One of the most interesting things Charlie Good told me was that he had been on the payroll of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) in 1984 when Commissioner of Police, Max Samuels, contracted him to hit me. The CIA chief in Belize at the time was one Bob Trencher, whom I think I had been introduced to by a businessman friend of mine. Good said Trencher’s response to the revelation of Samuels’ contract was: “Just don’t get us involved.”
Another interesting thing Good said was that Samuels had told him that a senior police officer (now deceased) would “take care of everything” once he did the X assignment.
As I said in the previous column, after I heard the 12:30 p.m. news on that fateful day, I went looking for Rufus X, who was working on the floating foundation of the home where I have lived since 1987 on Seashore Drive in Buttonwood Bay. (The piece of land is on the seafront, and it was granted to me by Rt. Hon. George Price and the Lands Minister, Hon. Florencio Marin, Sr., because Mr. Price felt that I had been of assistance to his party’s success in the 1979 general election campaign.)
Anyway, Rufus was typically unruffled and unhurried; then he drove me to his home, where he tried to show me how to use a weapon. The exercise quickly frustrated him, I would say, so he said to me that I should drive, and he would do the “weaponizing.” We then went looking for Mr. Good, and while we were searching the city, we got word about maybe 1:45 or so that he had been picked up by the police at the shop owned by the late Ernest Meighan, Sr., near the Cinderella Town Public Library. No details were given. (Around the time of the Heads of Agreement, Meighan used to write a column in this newspaper entitled, “Belize-U.S.A.: The Only Way.”)
A few days later, I was in my bed early one night, when a neighbor by the name of Erica Moses, who was doing some ironing for my wife, came to ask me if I wanted to see Charlie Good. Good was outside my ground floor home on First Street. I was, of course, scared, and told her no. I have always felt that if Erica had not been there, things might have gone differently.
I then decided to go underground, which I did in a room at the old Bliss Hotel on Water Lane. The 1984 general election was about a week away, and I felt that if I survived until the election, whether the PUP won or lost, the danger to me would be greatly reduced.
The Panamanian strongman, Manuel Noriega, had been on the CIA’s payroll before he went rogue, so to speak, and U.S. president George Bush, Sr., decided to invade Noriega-led Panama in 1989. My personal belief is that Max Samuels had also been a CIA asset who went rogue, and the United States government had revoked his American visa in the early 2000s when he was PUP Minister of Immigration. I suspect Max was a CIA asset in 1984, when this Good/X drama was taking place.
Samuels’ personal beef with me was probably the result of the headline article in the Friday, August 24, 1984 issue of AMANDALA, for which the ComPol demanded an apology. I was young and macho at the time, and refused his demand.
The headline story of August 24, 1984, was directly related to the headline article in the Friday, May 4, 1984 issue of AMANDALA. The May 4 headline had discussed the indictment of three prominent Belizeans in Dade County (Florida) on the charge of moving $2.2 billion (U.S.) worth of cocaine into the United States from Colombia through the Belize International Airport. At the time of the indictment, Samuels told the Belizean public that he would take care of the case personally.
On August 24, 1984, our headline story had reported: “Questioning eyes were also cast his (Samuels’) way after a Los Angeles-based American lawyer (married to a Belizean lady) threw a $12,000 party for Commissioner Samuels at the Fort George Hotel. The whispering was that the lawyer’s clients were all narcotics connected gangsters and that he had ulterior motives for throwing the Samuels party.”
It was not until the 1990s that an American reporter named Gary Webb began breaking a monumental story in a California newspaper —THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS. Webb died mysteriously, but not before he published DARK ALLIANCE in 1998. Here are a couple paragraphs from the foreword to Webb’s book written by the well-known Los Angeles congresswoman, Hon. Maxine Waters:
“The night that I read the ‘Dark Alliance’ series, I was so alarmed, that I literally sat straight up in bed, poring over every word. I reflected on the many meetings I attended throughout South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s, when I constantly asked, ‘Where are all the drugs coming from?’”
“The time I spent investigating the allegations of the ‘Dark Alliance’ series led me to the undeniable conclusion that the CIA, DEA, DIA, and FBI knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles.”
Let’s try to cut a long story shorter. Otherwise, we would have to write another column on this subject, something unprecedented in our history. Charlie Good, a very highly trained military officer, became the chief of security at AMANDALA in the mid-1990s. When I became chairman of the board at the University College of Belize in 1999 (and then the University of Belize in 2000), I hired him as our chief of security at the university campus in Belize City.
Our wives became friends, and I visited his home several times, sometimes with the late Odinga Lumumba, who had been a highly ranked security operative and consultant in Ghana under the late Jerry Rawlings. Lumumba’s story itself is an incredible one, but I want to end with the fact that a couple times I caught Charlie and Odinga “making pappyshow” of me. I was not angry, because I was a fragile intellectual compared to these warrior brothers.
When my generation of university students in this region was being radicalized in the 1960s, we hero-worshipped Che Guevara and Fidel Castro because they had been university students who successfully fought against professional soldiers in the Cuban Revolution. In Africa, students idolized South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, an attorney who had given up the law to train in guerrilla warfare. In my case, when I had to face Charlie Good, I had no chance to survive. If what appeared to happen was the real deal, then the one Rufus X saved my life. Straight up.