Miami - MIM E1

Published Jan 19, 2023, 5:01 AM

Phil Stanford leaves political reporting in Washington D.C. to cover crime stories and stumbles directly into the dangerous, cocaine-fueled world of Miami in the early 1980s. In the process he finds himself intertwined with an unsolved murder after a chance encounter at a dive bar with a private detective named Clay Williams. 

Murder in Miami is a production of I Heart Radio. Let me get my head around this. You drop out of journalism in Washington d C. Moved to Miami and end up working for a detective agency that's a front for a major drug operation with c I A connections. Yeah, how stupid? Can you be? Right? So, I've known you for a long time and your many things, but you're not stupid. You're going to have to tell me how you got caught up in all of this. Yeah, it's something I've been trying to figure out myself for years now. And the guy you replaced was murdered. Yea. It started when I took place of the detective the guy had been murdered, but that was just for starters. It got crazier as time went on. And if I do say so, it's a pretty good story. I'm Lauren breg Pacheco and this is Murder in Miami. Journalist Pills Stamford and I first cross paths during my first podcast, Happy Face, about Keith Hunter jesperson, the serial killer and rapist in the nineties. Stanford was the newspaper reporter at The Oregonian who had received an anonymous letter from Jesperson basically bragging about his kills creepily signed with a smiley face. As a result, Stanford coined the happy face killer Moniker and it's stuck. Yeah. I certainly don't take credit for the happy face nickname. That was him. That was Keith Jesperson. He drew all those little happy faces. That's who he wanted to be. Stanford ended up connecting with the hulking, nearly six ft eight killer in person for a pretty interesting reason. After he was arrested. He wanted credit for a murder that two people were already serving time for. And I had written about those two people trying to point out that the case against them was completely full of it. Jesperson was coming at it from a slightly different angle. He wanted credit. Stanford subsequent reporting helped prove Jesperson had indeed killed twenty three year old Tanya Bennett and contributed to getting the two people already serving time for her murder out of prison. But by the time I'd tracked Stamford down, he was pretty sick of talking about Keith Hunter Jesperson. Well, he was certainly no Hannibal Lector. He's just a big dummy driven by compulsions. He didn't understand himself. When we connected, Stanford, who was at one point the most successful columnist in Oregon, was so tired of talking to people in general. He'd pretty much dropped off the grid, living as far west as he could without falling into the ocean. Yeah, it was one of the more remote places in the United States. I think Gold Beach, Oregon, which is down to the southern tip of Oregon on the coast just above the California line. After some politely persistent stalking, Stanford begrudgingly agreed to be interviewed. I'm glad you finally found me. Yes. Well, to get to you, I had to go through your publishers, who were quite pragmatic and letting me know that they could reach out to you, but the likelihood was that you would want nothing to do with me. The Phil Stanford I'd grow to know was extremely private and more than a bit guarded and cynical. Understandable given the story that motivated his departure from his career as a reporter. Due to the politics that surrounded the murder of Michael Frankie. Ahead of the Oregon's Correction Department had discovered a rat's nest of corruption in his department, and it was going to expose it, clean house, and he was murdered. He was assassinated out in front of the building where he worked in Salem, Oregon, stabbed to death. That was the night before he was supposed to address a Senate committee on the subject. Using his newspaper column as a platform, Stanford started relentlessly questioning Frankie's highly suspicious murder and the guilt of the low level drug dealer it was penned on, all while calling out the corruption that surrounded the case. And it was denied, denied, absolutely denied that his murder could have had anything to do with corruption, because, of course there was no corruption in Oregon. And I was writing a column for the Oregonian at the time, Smolder Rat, and I kept raising questions doing so would ultimately cost Stanford his job and take its toll. When we first met in person, here's how I described Phil. Phil is a fiercely loyal guy with a choppy head of silver hair that matches the stubble of his beard, and soft brown eyes that seem to have seen a bit too much of the corruption. He writes about thirty years after Michael Frankie's death, the Murder in Oregon podcast would again raise questions about Oregon's Department of Corrections and Corruption. A new hit podcast called Murder in Oregon is uncovering new information about the stabbing death of forty two year old Michael Frankie. In the process, Phil and I would become pretty good friends, speaking regularly and crossing paths in person whenever possible. That's how I became familiar with his time spent working as a private investigator in Miami. It's a story that just gets crazier and crazier as we go along. And it's one filled with drugs, deception, conspiracies, and more than one extre eamily questionable killing. Set in the time and place that was equally extreme, Miami in the early nineteen eighties. Pastels and palm dancers and a hint of danger. Together they can provide the image of Miami, a city some have described as America's Casablanca. By the nineteen seventies, parts of Miami, especially Miami Beach, had fallen from the glory of its nineteen thirties Art Deco heyday, the glamour that carried it through the nineteen fifties and sixties, as a trendy tropical hotspot for the jet set had dissipated and Miami settled into more of a mundane destination for retired snowbirds fleeing snowy northern winters. But as the eighties approached, the city was about to be revitalized by a different sort of white powder. Cocaine comes from the leaves of the Coque tree, found chiefly in Peru and Bolivia, then processed in Colombia. About a third of the world's production finds its way to the United States and it's preferred point of entry Florida. As nineteen eighty approached, Miami was on its way to becoming the skyline built by cocaine and overrun by drug cartel's crowned the murder capital of America, setting the stage for the salacious scene that would be dramatized and immortalized when the hit television show Miami Vice first aired in nineteen Will Die more deeply into all of that a bit later, But the Miami Stanford ended up moving into was definitely dangerous. Maybe that's part of what polled fill to Miami. Okay, it's nineteen eighty. I'm working as a columnist for political magazine in Washington, d C. Except I don't like politics or government or military affairs. Written about that too, and I want to write about crime. Okay, So how did you end up chucking it all all and heading to Miami. Well, like I said, I was sick of writing about politics and government. Why wouldn't you just stay in Washington then and write about what you wanted to? Why just walk away from everything that you built in terms of your career. Well, I suppose that's entirely too sensible. But in fact, I had tried to get out of the political rut I was in. I'd actually gone down to Miami for another smaller magazine called Quest and covered a big drug trial, the Black Tuna. Yeah, the Black Tuna case. Drug smuggling was also the topic at federal court today with the beginning of testimony in the government's Black Tuna case. The Black Tuna Gang ran Miami's drug trade in the nineties seventies. The name was coined by the media based on the solid gold medallion with a black Tuna emblem worn by members to identify themselves. At the time. The Black Tuna Gang was alleged by the DA to be one of the most sophisticated drug smuggling organizations in existence. Federal Judge James King listened as one time smuggle returned government informant Luke McLeod told of the eight tons of marijuana which he claims to have delivered to the key defendants, Robert Miinster and Robert Platt show in nine the gang was accused of importing around five hundred tons of marijuana to the United States over the course of sixteen months, operating at one point from a suite in the Fontain Blue Hotel in Miami Beach. But we'll come back to all of that later. Back to Phil in his time covering the trial, I remember sitting there in this big courtroom with stone floors. I think they called it Chattahoochie or something like that. And the courtroom was never packed, you know, it was always about a third full. Sometimes there were more defendants up there behind the Railian than spectators, reporters from the local papers in Miami and a few others, and me was a big deal of a trial at the time. The government was making a big thing of it. I was always disposed to excuse marijuana smugglers anyway. You know, I thought it was ridiculous that there was a law against this, regardless of how much they were supposed to have smuggled in. And it turns out the government greatly exaggerated the amount they did smuggle. But they charged Platforn under a Kingpin statute that was meant for much heavier drug offenses. And what I really remembered about that is that he got sixty years for smuggling marijuana in the United States. Remember the length of that sentence. Sixty years will come back to it. Because it wasn't entirely motivated by drugs. I certainly didn't understand things as well as I might have when they were happening. I think I probably got taken in an awful lot by the government. I was fascinated by the agents too. They were living a very exciting life and got to know a couple of them. It was way better than Washington d C. That's for sure. While Stanford definitely found the trials top bit more compelling than Washington based politics, he was equally attracted to its setting. I was fascinated by Miami. I was fascinated by the the whole vibe back then, it was wild and the Miami assignment was a welcomed break from his usual beat. But other than that, I wasn't having any luck getting any assignments. I remember sitting in the office at Harper's Magazine in New York talking to the editor. I told him I wanted to do stuff on crime, and he wanted me to do some government procedural peace and I said, oh my god. And it was about that time I decided to chuck it all and go to Miami. Well, in a way that kind of makes sense, because Miami, particularly at that time, was swimming in crime, just in terms of the drug trade and everything, and it must have, on top of being romantic, it must have felt like an outlaw town. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean there was a vibe there really was, and people were different down there. I mean, d c Is is really a very boring place. And Stanford was basically bored of his life and the way he was making a living. I was stuck professionally. That's what I meant by wanting to write about crime. But in a way that's sort of a mental dodge. I suppose the way we give ourselves more palatable excuses for what's really going on underneath, and was personal as well. How old were you at the time. I was thirty eight, And of course there was the divorce certainly had something to do with it. I was missing my boys. Phil had two sons with his first wife. After the divorce, she relocated with him to Oregon, leaving Stanford feeling unsettled and a bit adrift. And I was having these dreams every two weeks regularly. I was in a desert somewhere there's nighttime, just moonlight or starlight, looking out across the desert at a wall's city m after midnight, you know, there's still a few lights shining through windows, maybe a caravan leaving what I remember hearing the camel bills in the dream, and concealing myself behind some sort of sand dune. This walled cities, maybe quarter mile a half mile away, and knowing that I have to get into the city without being noticed and come back with something I don't know what it is. And so I'm there waiting, waiting to go. It's not really daring to go, and it starts to get lighter and lighter. Here a rooster crow, and that's it. I have this dream once a week or so, and and even I can see it. There's some connection with Miami. I've already been down to Miami for the Black Tuned trial. So the dream is about an opportunity that you're gonna miss if you don't make a move, or something is telling me that there's something I have to find out. I don't know. Yeah, you left Washington in a bit of a rush. Night or two before I left, there was a party at the place where I was living. There wasn't a going away party, was just a party telling everyone talking about going to Miami. And someone says, do you have a job yet? I know this person is much more practical than I am. I guess said, well, I know that the publisher of newspaper down there. I'll give him a call and he'll be expecting to hear from you. Maybe you can work out something there. So I quit my job on very short notice. I'm ashamed to say, load everything into my old beat up Capri and head to Miami attribute and driving down. You know that it was a huge change from Washington d C. It was during the winter months, and d C everything is drab and they've got the dirty ice overcast sky and the farther south, I'd get the writer at get till finally in Miami, the sun just burst upon you and the primary colors Miami just it was another world, bright blue, dark green, vegetation, the sea, blue green sea, lit with sun, and it was It was a glorious place, it seemed to me. I parked in front of the Miami News building, which was on the right on the edge of the Bay. I persuade the managing editor of the Miami News, a very nice lady named Gloria Anderson, to give me a job writing what I referred to as detective stories. So you start doing investigating crime stories pretty much. Yeah, and I liked what I was doing, long stories divided by chapters, and I think readers liked them too. Miami was full of great stories back then. And I did several unsolved murderers, jewelry heighs pirates off the shore of Andros Island. And then you decided to take on one of Miami's biggest unsolved mysteries. Yeah. I started working on a story about a pretty young seventeen year old girl, Amy Billig, who about what five or six years before, had been walking down the street near her home in Coconut Grove on the way to the store or something like that, and she just disappeared, as far as anyone knew, vanished into thin air. No one saw her again ever, and the mother, to her credit and never let it go. She kept demanding answers. And so I got in touch with the mother and she had a new lead. Someone had called her three o'clock in the morning, called her, collect and hold her. Her daughter was alive, and well, so you know, this was well before the cell phones or call her I d she had to go down to the phone company to get the address of the of the person who called what she had because she had accepted the call. Someone had called her turns out from a little town in Oklahoma, Cement, Oklahoma. So I was going to go out there, two semen Oklahoma and solve this case and probably make a name for myself. That's what I was thinking at the time. And how would you do well? At that point the story was taking too long anyway. After several weeks, Gloria calls me into her office and says, the publisher is getting a little bit restive about our little experiment with detective stories. This one is taking too long. It doesn't think it's good use of the time. And if I don't come up with something pretty quick on the Amy Billy case, we would have to reassess our arrangement. And I say, Gloria, but I have a new lead, and I tell her about how the phone call and how I want to go out to Seemen, Oklahoma, and all I need is an airline ticket and money for a rental car. Come on if it works out as Pulletzer prize material. And she says, okay, but I'm telling you. So I get my ticket and I get all packed and ready to go, and the night before I'm with my girlfriend Ruth in the Prying Pub. That's where we hung out. Who was Ruth? Did you meet her in Miami? Yeah? She was Glorious secretary and we sort of took up together after I started working at the News. It's a very talkative, cute redhead who'd spend some time hanging around with country bands in Nashville, so she had no problem attracting mail attention none at all. And Stanford is not exaggerating. I tracked down a candid photo of the couple at the time, and it actually looks like a paparazzi shot. It's in black and white eight and the two appear to be arriving at some sort of event. Phils glancing back towards Ruth. He's wearing a blazer and a collared shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal a disco era amount of tanned chest, and Ruth is smiling broadly at the camera from underneath thick bangs, her face framed in a weavy mane that just falls past her shoulders. Her vibe is as cool and confident as the silky top that accentuates her slim, yet pronounced curves. They made a stunning couple. Here's Ruth, that former girlfriend recollecting Phil Well. I made him in the newsroom Miamie News. My first impression was he was basically count of an explosion personality. Most of our reporters and all we're candle, laid back and all that. But Phil was always on charge, very verbal and outspoken, always traveling in a hundred miles. There was down mellow time would fail. But he was so smart and interesting. Our conversations were just so different than you have with most guys. You know. And Bill was very good looking. Oh yeah, and he had a great body. Okay, back to Phil and Ruth in that bar in Perime, We're sitting in the bar there, in the big horseshoe shaped bar, and she's telling the bartender about how I'm going out to Oklahoma and I was going to solve the Amy Billy Kings. And one of the things she's saying to the bartenders that the theory at that time was that Amy Billy had been snatched off the street by some bikers who were coming through ten and down at the end of the bar a few places away, there's this guy, long hair, sort of good looking guy who says, say, I'm gonna be talking to some bikers here over the weekend. Maybe I can help. And it turns out he's a private investigator, hands me his card, says Clay Williams Intercept Detective Agency. I remember a guy doing that, but he didn't register with me that much, you know, because people, when they knew you were reporters, are always giving you their cards. While the offering of the card wasn't noteworthy, Ruth recalls the guy offering it was. I remember he was kind of unusual for that bra. You know what I'm saying. The way he looked and dressed and everything. Do you remember in what way? Well, he was just a little more higher rent than most of the customers there, well dressed and all that which. The Prime Pub was the kind of bar you go in and your pajamas if you wanted to. There's nothing about it sophisticated or cheek. And it was very small. It wasn't a big bar at all. That card and the man who belonged to Clay Williams would end up having an enormous impact on Stanford. And this story, okay, Well, to make a short story short. I fly out to Cement, Oklahoma, get a rental car, go to this little town, just two thousand population, find the address, knock on the door, and the woman there, of course doesn't look anything like Amy Bell. Her husband's there. And the story is they have parties all the time, people coming in and out of the house, and on this particular night when mother got the call, they were having one of those big parties. They have no idea who was there. In other words, it was a complete flop. I go back to the airport, get on the plane, go back to Miami, and I know I'm in trouble. Stanford figured was likely to lose his job at the paper. Then he remembered that stranger from the bar, Clay Williams, the private investigator who had offered to ask the bikers about Amy Billgg. So I get out the card for Clay Williams, which I thought i'd never have to use because I was so sure that this was going to be in and I called the number on it. Intercept secretary answers. I asked for Clay Williams and she says, I'm sorry, we don't have a Clay Williams here. And I said what she said? No. At this point, Stanford is not only desperate, he's confused and annoyed. So I jumped in my car drive out there. They're actually in Prine too. They have nice offices in the Bank of Prine, third floor, and barge into the office and I'm waving this card and the secretary and I said, look, I have his card. It says he works here. And this big burly guy comes out of the office, introduces himself Bob Adams. He's as an inventor, second coint in and let's talk. And so we go into his office. The first thing you notice there's this big poster of Casablanca behind his desk. Turns out he's something of a romantic. So we talked and he says, sorry about the confusion, but we didn't know who you were when you called. You know, we get all sorts of calls from all sorts of people. But yeah, Clay Williams did some work for us, and we haven't been able to get in touch with him for two or three days. I guess it was. And we're worried about him too. And I say, I'm worried about him because I think I may be responsible. Worried Williams wound up in trouble after asking bikers about Amy Billick. Stanford fears it's his fault. The guy's gone missing. When he conveyed that to Bob Adams, Adams offered to assist Stanford in his search for Clay Williams. The next few days, they sort of squire me around as a dog and pony show. We're looking for Clay Williams. Of course we don't find him. Did he ever turn up? Oh yeah, About two weeks later, I got a call from Bob. He said they found Clay. He's dead. They found his body in the Everglades. Suddenly Stamford is really regretting that exchange in the bar. Now I am quite convinced I'm responsible for Clay Williams's death. I told Bob too that I was worried that I'd caused Clay's death because he was doing research for me. And he says, well, look, you're still working for the the newspaper, right And I said yeah, And he said, well, why don't you go down to the Sheriff's office talk to the detectives working on this case and see what they know. And so I go down the Miami Dade Sheriff's office and tell the person at the entrance that I'd like to talk to the detectives. I'm from the Miami News and I might have some information that's useful on Clay Williams. One of the detectives comes out, tall, lanky guy, sort of detective issue suit, and leads me back to the room where his partner is and I sit in front of their desk and I tell him about the Amy Belly case. I think I might be irresponsible for this death. And they say right away, no, this has nothing to do with the missing girl. They think it's drugs and I said no, no, no, no. So we go back and forth, and at a certain point they start pulling out pictures of Clay William's body polaroids taken out in the Everglades, and he's just this is after two weeks now. He's a skeleton with long hair down to his shoulders. Most of the flesh has gone from his face, and the alligators have taken off an arm and part of a leg. And they they show me more photos of the body and then say you better watch what you're getting into. I said, you know, I'm fine, and so they just sort of throw up their hands escort me to the door, but not without offering Phil a final warning. They said, look, you're involved with some dangerous people here. And I report back to Bob. I call and tell them what I found out is a good work, good work. And so that was sort of my first job for Intercept as a private detective, as a newspaper reporter slash private detective. Yes, as gruesome as Clay William's death may sound, apparently it didn't even make news. I couldn't find any information about it online or in any of the newspaper archives. But that could be because it was just one of an avalanche of murders in that year. In alone, Miami had a record five hundred and seventy three murders. The Miami Dade Morgue was so overwhelmed with corpses that the Medical Examiner's Office had to lease a refrigerated truck to keep the cascades of bodies on ice. And Miami earned the dubious distinction of being the nation's murder capital, largely as a result of shootouts among cocaine cowboys and violent crimes committed by Mary Alito's crime games of mostly male Cubans who had poured into Miami at the time straight from the prisons in Cuba. It was a recipe for violence and volatility. Here's how Ruth Fills, then girlfriend, who also worked at the Miami News at the time, remembers that during those years in Miami, there were so many people that turned up dead because anybody, yeah, crossed the cartails and any white that just killed everybody it was home. One of the people that got arrested even said that, well, just killed everybody there was at home, you know, And there were so many murders that we're just inexplicable that then it was a crazy time in Miami and a time when drug money fuel to the mayhem. As we say in the staff, money talks and bullshit walks, because I had millions of millions of dollars that I were making from that money made on supply and demand during the eighties. The number of Americans abusing cocaine has skyrocketed. In the early part of the decade, this white powder was considered a white collar drug. Coke was it. Coke was chic, and at a hundred dollars of Graham, it had the high price tag to match cocaine his big business. Americans are spending over thirty billion dollars a year on it. Both suppliers and users are a formidable adversary in the war on drugs, and in nineteen eighty Miami was the undisputed ground zero in that battle. I tell people that that was our copol era, because it was just crazy with all the achilles. That's Israel reis a former Circuit court judge of the eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Today he runs his own law firm. After nearly thirty years of public service as a judge and Assistant States Attorney. I sought him out because from nineteen eighty until he was also a police officer detective with the Miami Dade Police Department, where at various times he worked in the Homicide Bureau, Media Relations Section, and Special Investigations divisions, Criminal Conspiracy and Racketeering squads, so he was no stranger to drug related violence. My first exposure to that was when I was still a patrol officer in nineteen eighty one, when I was dispatched to a shooting in the new part of Miami Les, Florida. Miami Lakes is now an incorporated town, but back then it was just an unincorporated area of Day County. As I arrived on the scene, I was the first all sor on the scene. That was the victim was lying in his driveway and he had been peppered with either a Mac ten or a Mac a Levin, which is a small van held submachine gun that was used a lot by the Colombian pitman. I remember he was lying in his driveway there in a garage stores behind him. Run store was just littered with holes because they just kept shooting at this day with this automatic submachine gun in that era, Most if not all, of Miami's violent crimes were meant to serve as messages or warnings to those who crossed the drug cartels or even considered it. We would just hear about these different cases people just being killed. I think there was like eight or nine people killed inside of a house in Kendall, which was you know, the South Dad area, a nice middle class area. Eight or nine people killed there. There were a lot of kidnappings for ransom. I mean it was just daye and day out. Former detective Jeff Lewis, who is now a private investigator, started out as a uniformed officer in the Liberty City area of Miami in nine before going on to become an undercover detective, robber detective, and homicide detective in Miami Dade. He also gave me his take on the times. I would categorize it as the left. Every day somebody was getting shot, murdered, robbed, victimized. The crime was definitely out of control in that particular time. Buyed by the influx of drug related conflicts, the crime wave hit with a gruesome severity not before seen in the US. Then started in Miami because that's where the money was, and that's where the people that wanted to make money came. The term home invasion robbery was coined in Miami. You didn't have all invasion robberies in l A or Chicago or or collect we did in Miami. That's where it started because that's where the drug trade really started. And blew up one of our sergeants going to turn Home Nation robbery. Wow. And so that was a direct result of the influence of the violence that the cartels brought with the business. Absolutely. I mean, you know, between the Colombians and Mary elite to and a lot of those Cubans that came over. Everybody saw the movie car Face. I mean, that's what would happen if you were criminal and you came to Miami from Maryell. If you didn't become a drug dealer, it became a drug robber. And then you would recruit those to work for you, and usually those were people you were in prison with the Cubo. So it was a big vicious cycle and it was a business. You had two businesses with that. You had the drug dealers and then you had the people that were robbing a drug dealer. So our hands were full because we had to deal with both both groups, and they were vicious. They were nasty. I mean, these guys were ruthless. Victims were hurt so bad they had to call the police or an ambulance or go to the hospital, and otherwise they probably wouldn't even call the police. We would have on cooperative victims and that was a problem as a robber detective, and they was very prevalent, and so it was also pretty prevalent that many of these crimes went unsolved, especially ones involving discarded bodies like the body of Clay Williams during that specific time, and they had what they were called body dumps out in the Redlands or out in the swamp areas or anywhere outside of the cities. Sometimes they would get the individual identified, sometimes they wouldn't, putting A lot of those cases turned out to be drug related, and they didn't get the assistance from the Bickings family because they were either too afraid or they were also involved in the drug trade. So a lot of those cases went unsolved. But it was basically drug dealers killing other drug dealers. And if the rise in drug dealing was linked to the rise in body counts, so was the violence. Those bodies endured before being found, and you just don't go kill kill. A lot of times, either that person stole from you, lie to you, it's something to your family in regards to drugs, or they knew where the big stash was or whatever. So they're going to torture you. They're gonna kill you. Now, they've got to get rid of the body up there in the Everglades. Go out there where nobody goes the middle of the night, dump the body and leave no idea. Sometimes you might pull the team, cuts fingers off, maybe the head. You know, you don't want the body to get identified, or you put it in and hoping gators will get it. That's not a myth. I mean, there's been plenty of bones found in the Everglades even today. I'm sure there's bones still out there. I'd say that's part of the deal, cost of doing business and the drug trade and crossing somebody. So Miami and the situation you were walking into sounded outright dangerous. Didn't you realize any of this? Well, sure I did. When I was at the News, I had written a front page story about how Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. I just looked at the FBI crime statistics and did the necessary arithmetic, and it had the highest per capita rate of murders in the United still clips to Houston, New York City's murder city US A kind of interesting that after it appeared on the front page. I mean, there's a banner headline across the front page. The delegation from the Chamber of Commerce came in and there were hush meetings with the editors back behind those glass cubicles, and they were upset that newspaper would be pointing this out. When Bob Adams made Phil Stanford and offer to work at Intercept Agency, basically replacing Clay Williams, Phil didn't suspect Intercept and its activities may actually have been responsible for Clay Williams being murdered and left to the alligators in the Everglades. At this point, I don't know exactly what it was that got him killed. So after his gruesome death, being warned by police detectives that you're getting involved with dangerous people, you and taking the job of a man who was just murdered, dumped in the Everglades and half eaten by alligators. Yeah, I suppose you could look at it that way and you realize that the murder of Clay Williams has never been solved. Yeah, apparently that's the case. So after you gave me his name, I put in a formal request for information on the case months ago in January with the Miami Dade Sheriff's Office, and to date they can't seem to find the file. I mean, they're still looking for it, but they believe it may have been misfiled or or even lost. Now that's ridiculous. A cold case murder and they think maybe they lost the file. But you must have realized even at the time that something wasn't right. I wasn't thinking about that. I was at a point in my life where I was just sort of throwing my fate to the wind. It's one of those times when all your plans are coming to nothing, when nothing's working. Maybe the best end of all is no plan at all. And I ended up working for interest. What could go wrong? More, it turns out than Phil could have ever imagined, because Intercept that private investigation firm Phil now worked for wasn't exactly what it seemed. But of course I had no way of knowing the detective Agency would turn out to be a front for a major drug operation that was about to be indicted in federal court. And when the indictment came down, the guy they were working for, this dashing drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester, would claim he did it all for this CIA. Did he have proof, he said, if they put him on trial, he was going to spill the beans on the CIA and it would shape the foundations of the government to its core. Did he give you any idea of what kind of secrets he had? Well, that's where things start to get interesting and maybe a little bit dangerous too. So Clay wasn't the only person who murdered on the next murder in Miami. Months of researching, the mysterious death of Clay Williams raises more questions than answers. It was a strange funeral anyway. Standing in the back end of the trailer were about four or five very big guys, obviously detectives. They were there to send a message. Stanford was all too willing to dive into the new role of private investigator. I'm just there to handle the stuff that comes in from the Yellow Pages. So the rest of the guys contend to the real business, which was the drug business. Of course, this is Miami. There was no big secret at all that their biggest client at the time was this dashing dope pilot by the name of lamar Chester. He introduced me to Bob Adams and another fellow there, and I had understood from that these were former intelligence people from the federal government, well, the CIA, Army intelligence. They were associated. I think that's how Clay got to know these people. Murder of Miami is a production of I Heart Radio. Executive producers are Lauren Bright Pacheco, Taylor Chokogne, and Phil Stanford. Written by Phil Stanford and Lauren bred Pacheco. Audio editing and sound designed by Nicholas Harder, Evan Tire and Taylor Chokogne, featuring music by Event Tyre, Phil Mayor, John Murchison and Taylor Chacogne. Archival elements provided by Lennon Lewis Wolfson, the Second Florida Moving Image Archives and Film Ark Huves Incorporated. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the stories that matter to you.

Murder in Miami

In the 1980s crime journalist Phil Stanford dove into the decadent and dangerous world of Miami just 
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