Chong Feature

It also required some hardware. In early September, Chong convinced his superiors that the Homestead Police Department should purchase an aviation fuel pump and ship it to Jamaica for use in the drug operation. The request arose out of yet another overseas trip by Swarnes, this time to Chong's native land. In Jamaica, Swarnes met with Carl Brandon, a prominent businessman and suspected drug dealer from Ocho Rios, to discuss further details regarding how the shipment from Colombia would be handled. An old military airstrip near the city had been chosen for landing the planes from Colombia and Miami, but refueling threatened to become troublesome. "It was a seven-hour flight from Colombia, and they needed to refuel to go back," Chong explains. "So we had to have fuel for them once they got there, and fuel for us in Jamaica. And we had to get a pump to pump the fuel, which you can't buy in Jamaica. So we bought a pump up here with a long hose, and shipped it down there to take care of this problem."

But when Chong and Swarnes finally went to Jamaica together to pick up the cocaine, they traveled not by airplane but by commercial fishing boat - with undercover Customs agents acting as crew and skipper. Shortly after the police-purchased fuel pump arrived on the island, Carl Brandon called Chong and Swarnes to say Plan A had fallen through.

Previously, Brandon had felt sure he could bribe the necessary officials in the Jamaican military to guarantee the security of the airstrip. Now something had happened to make him doubt his abilities. So Brandon and the Colombian broker proposed flying the cocaine into another, undisclosed airfield, where it would be unloaded and hidden. Chong and Swarnes would then pick up the cocaine and transport it to Miami by boat, where they would use it as bait. After the broker's stateside associates had paid Chong for his smuggling services, Homestead police and Customs agents would arrest the broker's Miami connections and arrange for the seizure of Brandon in Jamaica.

By the time Chong and Swarnes set sail for Jamaica in a weather-beaten trawler, the Homestead Police Department had more than covered its debt for the fuel pump. Following a series of increasingly strident demands by Chong and Swarnes, the Colombian broker telephoned to say he was dispatching an emissary from New York to bring them $35,000 in front money to pay the crew of the fishing boat and help defray other expenses. On a bright afternoon in mid-September of last year, Faustino Contreras-Ordonez walked into La Carreta Restaurant on SW Eighth Street with two shopping bags filled with 50s and 100s. After a ride down the turnpike in Swarnes's car - with Chong frantically following close behind - Contreras-Ordonez turned over the money to Swarnes in a Howard Johnson motel room in Homestead and flew back to New York. The cash was only a taste of what was to come.

"We had a bunch of boxes, fish boxes, and long lines thrown around on the deck," Chong recalls of the first sea voyage to Jamaica. "It looked like a working boat. Customs had notified DEA in Jamaica that we were coming, just to make sure it wasn't a double rip - us trying to get the dope and DEA involved in trying to sell it; both good guys doing the same thing. Which has happened before." Once Chong and Rick Swarnes arrived at the municipal dock in Ocho Rios, however, things started to go wrong. A fierce storm that had battered the trawler on the way over threatened to become all the more dangerous on the return trip. And on the day the cop and the smuggler arrived in Jamaica, the island's telephone operators went on strike. It became almost impossible to place an overseas call.

"We call [Carl Brandon], but he hasn't heard anything," Chong remembers. "We try to call the Colombian, but it's hard to get out. We finally get through to Colombia, and they say they're having a little bit of a problem there. We said `Hey, look, we can't stay very long. We got a seven-day pass, that's it.' They say, `All right, all right, all right, just hang in there.'"