Barry Seal
Barry Seal, born Adler Berriman Seal, was shot dead in a parking lot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the evening of the 19th of February 1986. The lot belonged to a Salvation Army center, and he had been on probation for just three weeks.
Seal was an American pilot who once flew Boeing jets for a major airline. He went on to smuggle cocaine for the Medellín Cartel, and then he switched sides and became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. His testimony helped convict defendants in several major drug trials.
How does a gifted young airline captain end up flying for Colombian traffickers? What did the government gain from his turn, and what did it fail to do for him afterward? And why are so many of the stories told about him, from Nicaragua to the CIA, still argued over today?
Seal was born on the 16th of July 1939 in Baton Rouge, the son of a candy wholesaler named Benjamin Curtis Seal and his wife Mary Lou, whose maiden name was Delcambre. He was flying as a teenager. He held a student pilot certificate at 16 and a private pilot's certificate at 17, and his flight instructor called him a naturally gifted pilot.
In 1962, Seal enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard for six years. His active duty began that July and lasted six months. He was assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group and completed Army airborne training. The remaining five and a half years were inactive service in the 245th Engineer Battalion, where he worked as a radio telephone operator.
TWA hired Seal in 1964 as a flight engineer. He rose to first officer and then captain, flying a Boeing 707 on a regular route to Western Europe. He was one of the youngest 707 command pilots in the airline's fleet.
In July 1972, Seal was arrested in a conspiracy to ship plastic explosives to Mexico aboard a DC-4. He had claimed medical leave under false pretenses to take part, and TWA fired him. The case was dismissed in 1974 for prosecutorial misconduct, but by then his airline career was over.
By his own later admission, Seal began flying small amounts of marijuana in early 1976. By 1978 he had moved up to significant loads of cocaine, which paid far more for the same weight.
A Honduran jail cell gave his business its next push. Seal was arrested in Honduras on the return leg of a smuggling trip to Ecuador. Inside, he met Emile Camp, a fellow Louisiana pilot and smuggler who became one of his closest associates. He also met Ellis McKenzie, a local Honduran smuggler. After his release, he met William Roger Reaves on the flight home, and Reaves gave him his first connection to the Medellín Cartel.
Seal hired his ex-brother-in-law, William Bottoms, as a pilot. From 1980, Bottoms was the main pilot in the operation and often flew with Camp, while Seal handled planning and logistics. In 1981 Seal began hauling cocaine for the Medellín Cartel, earning as much as $500,000 for a single flight.
His method relied on low-flying planes. They dropped packages in remote parts of Louisiana, where a ground crew collected them and moved them on to Colombian distributors in Florida. By 1982 he was using more than a dozen aircraft. That many planes flying that often drew the notice of the Louisiana State Police and federal investigators.
Seal's answer was to base his aircraft at Mena Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas. There he had the planes serviced and modified to carry more and to improve their electronics. His biographer, former FBI agent Del Hahn, said Mena was never a transshipment point for drugs. A joint investigation by the FBI, the Arkansas State Police and the IRS, made public in 2020, said otherwise. It found Seal used the airport for smuggling activity from late 1980 until March 1984.
Federal agents in Florida had not waited for any of that. By 1981, DEA officers there already knew who he was.
In April 1981, a DEA informant introduced Seal to an undercover agent. After several months of contact, the agent struck a deal with him to bring 1,200 pounds of methaqualone tablets into the country. The tablets were counterfeits made of chalk.
The sting was part of a large undercover effort called Operation Screamer, which eventually produced indictments against more than 80 pilots. Seal was named in two of them in March 1983. The first charged him alone with two counts of conspiracy to distribute methaqualone. The second charged him and three others with multiple counts of possession and distribution of methaqualone, phenobarbital and meperidine.
At the end of April 1983, Seal surrendered to federal authorities and tried to bargain. He approached the Florida task force first and then the Baton Rouge task force. He gave them a little about his dealings with the Ochoa family, but both turned him down. A month-long trial in February 1984 ended with convictions on every count of the first indictment.
In March 1984, facing a ten-year sentence, Seal reached out to the South Florida Task Force. This was a cross-agency drug interdiction team led by then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. The office passed him to DEA headquarters, which sent agent Ernst Jacobsen to debrief him. Jacobsen came away impressed, particularly by Seal's links to the Ochoa family.
On the 28th of March, Seal signed a letter agreeing to work as a DEA informant. He then pleaded guilty to the second Florida indictment and was released. The terms of his sentence now depended on how well he performed.
The first assignment was to arrange a cocaine purchase from the Ochoas and other cartel figures. Seal had used the name Ellis McKenzie in earlier dealings with the cartel, borrowing the name of his Honduran associate. He used that alias again to set up a meeting in Medellín.
On the 8th of April, Seal flew to Medellín for the meeting, accompanied by a Miami-based cartel pilot who had no idea Seal was working for the DEA. Pablo Escobar was there, along with Jorge, Fabio Jr. and Juan David Ochoa. The Colombian government had recently raided the cartel's jungle production site at Tranquilandia, destroying millions of dollars of cocaine. The Sandinista government later denied Seal's account of the meeting and its aftermath, as presented by the Reagan administration, and the media scrutinized it heavily.
According to Seal, the traffickers were planning shipping and production facilities in Nicaragua, under a deal with the Sandinistas. Those arrangements were not finished, so his first load was to fly directly to the United States. It was planned for mid-April but did not go until the end of May. The overloaded plane then crashed on takeoff from the Colombian airfield.
The cartel supplied another plane, but it could not make the trip nonstop. A stopover in Nicaragua was arranged, at Los Brasiles airfield near Managua. After refueling, Seal took off without lights and came under fire from Nicaraguan military units near the capital. Hit by gunfire, he made an emergency landing at Sandino International Airport in Managua. Soldiers unloaded the cocaine, and Seal and his co-pilot were held in downtown Managua. They were then handed over to the cartel's Nicaraguan contact, Federico Vaughan.
This account drew sharp criticism from Jonathan Kwitny, a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal, in April 1987. He noted that the administration had first called Los Brasiles a military facility. It later admitted the field was civilian and used mostly by crop-dusters, which matched Defense Department documentation of the time.
Vaughan was another point of dispute. A federal grand jury indictment called him an aide to Tomás Borge, Nicaragua's Minister of the Interior. Kwitny reported that Vaughan was actually deputy manager of a state-run import-export business within that ministry. In 1988, William J. Hughes, chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, released more findings. His subcommittee agreed that Escobar and his associates had operated from Nicaragua, but it doubted Vaughan's ties. Staff who called Vaughan's number found that the Managua residence had been rented since 1981 by a recently expelled member of the US embassy staff. Hughes also pointed to references to a "Freddy Vaughn" in Oliver North's diary in July 1984. Nobody could establish whether that was the same man.
In Managua, Seal met Escobar again, who was setting up a cocaine lab. Escobar decided to keep the first load in Nicaragua and told Seal to go back to the States and buy a bigger plane. Seal bought a C-123K, a large military-style transport. Before he flew it back, the DEA had CIA technicians install hidden cameras inside.
Seal returned to Los Brasiles on the 25th of June, and this time the pickup went smoothly. The cameras photographed him and several others loading cocaine, among them Escobar, the cartel figure José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha and Vaughan. Seal landed at Homestead Air Force Base, and the drugs were moved into a Winnebago camper that he handed over to his Colombian contact. The Reagan administration later claimed that the men helping Seal were Sandinista soldiers. None of them wore military uniforms.
The DEA could not simply arrest the people handling the camper, since that would tell the Colombians Seal had betrayed them. Agents staged an accident to let the driver slip away. Local police arrested him anyway, and the odd circumstances of the seizure made the cartel suspicious.
Seal said he made one more trip on the 7th of July, carrying money for Escobar to pay the Nicaraguans for landing rights. Another load was planned, but the DEA told him to warn Escobar that the landing site was under surveillance, to avoid having to seize a second shipment. Seal flew home empty. The agency hoped to keep him working the cartel's supply chain, such as moving cocaine base into Nicaragua and inspecting airfields in Mexico and the United States. The ultimate goal was to arrest the leaders somewhere they could easily be extracted.
The plan did not survive the press. On the 29th of June, General Paul F. Gorman of Southern Command gave a speech saying the United States had evidence that elements of the Nicaraguan government were involved in drug smuggling. He did not mention Seal. It is unclear whether Seal's crew knew about the speech before they flew back. Then, on the 17th of July, reporter Edmond Jacoby published a more detailed account on the front page of the Washington Times. It was incomplete, but it was enough to end Seal's work with the cartel.
The DEA had been warned before Jacoby's article ran, so it moved fast in Miami. Seal arranged a meeting with Carlos Bustamonte, the cartel's chief supervisor in the city, and agents arrested him on the 17th of July along with other cartel employees. The evidence from that arrest, combined with what Seal had gathered, supported the first US drug trafficking indictment against Escobar and the Ochoas.
Seal then assembled a second major operation later in 1984. It involved a long, complicated cocaine run from Bolivia, with refueling in Colombia and again in Texas, ending in Las Vegas. The DEA would not let him leave the country because of the danger. So his ex-brother-in-law, William Bottoms, flew it in January 1985. The flight succeeded and led to arrests and convictions.
In February 1985, Seal took a central part in a sting against Norman Saunders, chief minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British colony south of the Bahamas. Saunders was videotaped in Miami paying a bribe to Seal, and he was successfully prosecuted.
Seal's trouble at home had not gone away. State and federal authorities in Baton Rouge and Little Rock, Arkansas, were still investigating him, and a Louisiana grand jury began hearing witnesses in October 1984. Seal fought back through the media. In November 1984, the Baton Rouge station WBRZ ran a five-night documentary series called "Uncle Sam Wants You." In an interview, Seal denied being a smuggler and was portrayed as a man hounded by the government. The state narcotics agents who had investigated him sued over how the series depicted them, but the suit was dismissed.
Soon after the broadcast, the heads of the Florida and Louisiana task forces met. They agreed that Seal could keep working with Florida and testify at trial. His Louisiana sentence would be no greater than his Florida one, and the two would run together. The agreement dates to December 1984.
In June 1985, Seal was taken into federal custody and spent several months on the witness stand. He was the primary witness in three trials. The first, in July, was of Saunders and other Turks and Caicos officials. The other two came in August: the Miami cartel distributors, and the distributors tied to the Bolivia-to-Las Vegas shipment. Every defendant in all three trials was convicted. Seal also appeared before the President's Commission on Organized Crime to describe his years as a smuggler.
His own sentencing in Florida came next. On the second Screamer indictment, to which he had pleaded guilty, he received five years of unsupervised probation, with the backing of his DEA supervisors. After the Las Vegas testimony he spent another month in a witness protection center. In October 1985 he returned to court on the first indictment, which had carried a ten-year sentence. Judge Norman Roettger heard summaries of Seal's work for the DEA and sentenced him to time served, a little over three months in witness protection, plus three years of probation.
That ruling put Louisiana prosecutors in a corner.
At Seal's Louisiana sentencing in January 1986, Judge Frank Polozola made clear he did not like where he had been left. Louisiana investigators had expected Seal to serve real time in Florida. Instead, the Florida sentence meant he could not be jailed in Louisiana, even though he was now pleading guilty to buying 200 kilograms (440 lbs) of cocaine. That was more serious than the Florida charges, and before the deal the Louisiana inquiry had examined his role in moving thousands of kilograms.
Polozola told Seal that people like him were "the lowest, most despicable people I can think of." He warned that he would set strict probation terms and that a violation could revoke the plea bargain and bring a new sentence. One condition barred Seal from carrying a gun or hiring armed bodyguards, since either would count as possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Seal's attorney, Lewis Unglesby, told the judge the ruling amounted to a death sentence. Seal told friends the judge had "made me a clay pigeon."
The probation rules also forbade Seal to leave Baton Rouge without Polozola's written permission. For the first six months he had to spend every night from 6 pm to 6 am at a halfway house. He was assigned to the Salvation Army's Community Treatment Center in the city.
The cartel had its own reasons to want him dead. The men in Medellín had known him only as the pilot Ellis McKenzie. The newspaper report and the arrests of their Miami distributors had told them their pilot was working for the DEA. But they did not learn that McKenzie was Seal until they saw a copy of his television documentary. Then they put out a contract to kidnap or kill him.
Max Mermelstein, a high-level cartel distributor in Miami, later testified that he was shown the documentary a few days after it aired. He was told the cartel wanted Seal captured or dead. The price was $500,000 for a killing and $1,000,000 for a live capture. Mermelstein said he accepted because he believed refusing would cost him his own life. Fabio Ochoa and Escobar phoned to thank him, and he received $100,000 to cover costs. In June 1985, before he found Seal, a federal task force arrested him. He told investigators about the contract, and Seal was informed that the cartel was offering $500,000 for his death.
On the evening of the killing, Seal drove into the Salvation Army parking lot and parked. A man stepped out of a car behind the center's donation drop boxes and opened fire with a suppressed MAC-10 submachine gun. Seal was hit six times and died almost at once.
Six Colombians were arrested. Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz, Miguel Vélez and Bernardo Antonio Vásquez were indicted on state capital murder charges. A fourth man faced lesser charges in a separate indictment. Evidence of direct involvement was too thin for the last two, who were released and deported. Federal prosecutors also charged Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar and a third cartel member, Rafael Cardona Salazar, with conspiring to violate Seal's civil rights by murdering him.
Public outcry and heavy publicity delayed the murder trial by several months. When it became clear that enough jurors could not be seated in Baton Rouge, the trial moved to Lake Charles, where it opened in April 1987. The two most important witnesses were Max Mermelstein and Luis Carlos Uribe-Munera.
Mermelstein testified that Ochoa, Escobar and Cardona had asked him to take the contract and had given him money and weapons for the job. He had watched Cardona test-fire the murder weapon in his garage. FBI forensic examiners later dug bullets matching that weapon out of the garage wall. Mermelstein also knew Vélez, who he said was present when the contract was handed over and who later asked Mermelstein to give it to him.
Uribe-Munera was a Colombian smuggler who worked for the cartel. He testified that Jorge Ochoa ordered him to kill Seal in January 1986. When he realized he would probably be killed afterward, he refused. Cartel gunmen shot him five times, but he survived and sought asylum at the US embassy in Bogota. Brought to the United States, he agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine.
The case against the three defendants also rested on eyewitnesses and forensic evidence. One witness identified Vélez as the driver of the car in the halfway house lot. Another saw Quintero-Cruz outside the car, passing the MAC-10 through the window to the driver after the shooting. Fingerprints from all three men were found in the vehicle. A car agency salesman identified Vásquez as the buyer of the car, and he had paid for hotel rooms and rental cars under his own name.
All three were convicted and sentenced to life without parole. Decades later, in January 2023, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards denied Vásquez's request for clemency.
Seal was married three times. His first marriage, to Barbara Dodson, ran from 1963 to 1971. His second, to Lynn Ross, lasted from 1971 to 1972. In 1973 he married Deborah DuBois, and that marriage ended only with his death in 1986. He had six children: two with his first wife, one from a relationship between marriages, and three with Deborah.
In 1988, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on how the story of Seal's Nicaragua trip had reached the press. DEA agent Ernst Jacobsen testified, "I heard that the leak came from an aide in the White House." He said Oliver North, a figure in the Iran-Contra affair, had attended two meetings about the sting and had a motive. UPI reported that by linking the Sandinistas with drug traffic, aid to rebels accused of human rights violations might seem more palatable.
Subcommittee chairman Hughes strongly suggested North was the source. Representative Bill McCollum disagreed that it was known, saying, "we don't know who leaked this. No one has been able to tell us." Citing testimony from DEA Administrator John C. Lawn, the Kerry Committee report of December 1988 blamed North, saying he "decided to play politics with the issue." North told Frontline that his superiors on the National Security Council had told him to brief Senator Paula Hawkins about the operation, but he denied leaking it. Hawkins told Frontline that neither she nor her staff were the source. The reporter, Jacoby, also denied North was his source and pointed instead to a deceased staff member for Representative Dan Daniel.
Seal's death raised a different question about blame. Louisiana Attorney General William Guste wrote to US Attorney General Edwin Meese, criticizing the government's failure to protect a witness. At Guste's request, Meese opened an investigation into whether attorneys in Louisiana, Miami and Washington had mishandled the case, and whether Seal should have been forced into protective custody. Government attorneys replied that Seal had put himself in danger by refusing to move his family and enter witness protection.
The CIA remains the most contested part of his story. Writers such as Alexander Cockburn suggested Seal's ties to the agency went back to the 1960s, when he was allegedly a special forces helicopter pilot in Vietnam, or even to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961. Seal was also reportedly involved in CIA-sponsored activities in Central America in the 1980s, including carrying weapons to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and smuggling drugs. The CIA denied ever employing him, and Seal denied being an agency asset.
Screen versions have taken liberties. Dennis Hopper played Seal in Doublecrossed (1991), a docudrama made for HBO. Michael Paré appeared as Seal in two brief and historically inaccurate scenes of The Infiltrator (2016). In American Made (2017), produced by Imagine Entertainment, Tom Cruise plays a character loosely based on Seal. Little of that film is accurate, and the murder of Seal's brother-in-law was invented for the plot.
Television has done the same. Sebastián Sánchez played the character Harry Beal in Pablo Escobar, The Drug Lord, and the theater director Thaddeus McWhinnie Phillips portrayed Seal in the 2013 series Alias El Mexicano. In Season 1, Episode 4 of the Netflix series Narcos (2015), Dylan Bruno plays Seal as an ex-CIA pilot rather than a former commercial airline pilot.
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Common questions
Who was Barry Seal?
Adler Berriman Seal was an American pilot, born on the 16th of July 1939. He flew for TWA, later smuggled cocaine for the Medellín Cartel, and then became a DEA informant who testified in several major drug trials.
Why did the Medellín Cartel want Barry Seal dead?
The cartel learned he had worked as a DEA informant after his Miami distributors were arrested and a newspaper report appeared. They identified Ellis McKenzie as Seal when they received a copy of his television documentary, and then put out a contract on him.
How did Barry Seal die?
On the evening of the 19th of February 1986, a gunman with a suppressed MAC-10 submachine gun shot him six times in the parking lot of a Salvation Army center in Baton Rouge, where he was serving probation.
Who was convicted of Barry Seal's murder?
Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz, Miguel Vélez and Bernardo Antonio Vásquez were found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. Federal charges were also filed against Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar and Rafael Cardona Salazar.
Was Barry Seal a CIA agent?
Some writers have suggested CIA ties going back to the 1960s, but those links are controversial. The CIA denied employing him, and Seal denied ever being an asset of the agency.
How accurate is the film American Made?
Little of it is historically accurate. Tom Cruise plays a character loosely based on Seal, and much of the plot, such as the murder of his brother-in-law, was invented for the film.
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23 references cited across the entry
- 2Activities at airport in Mena detailed - FBI document recently releasedBill Bowden — WEHCO Media — 19 July 2020
- 4NewsDope Story: Doubts Rise on Report Reagan Cited in Tying Sandinistas to CocaineJonathan Kwinty — April 22, 1987
- 5News11 Indicted by U.S. as Drug SmugglersLeslie Maitland Werner — 1984-07-28
- 6NewsDrug Agent: Leak Forced Probe to EndAP — July 29, 1988
- 7NewsSandinistas, cocaine traffic in U.S. linkedJacoby Edmond — July 17, 1984
- 9NewsLouisiana governor denies parole for man who helped kill Barry Seal for Escobar's cartelJames Finn — January 26, 2023
- 10NewsSlain drug smuggler Barry Seal's daughter sues to halt movie on her father's lifeJoe Gyan — 2015-10-16
- 12NewsNorth's name bandied about on news leakWendy Zentz — July 29, 1988
- 13BookDrugs, law enforcement, and foreign policy :a reportUS Government Printing Office — December 1988
- 14NewsTranscripts - Drug WarsPBS
- 16NewsInformants murder puts head on authoritiesRonald Kozol — April 13, 1986
- 17NewsWhat's Fact and What's Fiction in American MadeEllin Stein — 2017-09-29
- 19The Story Behind an Infamous Escobar Cartel AssassinationSeth Ferranti — 2016-03-28
- 20TV Reviews: 'Doublecrossed': Story of Drugs and PoliticsChris Willman — Articles.latimes.com — 1991-07-20
- 21NewsAmerican Made (2017)History vs. Hollywood
- 22BookKings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellín Cartel - An Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money and International CorruptionGuy Gugliotta et al. — Simon and Schuster — 1989
- 23BookSmuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry SealDel Hahn — Pelican Publishing Company — 2016