{"id":383539,"date":"2026-01-02T12:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T12:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/383539\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T12:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T12:56:09","slug":"inside-operation-lone-star-the-u-s-sting-that-took-down-miamis-kingpins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/383539\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Operation Lone Star, the U.S. sting that took down Miami’s kingpins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Investigators eventually discovered millions of dollars funneled through the Columbus Trust Company in Nassau, the bank founded by Don Aberle, who had arranged the sale of the Darby Islands to my father. Columbus Trust was an umbrella firm for 450 shell companies, including my father\u2019s Caribe Shores. The bank handled money from a variety of illegal activities\u2014oil price manipulation, fraudulent coal shelters, drug smuggling, and a number of businesses run by the mob. The shell companies were used to wire money back to the United States, laundered and ready to be spent.<\/p>\n

Investigators believed that Columbus Trust was initially funded by the fugitive American financier Robert Vesco, who had stolen more than $200 million from U.S. investors (and was hiding out in the Bahamas). The Bahamian prime minister and a Bahamian Cabinet member were minor shareholders in the company, though they both denied any role in the way the bank conducted its business.<\/p>\n

Operation Lone Star uncovered dirt on a lot of people, but my father\u2014who by that point had become one of the most well-known and successful marijuana<\/a> smugglers operating at the time\u2014was a priority on the government\u2019s target list. The reason? The War on Drugs.<\/p>\n

The War on Drugs had been formally launched in 1971 under the Nixon administration. It was a reaction to the 1960s counter-culture movement and the widespread use of marijuana, especially by people protesting the war in Vietnam. Marijuana was seen by the establishment as a threat to American values. Nixon called it \u201cpublic enemy number one.\u201d Marijuana was demonized, and those who brought it into the country were considered the worst kind of villain. By this time, my father\u2019s operation had grown to massive proportions. Between May and June 1979, his crew smuggled 31,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States.<\/p>\n

As a result of the Operation Lone Star investigation, the government held a series of grand juries in Houston. Agents began to subpoena witnesses. In response, my father assembled his own legal team. The first lawyer he hired was Jeffrey Bogart, a young attorney from Long Island. Bogart was in his early thirties when he worked for my father, but he\u2019d already served as the assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, where he\u2019d prosecuted organized crime and corruption cases. He\u2019d moved to Atlanta and done a stint as the assistant district attorney there before going into private practice. Bogart had followed the money to the other side of the legal aisle, but he never lost his sense of right and wrong. His roots were working class, and he\u2019d punched a clock in a factory before his legal career took off. But those days were long gone by the time he was hired by my father. Now bearded and bespectacled, he was more polished, less brash, with only an occasional [curse word] thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Investigators eventually discovered millions of dollars funneled through the Columbus Trust Company in Nassau, the bank founded by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,62039,21768,186933,2808,6149,2821,3,186934,186932,1022,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-383539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-bahamas","tag-cannabis","tag-drug-smuggling","tag-florida","tag-marijuana","tag-miami","tag-news","tag-no-ordinary-bird","tag-operation-lone-star","tag-texas","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}