. Barry Seal's apparent piloting of a JFK assassin getaway plane points, again, to Bush Sr. and his cronies (the Biderman part of the DuPont family, Rockefellers, and more). Despite his successful career, Seal had his eye on more exhilarating endeavors. It alleges, explicitly and implicitly, that an aircraft operated by a CIA front company in 1984 used the airfield at Mena, Arkansas, as a stating point for weapons supply flights to the Contras in Nicaragua; on the return flights from Honduras, the aircraft allegedly carried illegal narcotics to Mena. Seal made an estimated $60 million off smuggling drugs into the country and became one of the richest people in America. Two weeks after his argument with Vice President GHW Bush, Barry Seal was pumped full of bullets and murdered outside his Baton Rouge halfway house on Feb. 19, 1986. Author Del Hahn, a former FBI agent who wrote the book about Seal titled Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal, told Vice, "Seal thought he was smarter and cleverer than the Ochoas," who are one of the founding families of the Medelln Cartel. Universal Pictures (@UniversalPicsPT) 5 de junho de 2017. They agreed to a sentence for Seal's Louisiana activities no greater than the sentence he received for his Florida smuggling, with both sentences to run concurrently. He made four trips to Nicaragua that year, allegedly to document the complicity in cocaine trafficking. A leak regarding the operation came to light before Seal's second trip. Tom Cruise is moving on from his Mummy -fied adventures in 2017, with his next big release, American Made, hitting theaters soon. However, her real name is Debbie, not Lucy. American Made is one of many "so crazy, it must be real" stories that have hit Hollywood in the form of a major action movie in recent years. Plumlee also said he is in the infamous "Mexico City" picture, seated across the table from Seal and peering out from behind his jacket. But he did become one of the most important DEA informants, infiltrating the Medelln cartels inner circle. [2], In 1964, Seal joined TWA as a flight engineer and was soon promoted to the first officer, then captain, flying a Boeing 707 on a regular Western Europe route. -Daily Mail Online. That was until, believing himself smarter than the Colombian . "Tom did all his own flying in the movie," says director Doug Liman, who is a pilot himself (Vulture.com). President Reagan displayed Seals photo in a nationally televised speech in March 1986. Barry Seal was able to get photos of Pablos Escobar himself loading cocaine onto Barry's cargo plane in Nicaragua. [53], In addition to the state charges against the killers, federal charges were filed against Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, and a third cartel member, Rafael Cardona, for conspiring to violate Seal's civil rights by murdering him.[54]. The real Barry Seal claimed he had been working for agencies . As stated in the previous question, there is no strong evidence to confirm that Barry Seal was working with the CIA prior to becoming an informant after his arrest in 1983. In Tom Cruise's latest film he plays the pilot, drug smuggler, and informant Barry Seal. He was assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group and graduated from the United States Army Airborne School selection and training. From the get-go, he was a talented aviator, and before he graduated from high school in 1957, Seal had earned his private pilot wings. (Barry) Seal was a key player at Mena. "I trusted him so I didn't ask questions," says Debbie. He was the primary witness in three trials: the trial of Saunders and the other Turks and Caicos officials in July; the trial of the cartel distributors in Miami in August; the trial of the cartel distributors who had arranged the shipment of cocaine from Bolivia to Las Vegas, also in August. In 1981, he was making daily deposits of $50,000 into an account at a bank in the Bahamas. The Nevada aviator killed when a cargo plane was shot down in Nicaragua last weekend served as one of the CIA's chief pilots in . When the cartel caught wind of Seals betrayal, they sent three hitmen to gun him down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, bringing a bloody end to his work as an informant. [29], Seal made one more trip to Nicaragua on July 7, bringing money to Escobar to pay the Nicaraguans for landing rights. "I fly airplanes. Surprisingly, American Made actually downplayed just how integral an asset Seal was to the DEA especially when it came to taking down the Medelln cartel. Despite the movie attempting to pin it on North, Jacoby later said that North was not his source and that it was a deceased Special Forces and CIA guy named Ted Lunger, who at the time worked as a staff member for Representative Dan Daniel. Like in the movie, the American Made true story reveals that Barry made a living as a commercial airline pilot for several years. Do your research about it, link the dots, because Democrats were defending the Sandinistas, while they smeared the Contras and the Reagan administration, who they were fighting to prevent the US and USSR from getting the IMD treaty nuclear weapons treaty from being signed. And by 1978, according to The Gentlemans Journal, he had moved on to cocaine. You can also support FAIR on Patreon! In October 1984, a grand jury in Louisiana was convened and began interviewing witnesses against Seal. His first marriage, to Barbara Dodson, lasted from 1963 to 1971. The gunman hurried into a waiting Buick, which sped away. All three trials resulted in convictions for all defendants. Ochoa was arrested in Spain on a U.S. warrant, but due to pressure from the cartel was never extradited to the U.S. -Court Documents (STATE of Louisiana v. Miguel VELEZ, Bernardo Vasquez, and Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz), Yes. It is believed that the Colombians put a hit out on Barry after they learned he was going to help the feds with the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain, one of the heads of the Medelln Cartel. Filed under: Covert Operations, Drugs, Extra! Pablo . No. Universal Pictures. When Seal landed in the airfield, he was immediately surrounded by armed soldiers. [50] He had seen Cardona test-fire the murder weapon in Mermelstein's garage and bullets that matched the murder weapon were later extracted from the garage wall by FBI forensics. The extent of Barry Seal's involvement with the CIA in the 1980s has provided fuel for speculation and conspiracy theories. This led the U.S. to covertly supply arms to the Contras, the rebels fighting against the Sandinistas. Seals career as a pilot for Trans World Airlines crashlanded in 1974 when he was caught trying to smuggle explosives to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. Sep. 28, 2017. [22] The Colombian government had recently conducted a major raid on the cartel's manufacturing facilities at a remote jungle location called Tranquilandia, and they told Seal that they were making arrangements to set up shipping and production facilities in Nicaragua, where they had struck a deal with the Sandinista government. CBS obtained pages from Col. Oliver Norths diary revealing that the former National Security Council aid communicated frequently with the CIA about the sting operation in the weeks before the photo was leaked to the press despite objections from the DEA. Seal began to fly as a teenager, earning a student pilot certificate at 16 and a private pilot's certificate at 17. And though the tale of Barry Seal - drug smuggler, double-crosser, pilot extraordinaire - has now been transformed into a raucous Hollywood caper with Tom Cruise at the helm, the true story would be too . From earning his pilots license at the age of 16 to his blood-soaked end at the hands of a notorious cartel, Seal certainly got the life of excitement that he so desired. The story included the photograph Seal had taken of Escobar handling the cocaine. Set in the early 1980s, to combat the spread of communism . In addition to implicating Escobar as a drug kingpin, Seals photos provided evidence that the Sandinistas, Nicaraguan revolutionaries who overthrew the countrys dictator in 1979, were being funded by drug money. It was probably shortly before the operation or thereabouts when he was enlisted to give us proof that the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was actually . Within U.S. airspace, Seal would have people on the ground monitor for any signs his planes were being tailed. [1], In 1962, Seal enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard for six years: six months of active duty, followed by five and a half years of inactive duty. [13] Seal's activities in Mena later became the subject of rumor and controversy, but according to Seal's biographer, former FBI agent Del Hahn, Seal did not use Mena as a drug transshipment point. The American Made true story confirms that the real Barry Seal and his wife Debbie had three children (Aaron, Dean and Christina). Soon, Seal relocated his smuggling operations to Mena, Arkansas. The accident didn't happen during filming. No. In yet another conspiracy-stoking morsel, the C-123 used by Seal was the same one later piloted by Eugene Hasenfus when he was shot down over Nicaragua while piloting illegal U.S. arms shipments . A principio de los aos 80 comenz a estar al servicio del Cartel de Medelln para transportar la cocana y en 1984 le . After being caught in Honduras with 40 kilograms of cocaine in 1979, Barry spent nine months in a Honduran jail. When it did, the overloaded plane crashed at the Colombia airfield on takeoff. [5], Ironically, Seal's operations received an important boost when he was arrested and jailed in Honduras on the return leg of a drug-smuggling trip to Ecuador. The plane was hit and Seal had to make an emergency landing at Sandino International Airport in Managua. The pilot flew into Nicaragua with CIA cameras on his plane, taking photos showing Escobar and several other members of the Cartel . Aterriz en el aeropuerto y junto con las personas que lo esperaban carg unos bultos. The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair. 4 - July/August, Iran-Contra Affair. If not, they would continue on to drop sites over the Louisiana bayou, where duffel bags full of cocaine were tossed into the swamp. In an effort to frame the Sandinistas, the CIA installed a hidden camera in Seals C-130 cargo plane (the same plane, incidentally, that later crashed in Nicaragua leading to the capture of Eugene Hasenfus in October 1986). The last movie was produced by Imagine Entertainment under Universal Pictures and was made after the company purchased Barry's life rights from Deborah at the cost of $350,000.