The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

MANUEL “Pete” Fernandez shot down 14 Soviet and Chinese MiG jets in the Korean War, and was feted with a parade and medals from the US and UK. Then, at age 55 his Cessna aircraft filled with marijuana crashed and burned along a remote road in eastern Grand Bahama.

On October 17, 1980, Bahamas Assistant Police Commissioner, Alonzo Butler, observed that there was “a substantial amount” of marijuana, while others described it as a residual amount. Fernandez was killed in the crash. The ownership and destination of his plane remain unknown.

Fast money makes strange bedfellows.

According to reports, Fernandez and two other pilots had been detained in Colombia earlier, and had their DC-3 confiscated when the engines failed after delivering electronics. They each were forced to pay over $50,000, and resorted to both helping the “good guys” and “the bad guys” in the murky world of 1980s drug trading in South Florida.

A journalist for the Military News described the environmment at the time. “Tales of overnight wealth are legion. There isn't a pilot in South Florida who hasn't been approached by dopers,” he wrote. “Nick Navarro a Broward County narcotics detective knew Pete— and said he'd been ‘helpful’ in drug investigations this year.”

In other words, there were blurry lines everywhere.

Investigators speculated that Fernandez may have lost control when he spotted power lines on the shoulder of the road, which he was instructed to land on. After he clipped pine trees and slammed to earth, he ended up “burned and broken, laying crumpled face-down in the tall grass.”

The plane Fernandez took to Freeport that September was a hybrid: a Geronimo with a 180-hp engine instead of 150 hp. Fifty extra gallons of fuel were strapped to the wings, which probably contributed to his death. A fiberglass appendage up front allowed more cargo and the souped-up plane could land on just 457 feet of tarmac. The plane’s owner had invested $1,000 in extra wheels.

Telling his spouse, an Australian TV chef, he was hauling lobsters, Fernandez took off at dawn on 17 October. Once loaded with drugs, he avoided air balloons with deadly cables up to 15,000 feet and went in to High Rock, Grand Bahama. Armed with just a VHF radio to reach the cargo receivers on land, he headed for what reports called “a lonely asphalt road.” And the rest is history, as they say. Parts of his plane are no doubt still there.

Fernandez is buried in Arlington National Cemetery

In August 2023, I received a surprising message from a Norwegian friend, about a discovery his son had found: “a large submerged aircraft wreck just north of Freeport. Trying to figure out the story. It is a 4 engine, looks like a DC4 or DC6,” the message said.

With a lot of help from local fisherman Archie McBride, and Pericles Maillis, we believe this is a large former-military drug cargo plane wreck from the 1980s. Captain McBride, who has found a number of aircraft in his fishing career, some of them military, is convinced that this is a classic drug plane.

The location is ambiguous: about 25 miles north of Freeport, 15 miles from the deep water of the Gulf Stream, and far too deep for the pilot to say afloat. The  twin-engine DC-3 --aka C-47 Dakota--was a classic military cargo workhorse. The crew likely ditched due to weather or engine trouble, and then the drugs and crew were taken off. By whom? Nobody knows (or nobody’s talking).

During the 1970s and 80s there were at least 45 air crashes in and off Grand Bahama, including a passenger plane with many casualties – reported by the US agency NTSB. However, most aircraft were of the small private Cessna, Beechcraft, and Piper variety flying within the Bahamas or to the US, and not large cargo aircraft lumbering through Bahamas from South America.

Roughly 10 crashes each were at West End, Freeport, and  Walker’s Cay, likely not drug planes. A short article in the Miami News of 19 March 1982 reports how Paul Gumtto, an FBI agent in Pittsburgh, died in a plane crash in The Bahamas. His cousin, Harvey, and the pilot, Charles Johnson, survived. Paul had “jumped from the plane moments before it slammed into the water off Grand Bahama.”

In May of 1981, a Kentucky family arriving in the Bahamas by sailboat were resting off Riding Rock, Grand Bahamas with two young daughters when they saw a small airplane drop bales of marijuana to a yacht and several lobster boats anchored nearby. Though the sailboat captain strung up spear guns and a shotgun, the incident shook the sailboaters. “We were scared to death,” the captain’s wife admitted. “It was as flagrant as anything you ever saw.”

A contemporary news article by newswire Associated Press (AP) from Kingston Jamaica reported that four Americans smuggled 47 bales of marijuana with labels on them that read “Rush, Non-Toxic Serum.” They damaged their wing on landing and fled into the Grand Bahama bush.

Then United Press International reported on April 21, 1987 that a crowd of 100 beach partiers in Grand Bahama effectively enveloped and protected the crew of a crashed drug plane. “Some fired shots and attacked Bahamian and American drug enforcement police Monday night to keep officers from reaching a suspected drug plane that crash landed on the beach. One shot smashed the windshield of a US Customs helicopter. Police fired over the heads of the crowd,” the report said.

Before dusk that day the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reported spotting one of the suspected smugglers. “A Piper Aztec [N5BX], seen making an air drop to two high-speed cigarette boats near Orange Cay, about 40 miles south of Bimini.” When one of the boats was caught, it had night-vision goggles and M-16 machine guns. The US & Bahamas deployed a helicopter and a jet, but when Bahamian officers landed on the beach, the crowd pelted them with rocks and bottles and “bad-mouthed them from close quarters -- less than an arm's length away,” reports said. 

The police were extracted. And though a bale of marijuana was recovered, the windshield of the expensive chopper was destroyed by gunfire. The Washington Post reported that the men eluded capture.

On June 3, 1975, the Miami Herald reported details of another crash. “Two pilots were killed when a Lockheed Lodestar (N75G) crashed. One pilot was a passenger pilot by day, and his co-pilot was a real estate developer down on his financial luck. Both men left families.” The article continued with “three airplanes carrying illicit drugs crashed in Florida in recent months.” 

In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan appointed Admiral Daniel Murphy to work with the Bahamian government to curb the spiralling drug trade. The Miami Herald reported on some of the arrangements made. “A radar balloon will be floated over Grand Bahama to supplement the weaponry already in place in the war on drugs.” This was after a Bahamian Royal Commission determined that high-ranking members of the government had been accepting drug-tainted bribes. Admiral Murphy stated that “Florida remains the mecca for narcotics smugglers.”

Volumes were tripling, and seizures rose from 12,000 pounds in 1983 to 44,000 the following year.”

The US Senate was told that from 1982 to 1986 US Customs air operations seized 236 aircraft with 24,805 pounds of cocaine and 100,090 pounds of marijuana at a cost of $265 million. But 452 flights got through due to weather, lack of manpower, or lost tracks. US Customs’ Miami branch had 14 planes and 60 pilots. The Marine Operations budget for 1987 was just $24M, compared to $200M for air. They soon realized that identifying every single plane or boat crossing the US border was cost-prohibitive.

From 1982 to 1986 the US Coast Guard “seized 884 vessels with 15,312 pounds of cocaine and 12.1 million pounds of marijuana.” At first smuggled cocaine was shipped direct by air from Colombia to Florida, then via Bahamas. By 1987, the US had cut off 50% of that Colombia-Florida direct trade, so it was flown to Bahamas and inserted by boat.

US Customs placed three interceptor boats off Cat Cay, Bimini, which “dried up” the trade. On October 24, 1985, US Feds seized 28 boats in Florida. One group of smugglers in Florida charged $3,000 per kilo and a minimum load of 350 kilos.

American pilot James Bernard Mason was shot down and killed in a DC-3 over Honduras in March, 1987. Four years earlier, the “retired pilot who was frequently out of town,” was fined $20,000 in a marijuana bust in the Bahamas. The aircraft he flew was believed to have been “doubled,” meaning a clean tail number was placed over one identified with the drug trade.

US Customs officials estimated that some 80 planes secretly landed in South Florida or the US every night. As one observer noted in another Miami Herald article from June, 1981: “enforcement in the Bahamas is almost geographically impossible.” Over time, production and smuggling routes changed with economies and enforcement.

Who knows what the next smuggling opportunity will be?