Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl ‘Will you marry me?’ The girl said, ‘NO!’ And the guy lived happily ever after and rode motorcycles and went traveling and had wonderful adventures and got laid often from lots of different girls and had tons of money in the bank and left the toilet seat up whenever he wanted to.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Godfrey Osei and the Ghana Coup: Chapter 3
U.S MERCENARIES ESCAPE BRAZIL TO TELL OF PLAN TO OVERTHROW AFRICAN LEADER
By KATHERINE BISHOP, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: December 27, 1986
Two American mercenaries have escaped from a Brazilian prison and returned to the United States to tell a tangled tale of a foiled effort to overthrow the Government of Ghana.
The two men, Timothy M. Carmody of San Francisco and Steven W. Hedrick of Ocala, Fla., were among eight Americans arrested 10 months ago off Brazil, with a ship bearing six tons of weapons. They say they were headed for the West African country to join in a coup attempt aimed at the military Government of Lieut. Jerry Rawlings. Mr. Carmody and Mr. Hedrick said in interviews today that they believed they were participating in a plan sanctioned by the United States Government and led by Godfrey Osei, a Ghanaian dissident and expatriate living in the New York City borough of Queens. Mr. Osei led a failed coup attempt in 1983.
Mr. Carmody, a Vietnam veteran and a co-founder of the Rhodesia Veterans Association, a group of Americans who worked as private soldiers in Rhodesia in the late 1970′s, said that once in Ghana, they were to meet with supporters of Mr. Osei who would attack the capital city of Accra while the Americans attempted to free Ghanaian nationals jailed on charges that they were working covertly for the Central Intelligence Agency.
C.I.A. Says It’s ‘Ridiculous’
The same story is told by Mr. Hedrick, who said that ”sources” he would not name had sent him coded messages in jail that reasssured him that the job had the sanction of the American Government. ”I thought I had the blessing of my country,” Mr. Hedrick said of the work he signed on to do in Ghana. He said he felt ”abandoned” by the Government in his 10 months in various jails in Brazil.
But George Lauder, a C.I.A. spokesman, today denied that the agency had anything to do with an effort to overthrow the Government of Ghana, with which Washington has had strained relations. ”Their charges are ridiculous,” he said of the men’s comments today.
Pete Martinez, a State Department spokesman, said today that he had ”no information at all” on the men and was not aware of their whereabouts.
Mr. Hedrick and Mr. Carmody said they were determined to locate Mr. Osei and to speak to a Texas commodities broker who arranged for the sale of arms to the group, in an effort to sort out the information they were given.
Effort to Avoid Extradition
Though their conviction on arms-smuggling charges was overturned by a Brazilian appeals court, four of the eight Americans escaped from a prison in Brasilia Dec. 15, before they could be extradited to Argentina, where the arms had been purchased and where they faced charges of illegally exporting military material. Mr. Carmody and Mr. Hedrick, along with Sheldon W. Ainsworth of Omaha, arrived in the United States Thursday. Frederick T. Verduin of Santa Rosa, Calif., separated from the others shortly after the escape and did not accompany them home.
Those who remain imprisoned in Brasilia are John Early of Albuquerque, Robert E. Foti of New York City, and Julio Rodriguez Larrazabal and Steven Villa Sosa, both of Fayetteville, N.C.
According to Mr. Carmody, who was a graduate student in international relations at San Francisco State University, he was recruited for the mission by Mr. Early and Mr. Foti, fellow Vietnam veterans who also worked as private soldiers in Rhodesia.
Mr. Early is particularly well known in the shadowy fraternity of adventurers, mercenaries and arms dealers operating out of this country. Several people who know him say he has been involved in clandestine activities in Laos in the 1960′s and more recently in El Salvador.
Lawyer Claimed C.I.A. Tie
Mr. Early was also convicted in Federal District Court in San Diego in 1981 of conspiracy to smuggle marijuana for his role in a large drug-smuggling operation. According to Mr. Early’s defense attorney, quoted in an article in The San Diego Union at the time, the Central Intelligence Agency intervened in the case to insure that Mr. Early’s connections to the C.I.A. were not mentioned during his trial.
It was Mr. Early who was to lead the group of eight in the mission to overthrow the military Government of Ghana and install Mr. Osei as President.
According to Mr. Hedrick, the eight recruits assembled in the Miami airport on Feb. 13 and flew to Buenos Aires where they were met by Ted Bishop, a commodities broker from Texas. He said Mr. Bishop, who arranged for the purchase of weapons from Argentine Government factories, introduced the men to Mr. Osei.
Reached at his office in Farmersville, Tex., Mr. Bishop acknowledged arranging the purchase of arms on behalf of Mr. Osei, whom he said he had known for about two years. He said he believed that Mr. Osei had proper documentation for the legal purchase of the weapons.
Coffee Deal in Exchange
Mr. Bishop said his fee for the deal was an agreement that he would be the exclusive broker for coffee and other products from Ghana should Mr. Osei successfully take over the Government.
Members of Mr. Osei’s family answering the phone at his apartment in Queens have, over the past several weeks, said he was not there and it was not known when he might return. When the same telephone number was called today, an unidentified voice said ”wrong number” and hung up.
Daniel C.K. Gyabaah, counselor at the Embassy of Ghana in Washington, said today that his Government was aware that the three mercenaries had returned to the United States. But he said he knew of no plans by his Government in response to the escape.
Mr. Hedrick says that Mr. Osei told them that a New York City businessman named ”Solomon” had helped Mr. Bishop raise $500,000 to finance the weapons purchase, and that Mr. Bishop and Mr. Osei, when in Argentina to buy the weapons, had called ”Solomon” in New York.
A New York City commodities broker who has had business dealings with Mr. Bishop, Solomon Schwartz, is currently charged in an unrelated 14-count Federal racketeering indictment involving the illegal export of weapons.
Says He Didn’t Know Them
But Mr. Schwartz, in a recent interview, said he had no involvement with the Ghana plot and did not know the men arrested in Brazil.
He acknowledged that he had a business relationship with Ted Bishop, whom he said had asked him about two years ago to try to work out some commodities trading deals on produce from Mexico. He said that he met Mr. Bishop in New York City on one occasion and that Mr. Bishop called him from Argentina attempting to organize the sale of coffee, a deal that was never finalized.
”This fellow, Ted Bishop, as I understand it, knew those people,” Mr. Schwartz said of the mercenaries convicted in Brazil. ”But I had no connection with any of those people.”
Mr. Schwartz and the three other defendants in the racketeering case have pleaded not guilty in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. They also filed a motion asking that they be permitted to argue at their trial that their actions were authorized by the Government.
In a ruling in September, Judge Thomas C. Platt Jr. wrote that Mr. Schwartz ”had a relationship with certain agencies of the United States Government.” but he denied the defense request, based on Government offcials’ testimony in a closed hearing.
Sale of Night-Vision Equipment
Among the charges against the defendants are that they agreed to illegally ship sophisticated night-vision equipment to the Soviet Union and that Mr. Schwartz illegally exported night-vision equipment made by Litton Industries to the Government of Argentina during the 1982 Falkland Islands war with Britain.
A businessman who distributes Litton night-vision equipment on the East Coast, Wally Grasheim, once employed two of the mercenaries arrested in Brazil, Steven Villa Sosa and Julio Rodriguez Larrazabal, to demonstrate such equipment in El Salvador, according to Betty Sosa, Mr. Sosa’s wife.
Mr. Carmody, Mr. Hedrick and Mrs. Sosa all say that while the men were jailed in Brazil, Mr. Grasheim traveled there to attempt to intercede in their behalf.
At Mr. Grasheim’s office in Manhattan, an associate, Carmine Pelosi, said Mr. Grasheim was out of town and could not be reached. But he said he knew all of Mr. Grasheim’s associates and that he had never heard of Mr. Sosa or Mr. Rodriguez.
Godfrey Osei and the Ghana Coup: Chapter 2
San Jose Mercury News (CA)
October 29, 1986
Author: PETE CAREY, Mercury News Staff Writer
MERCENARY HELD IN BRAZIL DISCOVERS ‘HELL’
Article Text:
In a series of letters filled with black humor, whimsy and despair, a former San Francisco State University graduate student hired to help overthrow the West African nation of Ghana tells of his life as an accused mercenary in a Brazilian prison.
The letters to relatives in the Bay Area describe an abortive coup attempt and furnish a glimpse of a hidden world behind the bars of a South American prison, where thieves, murderers and deranged criminals are cellmates to eight Americans, many of them mercenaries who fought for Rhodesia in the mid-1970s.
”I have finally discovered hell in a small area — Agua Santa Prison — there could be no worse place on Earth,” wrote Timothy M. Carmody, 37, a former San Francisco State international relations graduate student who signed on last year with seven other Americans for an international “security” job that ended in March with his arrest in Rio de Janiero.
“Without a few bucks to buy food here, you would simply die,” Carmody wrote in July. “Because of our status as ‘international mercenaries’ we achieve status amongst the murderers on the one hand and nervous extra security from the cretin military guards. . . . The guards don’t even come amongst A through C levels. A life goes for $40. A Level are dungeons below ground — the rats are enormous.” Carmody and the seven other Americans have been held by Brazilian authorities since March in two federal prisons — Agua Santa and Helio Gomez — and now in Rio city jail, where they await the outcome of a request for their extradition to Argentina on charges of failing to pay duty on some motors for rubber boats. It could take eight months to a year for Brazilian courts to make a decision on that request, the U.S. State Department says.
They were arrested March 14 when their seagoing tug, the Nobistor, docked near Rio. Federal police found 6 tons of weapons aboard, purchased from Argentina’s government munitions factory. The men claimed they docked in Rio only because of engine trouble on the Nobistor, but they were convicted in June of attempting to smuggle weapons into Brazil, arms allegedly bound for warring factions in the Brazilian interior. On Oct. 7, a Brazilian appellate court unanimously overturned their conviction.
According to Carmody and to others familiar with the plot — the true purpose was to overthrow Ghana’s Marxist president, Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings, and replace him with his longtime adversary, Godfrey Osei. They claim the plot had the unofficial blessings of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, but the CIA has declined to confirm or deny the allegation and, according to a source, privately has told one U.S. senator that the CIA had nothing to do with it.
Year of the cockroach
”Did you ever have one of those years when everything goes wrong?” Carmody wrote to a family member Sept. 27. “1986 is definitely the year of the Brazilian cockroach.”
Carmody complained in another letter of bugs “with Bulgarian table manners” in his fruit drink and of a group of disturbed prisoners in the next cell.
”The loonies in E-9 (I am in E-8) are usually left to run wild in the corridor at night, because if they close their cell door they scream all night. The new guard closed their door, so the screaming started. It was straightened out, but when the guard left the door open the next night, the loons attacked it, broke it off its hinges and hid it in the back. They screamed with delight when the guard had to play ‘Hunt the Door.’ “
In a June 23 letter, Carmody wrote that the men learned they had been convicted by the Brazilian court from an article that was published June 22 in the San Jose Mercury News. His account of the mercenaries’ mission describes a well-financed coup effort planned in New York by Osei.
‘Dangerous’ knowledge
”Well, you wanted to know what this op entailed, and I guess you have the clearances,” Carmody wrote to his family. “The knowledge may be dangerous for you to talk about. But you are welcome to the wilderness of mirrors.”
The “operation” was organized and given a code name by the dissident leader, Osei, Carmody wrote. Osei is a “big enemy of our boy Jerry Rawlings. Follow this closely — notes permitted, questions later, you fall asleep, you will be shot. ”Enter stage right — Godfrey — failed coup leader 1983 escapes from Ghanaian jail, the dreaded ‘Castle,’ flees to Ivory Coast . . . then England, where he manages to lay his hand on some official funds — wasted on (reconnaissance) by Brit Vets who fleece him. Godfrey goes to U.S. and the Company (a term for the CIA) front door. They put him on hold — he lives and works in New York.
‘Agency net’
”Rawlings, meanwhile, rolls up a goodly portion of agency net in Ghana because of traitorous CIA employee Sharon Marie Scranage (U.S. citizen) who was lover of Rawlings’ cousin Michael S. . . . All agents are imprisoned, tortured, etc. in the ‘Castle.’ Both were convicted last year in U.S. Now, Jerry Rawlings has pissed off not only the ‘Company’ but its cousins — Middle East.”
In June 1985, Rawlings’ cousin, Michael Soussoudis, 39, was arrested on espionage charges during a visit to the United States and sentenced in Alexandria, Va., to 20 years in jail. He was granted a suspension of the sentence and sent home to Ghana in exchange for the release from Ghanaian jails of eight men described by Justice Department officials in Washington as “friendly to the interests of the United States.”
Two of those men had been convicted as spies in Ghana. The eight were named as U.S. spies by Soussoudis, who learned their names from his girlfriend, Scranage, a 30-year-old CIA employee who worked in the U.S. Embassy in Acra from May 1983 to May 1984. Scranage was sentenced to a five-year jail term.
‘More attention’
”Now, Godfrey is getting more attention,” Carmody’s letter continued. “He is directed to the mysterious Bophuthatswana Trading Co., Madison Ave., New York City.”
There, Carmody writes, Godfrey is introduced to a man named Ted Bishop. Bishop is a Texas commodities trader who has acknowledged arranging for Osei to purchase the weapons in Argentina.
Bishop said Friday he has never heard of the Bophuthatswana company. And in an interview Thursday, New York commodities trader Ronald Greenwald, president of Bophuthatswana International, said suggestions that his company was connected to the affair were “outrageous.” Greenwald said he had never heard of Bishop or Osei.
”People used to (ask) me, ‘Are you working for the CIA?’ But because I used to swap prisoners,” he said. Greenwald said that he has been involved in several U.S.-Soviet East bloc prisoner exchanges, including negotiations that eventually led to the release of Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky as part of an East-West prisoner exchange, a claim confirmed by published accounts of Shcharansky’s release.
‘Public relations’
Bophuthatswana was organized in 1980 and registered as a foreign agent to represent the South African tribal homeland of the same name, but was closed in 1982, said Greenwald. The company was “like a public relations firm,” he said. “That was the whole purpose of it.”
”I’m trying to figure out who walked in this place,” said Greenwald. “The CIA never walked in this place. . . . I don’t know. It sounds like somebody’s using our name. We’ll knock hell out of them wherever they are. . . . It must be somebody who walked in and took a card.”
In his Sept. 27 letter, Carmody continues:
”Now we are getting to our part. Godfrey needs . . . trained leadership . . . for his trained minions on the Ivory Coast.
”I won’t go into details of selection, let’s just say my name was still in the hopper from past jobs (not bartending). Money is laundered and released in New York hotel room. . . . Bishop, Godfrey fly to Buenos Aires to select weapons, boat, equipment for 100 men.
‘U.S. sanctioned’
”We are alerted for security on shipment to Africa — U.S. sanctioned. That was all we knew until we arrived in Buenos Aires.
”In Miami, we surrendered our passports at hotel, . . . and within one half-hour they are back with official four-year visas for Argentina. In Argentina, the customs . . . whisk us through after flashing badges. We are loaded into ‘bread trucks’ (the same type that picked up people during the ‘Dirty War.’) and taken to our hotel in center of town.
”Now that I whetted your curiosity, I will leave it for now as I don’t want everything in one letter.”
Carmody’s Bay Area relative said he hasn’t received a promised subsequent letter, which presumably would describe the ill-fated voyage.
Since their Brazilian convictions were overturned, the men have been moved from Helio Gomez Prison back to the Rio city jail, according to Jim Ritchie, a State Department Citizens’ Emergency Center spokesman.
”It looks like we might be able to get them transferred back to . . . Gomez,” said Ritchie. “It’s like the better of two evils, so to speak. There is some indication some of the men want to go, and some don’t.”
Memo:
United Press International contributed to this report.
Copyright (c) 1986 San Jose Mercury News
Record Number: 8603260771
English Names Are Funny
Eleonora and I passed a pub today named The Famous Cock.
England is full of funny names like that. A quick review of a map revealed the following gems:
Crotch Crescent, Oxford
Titty Ho, Northamptonshire
Wetwang, East Yorkshire
Slutshole Lane, Norfolk
Thong, Kent
Pratts Bottom
Some delightful street names can also be discovered such as Hoare Road, Typple Avenue, Quare Street and Corfe Close. My favorite though is Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire.
Below are a couple I’ve had the pleasure of seeing:
Godfrey Osei and the Ghana Coup: Chapter 1
This is one of those stories we should know about, but don’t. And I only came across it because I was doing research for my dissertation in this subject area. Try finding any information about it without intensive research of newspaper archives, academic publications or JSTOR!
San Jose Mercury News (CA)
June 22, 1986
Author: PETE CAREY, Mercury News Staff Writer
MYSTERIOUS SCHEME LANDS 8 AMERICANS IN BRAZILIAN PRISON
Article Text:
In a bizarre tale of international intrigue that reads like a lost chapter from ‘The Dogs of War,’ the plight of eight Americans sentenced last week to at least four years in a Brazilian prison has been explained variously as a CIA operation, an attempted coup, a plan to arm Brazilian insurgents and an effort to establish Mafia-run gambling resorts on the coast of Africa.
It may be some of those things; it may be none. Amid a storm of rumors, suspicions, accusations, charges and counter- charges, one of the few certainties about the “Nobistor affair” is that many of those involved say the others are liars.
During the past two weeks, several sources familiar with the case have described a plot strikingly similar to Frederick Forsyth’s novel, in which a group of European mercenaries buy a ship, load it with weapons and steam for Africa, where they overthrow a government. The sources’ account, which cannot be verified conclusively, contrasts sharply with accounts provided by the imprisoned men, their lawyer and even the Brazilian prosecutors.
Whether the plot is fact or fiction, the target the sources described is real: Ghana’s Marxist ruler, Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings.
The results of the plot are equally real: The eight Americans were convicted Thursday of violating Brazilian contraband laws; U.S. federal agents have opened an investigation; the governments of Ghana, Brazil, Argentina and the United States want answers; and six tons of military supplies and weapons are lying unexplained in the hold of an oceangoing tugboat, the Nobistor, in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay.
Through their lawyer and family members in this country, the imprisoned Americans have maintained that they were acting merely as security guards, hired to safeguard a $200,000 shipment of weapons bound by sea from Argentina to Africa. But the sources say the men were hired to overthrow Rawlings and install in his place Godfrey Osei, a Ghanian dissident who escaped from prison in 1983 and who has lived in the United States since then.
Two California participants
Among the eight are a 38-year-old San Francisco State University graduate student named Timothy M. Carmody and a 30- year-old Santa Rosa man named Frederick T. Verduin.
The others are self-described “soldier of fortune” John Dee Early; Robert E. Foti of New York City; Sheldon W. Ainsworth of Omaha, Neb.; Julio Rodriguez-Larrazabal and Steven Villa Sosa, both of Fayetteville, N.C.; and Steven W. Hedrick. Early, who described himself as the leader, was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison, the other men to four years.
The arms deal first came to light in March when a seagoing tugboat, the Nobistor, dropped anchor at a small port 20 miles east of Rio de Janeiro. Federal police searched the boat and found six tons of 70 FAL rifles, submachine guns, hand grenades, revolvers and ammunition.
After their arrest, the men said they had been hired by Osei and a shadowy Texas commodities broker named Ted Bishop to ferry the shipload of weapons from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Ghana, ostensibly for the Ghanaian defense ministry.
Bishop, the men said, could confirm the whole story, but they were unable to find him.
However, Bishop — interviewed last week by telephone from his home in Texas — told a very different tale. He said that the Americans had been hired to assist Osei in overthrowing Rawlings’ government and that he had warned them against participating as soon as he had found out. After the coup, Bishop said, the eight Americans were to be paid bonuses from Ghana’s national treasury and from its diamond and gold mines.
Bishop’s story couldn’t be verified conclusively, and an associate of Osei’s denied that bonuses were to be paid as Bishop described. But other parts of the tale have been confirmed by other sources.
From the moment of their arrest in Rio de Janeiro last March on charges of weapons smuggling, the jailed Americans themselves, while bitterly blaming Bishop for their plight, have insisted that only he could provide the true story behind their abortive operation.
Osei as new ruler
Bishop and others interviewed during the past two weeks said the plotters were to have installed Osei as the new ruler of Ghana. Osei escaped from a Ghanaian prison after being convicted of participating in a 1983 attempt to topple the Rawlings government.
Bishop, 46, and other sources quoted Osei as saying the weapons were purchased with $500,000 to $750,000 borrowed from New York City organized crime figures. Osei said the gambling figures had been promised permission to build a gaming resort on Ghana’s coast. Bishop and another source, who asked not to be identified, said Osei had three suitcases filled with cash to finance the deal. ”Godfrey told me he got it from the Mafia, and he was having to pay it back at 300 percent rates,” Bishop said.
Osei, interviewed briefly by telephone, denied Bishop’s allegation that gambling interests had financed the purchase of the weapons. “This is ridiculous,” Osei said. “Ask him how did he get to know me.”
Bishop had said earlier that he met Osei while working on a commodities deal with Osei’s Hudson, N.Y., roommate. Osei denied that: “That is a big lie. He, Ted, calls himself a CIA agent. Right? (Ask him) how he got to know me. He knows. He knows.”
Osei declined to comment further, offering neither any explanation for his involvement in the case nor any denial that he had been plotting the overthrow of the Ghanaian government.
”The situation is a little dicey, you know,” Osei said. “Maybe anything that I say would jeopardize my plans. So, in the future maybe I can give you my story.”
Bishop denied ever having worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has declined to confirm or deny any involvement in the affair.
Bishop said he arranged through a Buenos Aires broker for Osei to buy the weapons from Argentina’s Fabricaciones Militares, the government arms factory, after Osei asked him for help. Osei, he said, promised to pay him for his help by granting him the marketing rights to part of Ghana’s coffee and cocoa crops. Direct buy from producers
”We was going to pay fair market price for it but buy it directly from producers up in the hills and market it on the world market,” Bishop said.
When they were hired by Osei in February, the Americans all believed they were to provide security for a legitimate arms deal, according to various sources. The men — there were nine at that point — assembled in Miami, were flown to Panama and then on to Buenos Aires, where they met Bishop and Osei.
”It was all first class,” said one man who later backed out of the deal. “We stayed in nice hotels, the food was good.”
Once in Buenos Aires, Bishop said, they waited for Osei to buy the weapons and lease a ship.
”Godfrey was taking them out to dinner, paying their booze bills,” Bishop said. “Godfrey’s head swelled up three sizes when he got his private army. They used to go out to dinner two by two, all strung out down the main street of Buenos Aires, with Godfrey at the head wearing his khakis with shoulder straps. In his own mind, he had already become a dictator general.”
‘OK with your government’
At that point, the sources said, all of the men had been led by Osei to believe that the operation was sanctioned in some way by the U.S. government. ”He was saying, ‘It’s OK with your government, there’s not going to be any jeopardy,’ ” said one source, who claims to have helped devise Osei’s plans for assaulting Rawlings’ stronghold.
In Buenos Aires — or aboard the Nobistor, depending on who tells the story — Osei revealed the full scope of his plan to the Americans. It called for attacking the government compound in Accra, freeing and arming prisoners in a nearby jail, overthrowing Rawlings and attacking a Libyan base 40 miles from Accra.
Then, according to Bishop, who said he learned of Osei’s plans in Buenos Aires, they were to eliminate several of Osei’s enemies. If they went through with the coup, in addition to $4,000 to $10,000 each for ferrying the weapons to Ghana, Bishop said, they were to be paid in cash from Ghana’s national treasury and diamonds and gold from its mines.
‘This is the first I heard’
”When they got down there, Godfrey told them about it,” said Bishop. “I heard it from John Early. He asked me about it, and I said, ‘This is the first I heard about it, John. I don’t even know what you guys are doing down here.’ “
Bishop said another of the Americans asked him whether he worked for the CIA and whether the agency had given its tacit “sanction” to the operation. “He said, ‘I thought you were the one recruiting, and you are CIA.’ I said, ‘You better get out of this deal. This is a bad deal.’
”I told all of them right there in the lobby of the Republica Hotel in Buenos Aires. I said, ‘You better get out. I’m going home.’ “
Eight of the Americans ignored Bishop’s advice, he said. Leaving behind a Tampa, Fla., private investigator named Scott Caldwell, they set forth on the Nobistor. At sea, they received an urgent ship-to-shore message from Caldwell in Tampa. He warned the Americans that he had learned the arms deal wasn’t sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Says Bishop hadn’t told them
”Bishop did not tell those men it was illegal, absolutely not,” Caldwell said in a recent interview. “I still to this day have not figured out why anybody would hire that guy to do anything.”
The Americans contend that they then forced the crew of the weapons-laden Nobistor to change its destination — from Ghana to South America. They were arrested March 14 in Itaipu, a small port 20 miles east of Rio. Federal police impounded the ship and confiscated the weapons. The trial began several weeks ago and ended with the guilty verdict Thursday.
The case came at a sensitive time in Brazil. An agrarian reform movement has provoked armed resistance by wealthy landowners opposed to distributing land to millions of poor peasants. Last week, Brazilian federal police seized hundreds of illegal weapons in a sweep of a northern region where the land disputes have been most violent.
‘Too much of a coincidence’
Nobistor Prosecutor Juarez Tavares said Judge Julieta Lunz ruled that “it was too much of a coincidence that heavy- caliber weapons would appear in Brazil exactly at the time we are having such heated conflicts over land.”
In addition, Brazil is on good terms with Ghana, which was equally certain the weapons were intended to arm Ghanaian dissidents.
In the U.S., federal agents were drawn into the case last month when Caldwell and three other men confronted Bishop at the apartment complex he owns and manages in Farmersville, Texas, a town of 2,700 near Dallas.
In an angry exchange, the men argued about Bishop’s role in the weapons shipment, believing that he knew more about the deal than he was telling. Some of the men say Bishop has worked for the CIA in the past, an allegation Bishop denies.
Pulled gun, police say
Bishop eventually pulled a gun on Caldwell and ordered the men out of his apartment, according to Farmersville police. No charges were filed, but Farmersville Police Chief John Davidson said he turned the matter over to the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Although it is not clear whether the ATF has jurisdiction over the legal issues in the case, a spokesman for the agency’s Dallas bureau said it has opened an investigation. Ordinarily, said a Dallas ATF agent who asked not to be identified, the ATF wouldn’t look into a brawl in a small farming town.
”When we got involved, we found international gun runners,” the agent said. “That’s how we got involved.” He said the agency’s inquiry has only “scraped the surface” of the complicated deal.
Assault plan
Another source, who asked not to be identified, said he and two other men whom he wouldn’t identify developed Osei’s assault plan for the palace in Accra last October but then backed out of the operation, sensing that Osei didn’t have enough money to make it work. Family members of one of the eight Americans said the man is knowledgeable about the operation.
The source said he was in Osei’s apartment in the sprawling Le Frak complex in Queens, New York, when several Asian men arrived with three suitcases containing a large amount of cash. He said Osei later told him that the “Chinese Mafia” was financing the coup.
”What Osei wanted to do was overthrow Jerry Rawlings and put himself in power,” the source said. “I started on this in October of 1985.”
Battle plan drawings
Osei, he said, provided “blurred” aerial photographs of the government compound, from which drawings were made for the battle plan. The original plan called for a force of about 300 to 400 men and an expenditure of $3.5 million, the source said.
The combatants were to include 100 Europeans. Two commando assault groups were to hit the palace and government buildings while a headquarters group handled logistics.
The boat would meet with another ship off the Ivory Coast and then proceed to Ghana, where the men would go ashore and attack the capital. The source said he became suspicious when it was clear there would be no advance payment.
No money up front
”Godfrey didn’t want to pay anybody up front,” the source said. “His thing was, when you hit the beach and assault the palace, you’ll be free to go to the national treasury, the gold mines. (He said,) ‘I will provide you with transportation.’ I said, ‘The hell with that.’ No professional would get onto that. There’s no guarantee he wouldn’t put us up against a wall. Everybody else was saying, you got to take a chance. . . . This is when I backed out.”
A few weeks later, the source said, he learned that eight Americans were in jail in Rio. “It confirmed my worst fears,” he said.
Both Caldwell and Steven Elswick, a 33-year-old ex-Marine who lives in Lexington, Ky., and who recruited Carmody, the San Franciscan, say they are convinced that the men thought they had been recruited for a routine security job.
”I’m convinced they were pigeons,” said Elswick. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Memo:
Mimi Whitefield of the Knight-Ridder News Service contributed to this article.
Copyright (c) 1986 San Jose Mercury News
Record Number: 8602170756
