wasn't always good about taking them.

In Fayetteville, she taught high school Spanish by day and snorted away her 
salary by night.

Embarrassed, the officer stopped including his wife in military social 
events. But they never discussed her dirty little secret until 1995, when 
she told him she wanted to enter rehab.

"If it's going to help you, I don't care," she recalls him saying. "So, 
high as a kite, I checked myself in."

Laurie Hiett stayed clean for a few months, but her problem resurfaced. So 
did their domestic don't-ask-don't-tell policy.

In the spring of 1998, amid the mad mix of self-destruction and denial, the 
Army promoted Col. Hiett to chief of the Colombia operation.

Bogota Is a Bad Idea: Even the colonel's wife knew Bogota was a bad idea.

"This is the ironic thing," she said. "I tried so hard not to go."

The Pentagon assigned Col. Hiett to supervise the more than 150 U.S. troops 
training local forces to combat Colombian drug lords. After he asked for 
permission to take his wife and children along, an Army medical technician 
reviewed his wife's medical records as part of a routine screening process.

The government says the technician alerted superiors to her history of 
mental problems and, because of privacy rules, nothing else. Those rules 
prohibited the superiors from seeing the medical records themselves.

Laurie Hiett's attorney, Paul Lazarus, asserts that the current U.S. 
ambassador to Nicaragua, Oliver Garza, then a diplomat in Bogota, saw 
paperwork revealing her appetite for drugs. The lawyer also claims that 
Garza told Army brass he opposed letting her live in the country that 
supplies 80 percent of the world's cocaine.

In court papers, prosecutors insisted that "relevant Army officials were 
unaware of the defendant's drug problem." They pointed out that in lobbying 
to take his wife to Colombia, Col. Hiett never mentioned her addiction.

At home, she pressed her husband to let her and the boys remain in Texas. 
He changed her mind by showing her Bogota.

"I had cars, I had security, I was going to these beautiful parties, 
beautiful places for dinner . . . I mean, I was like a queen," she said, 
snapping her fingers. "So then I was like, 'Oh yeah, I'm here.' "

Moving to Colombia in the summer of 1998, Laurie Hiett suppressed her dark 
side -- for a time. But the colonel often was away fighting the drug war, 
inviting trouble at home.

"I was bored," Laurie Hiett said. "It seemed like I was by myself all the 
time."

So she found a companion: a charming embassy employee named Jorge Ayala, a 
Colombian assigned to be her driver. One day, Hiett asked Ayala to take her 
to a bar in La Zona Rosa, a red-light district declared off-limits to 
embassy personnel.

There, she asked him: "I was just wondering if you could get me some cocaine?"

"Of course," she remembers him replying.

She expected a gram, but an hour later, she was sitting in her Ford 
Explorer holding a brown-paper package the size of a videocassette.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Jorge, what is this?"

A few minutes later, she was sneaking a small chunk of the pure coke into 
the bathroom of an embassy crawling with Marines and Drug Enforcement 
Administration agents.

The supply was so vast that it even spooked the addict, who thought about 
flushing it away. Instead, she decided to deliver it to her old drug 
buddies on a visit to the United States with her husband.

She carried the drugs in a carryon bag. Her diplomatic credentials provided 
cover.

"I go through about four security check points in Colombia, and the ones in 
Miami and make it all the way through with an open pound of cocaine in my 
overnight bag," she marveled.

An all-night binge with her friends, she thought, would be her last; but 
once back in Bogota, she told Jorge she needed more. He realized she had 
taken the brick on her trip.

"He said, 'I knew you did it! I knew you did it!,' " she said. "Now I have 
a business idea for you.' "

Amateur Pipeline: The plot was hatched in the spring of last year in a 
restaurant in La Zona Rosa.

At a table were Laurie Hiett, Ayala and a friend of his who had flown down 
from Queens, Hernan Arcila. They agreed Ayala would buy the drugs in 
Colombia, Laurie Hiett would ship them from the embassy and Arcila would 
receive the packages for New York City dealers.

On April 13, 1999, Laurie Hiett walked into the embassy post office with a 
small package wrapped in brown paper. She filled out a customs declaration 
identifying the contents as a T-shirt, candy, coffee -- whatever popped 
into her head. She was too wired on drugs to be nervous that she was really 
mailing 2 1/2 pounds of cocaine.

Over the next six weeks, Hiett shipped five more packages. In all, 15 
pounds of cocaine and heroin made it to New York, where it had a street 
value of about a half-million dollars.

How much the conspirators made is unclear, although court papers show 
Laurie Hiett received at least $25,000. For a couple drowning in debt 
created by her free-spending ways, the easy money was another narcotic.

Laurie Hiett flew to New York City twice in the spring of 1999 to collect 
her share from Arcila, stashing bundles of cash in her luggage. Records 
show that after her trips, the colonel bought nearly $13,000 in money 
orders made out to a dentist, five credit card companies and other 
creditors. She claims he was too busy and trusting to pin her down on where 
the money came from.

A random search of incoming Bogota parcels by Customs agents on May 23, 
1999, in Miami would end the insanity.

Layers of Lies: By the time the Army Criminal Investigation Division 
summoned Laurie Hiett in June, the case against her was overwhelming.

Questioned separately, Col. Hiett denied knowing what his wife was up to. 
In private, he finally demanded some answers.

"Laurie, I need you to look at me in the eye," he began, as she describes 
the moment. "Did you ever send a package to New York?' "

"Yes I did. But I didn't know what was in it."

"OK, Laurie, I believe you."

Laurie Hiett surrendered to federal authorities in Brooklyn in August. By 
then, her husband had requested a transfer that landed him in a desk job at 
Fort Monroe, Va.

Though Hiett pleaded innocent to drug conspiracy charges, she soon agreed 
to tell prosecutors what she knew in a bid to avoid a 10-year prison term. 
She regrets that her words were used against her husband.

Shortly after the couple learned they were under investigation, she 
admitted, her husband joined her on a trip to Florida carrying $11,000 in 
cash. By then, there was no denying it was drug money, but the colonel used 
it anyway on hotel and credit card bills, and to deposit in bank accounts. 
This was, he admitted later, an attempt to launder the cash.

Hiett told a judge at sentencing in May that if she had known her exploits 
"were going to destroy my husband, I would have never done it. . . . I'm 
ashamed and devastated."

Laurie Is Back: Hiett tries to comfort her sons, ages 12 and 8, by telling 
them their family "is on an adventure." The boys will live with an uncle 
once their father goes away.

And the marriage?

The couple left court holding hands when Col. Hiett pleaded guilty in 
April. She said she wants to spend the rest of her life with the man who 
always knew "exactly how to hold me and rock me" whenever drugs left her 
drowning in despair.

In one of those moments, she recalled, "I said, 'Where's Laurie? Where's 
Laurie?' And he said, 'Laurie's in there somewhere, and one day she'll be 
back.' "

"Here, I'm back," she said, "and I'm in jail."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart