Pubdate: Wed, 06 Dec 2000
Source: Salt Lake Tribune (UT)
Copyright: 2000 The Salt Lake Tribune
Contact:  143 S Main, Salt Lake City UT 84111
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Author: Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times

DRUG SAGA ENDS WITH CONVICTION OF INFORMANT

MIAMI -- After six days of gripping testimony and four hours of 
deliberation, a Miami federal jury Tuesday convicted former U.S. federal 
witness Charles "Little Nut" Miller on narcotics charges, ending one of the 
most bizarre and enduring tales in America's war on drugs.

Miller was found guilty of conspiring to send hundreds of pounds of 
Colombian cocaine from his native island of St. Kitts to the United States 
in the 1990s. His court-appointed defense attorney, John Howes, said he 
will appeal the verdict, which ends the reign of one of the Caribbean's 
most notorious figures -- a wily drug lord-turned-informant-turned-drug 
lord who became U.S. law enforcement's worst nightmare.

Miller spent hours on the witness stand trying to navigate loopholes in 
U.S. drug laws. He said he was merely a businessman -- the "tax man," he 
called himself -- who took millions of dollars in "fees" from Colombian 
drug cartels for safeguarding cocaine shipments as they passed through tiny 
St. Kitts.

But Miller also claimed the drugs were destined for Europe, not America, 
and thus he violated no U.S. law. Assistant U.S. Attorney Russell Killinger 
called this claim "absurd."

A Star Witness: Miller's trial came nearly 11 years after he took the stand 
in a Miami federal court as the star witness against a vicious Jamaican 
drug gang blamed for nearly 1,000 murders from California to New York in 
the 1980s. He received broad protections and a new identity, but fled the 
country for St. Kitts in 1991 and returned to a life of mayhem. U.S. law 
enforcement officials said his intimate knowledge of the U.S. justice 
system made him all the more dangerous.

In testimony last week, Clifford Henry, one of four men indicted in the 
1994 conspiracy case, testified that Miller handcuffed, blindfolded and 
interrogated Vincent "Seko" Morris, the son of a former St. Kitts deputy 
prime minister, before fatally shooting him because "the boy knows too 
much." Miller flatly denied the accusation.

"I cried. I pleaded with Mr. Miller. I begged Mr. Miller," said Henry, who 
was convicted in an earlier trial and sentenced to life in prison without 
parole.

"Mr. Miller pulled out his gun, and he shot Seko," added Henry, who told 
the jury he decided to speak out for the first time in six years to clear 
his conscience. "He shot him in the head. And Iboo [Miller's lieutenant, 
Kirk Hendrikson] shot the girl."

The Oct. 2, 1994, slayings of Morris and his girlfriend, Joan Welch, were 
among more than half a dozen unsolved murders on St. Kitts that prosecutors 
claim were linked to Miller; local murder charges against Miller were 
dropped when the island's prosecutors failed to show up at a preliminary 
inquiry in 1995.

Off the Federal Payroll: Taken together, the U.S. prosecutors' nine 
witnesses and 27 exhibits here cast the Eastern Caribbean island of 45,000 
people as a land that Miller had corrupted and endangered while 
transforming it into his private drug fiefdom.

The testimony also sharply underscored concerns among some federal agencies 
that U.S. taxpayers paid and protected a man such as Miller, described by a 
federal judge in the 1989 trial as "worse than the people on trial."

Commenting on the case after Tuesday's verdict, Frank Figueroa, chief of 
the U.S. Customs Service's Miami office, said of the federal 
witness-protection program: "In this case, it may not have worked out as 
well as it should have.

"But the important thing is Miller is no longer in a position to do anyone 
any harm, and I think everyone involved is better off for it." Miller's 
sentencing is set for Feb. 13; he faces a term of life without parole.
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