Black-Market Cigarettes: Miami's New Vice

Black-Market Cigarettes: Miami's New Vice
The feds say a local man smuggled millions of smokes for terrorists. He's not alone.
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By Tim Elfrink
Published on June 30, 2009 at 10:28amCourtesy of Jack Garcia Joaquin "Jack" Garcia at the FBI Academy in 1980.
REUTERS/MOD/Newscom Mark Quinsey, age 23, and Patrick Azimkar, age 21, were killed in March by the Real IRA.
Subject(s):
cigarette smuggling, Real IRATheir bags were packed. Their farewells had been said.

Like the rest of the British 38th Regiment Royal Engineers, Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar had shed their jeans and T-shirts for the camouflage they'd wear during the next six months.

All around the barracks, soldiers threw green canvas bags into huge piles and made last-minute phone calls to family. In just a few hours, they would depart for Helmand Province, a remote desert enclave in Afghanistan besieged by Taliban warriors.

It would be the first combat tour for both Quinsey and Azimkar. They were ready to go — but first, they wanted to enjoy one final night of civilization. So they called Domino's Pizza to deliver one last hot meal.

The men walked outside into the damp, cold March night. It was about 9:40 p.m. at the Massereene base in Antrim, Northern Ireland, a town of 20,000 about 22 miles west of Belfast. The sun had set hours ago.

Everything seemed normal. As Quinsey and Azimkar approached a two-story brick guard tower, a pair of sentries waved and opened the razor wire-topped metal gate that separated the barracks from the A6 road outside.

In the wet driveway, just past a chainlink fence, a couple of Domino's deliverymen leaned on their cars, a red Mazda and a souped-up blue sports car with a spoiler.

The two young soldiers said hello and handed over the cash.

Then, with an abrupt whip-crack, a pop, pop, pop ripped through the night air. Bullets rained on the driveway, slapping off the asphalt. Dozens stung Quinsey and Azimkar and knocked the deliverymen and guards off of their feet.

The two gunmen stopped firing. Sudden silence descended as they leapt from a green Vauxhall Cavalier. M16s in hand, they sprinted to the men moaning on the ground, leveled their rifles at the two young soldiers bleeding on the pavement, and fired.

The gunmen returned to the car and peeled off to the west. More than 60 spent casings lay smoking among the bodies.

In less than five minutes, the brutal attack left Quinsey and Azimkar dead, the two pizza deliverymen and a pair of guards clinging to life, and the historic 1998 peace agreement between Irish Catholics and Protestants suddenly imperiled.

Though the bullets rang out in a drizzly Irish suburb thousands of miles from Miami's sunny shores, investigators now believe the assault began right here, in an anonymous cargo ship docked at the bustling Port of Miami.

A gray-haired 57-year-old Cutler Bay man named Roman Vidal smuggled millions of cigarettes from Miami to Dublin criminals who funded the terrorist group that killed Quinsey and Azimkar, investigators say. The charges are just the latest link between black-market U.S. smokes and violent terrorist groups around the world.

It's the first cigarette smuggling case in Florida with explicit ties to a terrorist organization, but at least four major rings around the nation have been busted in the past seven years with proven connections to Hezbollah, the Iraqi Kurdistan Workers' Party, and North Korean weapons runners. A four-monthlong review of court filings and interviews with investigators reveals exactly why smuggling smokes might be the best racket for America's enemies.

Underground cigarettes provide huge profits at low risk: a perfect paradigm for violent gangs. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms estimates states lose more than $5 billion in taxes every year to sales of black-market smokes. And those caught in the act face only a maximum five-year federal sentence, and sometimes get less.

Globally, cigarettes now rival drugs as the most profitable underground product. A recent project by the Center for Public Integrity found that governments worldwide lose up to $50 billion every year in tax revenue. One in ten cigarettes is sold underground.

Today, more than 300 federal cigarette smuggling cases are open nationwide, including several in South Florida. State officials have busted almost 30 smuggling rings in the Sunshine State during the past year. And because cigarette taxes recently increased by 300 percent, investigators expect the trade to explode.

For the average smoker, those under-the-table, tax-free packs might seem like a bargain. But as the recent history of cigarette smuggling vividly illustrates, when you buy black-market smokes, you never know whose paycheck you're signing.

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The Miami Connection

On January 9, 2006, everything was going according to plan for Roman Vidal. He wore his graying hair combed straight back into a puffy cloud above a long, weathered face and square glasses.

That morning, the latest shipment from Panama arrived right on time — 730 cases containing 7.3 million cigarettes were inside a 15-meter metal shipping container stacked among hundreds of others on a freighter at the Port of Miami.

As usual, Vidal had already been in touch with his contact in Spain. Funds had been wired from a Portuguese bank into his account. The contacts in Dublin were ready for the shipment of smokes.

But first, Vidal had work to do. After picking up the cigarettes and storing them in a warehouse, he drove to Floors Today, a strip mall storefront in Kendall. There he bought a few hundred cases of cheap wood flooring.

Later that week, he headed back to the port and with the help of a friend — who would net a cut of the profits — reloaded the cigarettes into a new shipping container and carefully piled wood flooring on top of the smokes.

Vidal's friend worked for a freight forwarding company. He wrote up a bill of lading, the document U.S. Customs uses to track shipments, showing the box contained nothing more than a few hundred cases of wood.

REUTERS/Faleh Kheiber/Newscom A lawsuit accuses R.J. Reynolds Co. of smuggling cigarettes, like these shown, into Iraq.
Subject(s):
cigarette smuggling, Real IRAA few weeks later, the container arrived in Dublin. Vidal shelled out $2,900 in taxes on the flooring. Another $2.1 million in taxes — the tariff due on all of those cigarettes stuffed under the floorboards — went unpaid.

The next major shipment arrived two years later, on February 6, 2008. A 15-meter container arrived in the Port of Miami on a freighter from Panama. This time, 600 cases with 6 million cigarettes sat inside. Later that day, Vidal visited a Miami Home Depot and bought $2,000 worth of building insulation. He covered the cigarettes with it.

With the goods hidden, Vidal shipped the container to Felixstowe, a major port in southeastern England. Another $2.1 million in taxes went uncollected on the concealed cigs. More cash from the Portuguese bank flowed into Vidal's account.

According to a recently released federal indictment, the Cutler Bay man had established this smooth operation through years of travel to Panama and coordination with his European contacts. But what he didn't know was these two shipments were different from all the previous ones.

The friend at the freight forwarding company had flipped and was cooperating with a federal agent. Vidal's calls to Spain had been tapped. His bank accounts had been tagged. And his shipments had been seized in Dublin and Felixstowe by waiting agents of the Brussels-based European Anti-Fraud Office.

The investigation continued for another year, until ICE nabbed Vidal this past February 19, about four years after he began shipping black-market cigarettes from Panama through the Port of Miami to criminal gangs in Europe. Investigators say they found Vidal working "in concert with a criminal organization that has associates operating in Spain, Ireland, and... the Southern District of Florida," according to the indictment.

Investigators turned up an even more disturbing connection. The gang, they say, was a wing of the Real IRA — a splinter terrorist group that killed Quinsey and Azimkar outside their barracks.

After his arrest, Vidal, who has no prior criminal record, paid $5,000 in bond and was confined to his Cutler Bay home. The feds charged him with conspiracy, mail fraud, and smuggling goods from the United States. He pleaded not guilty and requested a public defender.

His house, a spacious salmon pink ranch with a wide semicircular driveway, is surrounded by palms. It sits on SW 184th Lane in a labyrinthine suburb near Galloway Road. On a recent weeknight, a white Ford Bronco was parked in the driveway. High shrubs surrounded by a tall wooden fence filled his back yard. Large homes stretched down the unlit, quiet street. Several looked poorly cared for, but Vidal's place was impeccable.

He and wife Delia bought the house in 2003 for $270,000, according to county records. But neighbors remember the couple living there for only the past year or so. No one on the block had ever had a conversation with him.

"He really keeps to himself," said Tom Dean, a 44-year-old stonemason who lives next door.

When New Times visited, Vidal swung open his heavy front door after a few knocks. His gray mane framed his long face. His eyes and teeth were yellowed, as if he'd smoked quite a few of the cigarettes he allegedly funneled through the Port of Miami.

"OK, I'll talk," he said quietly, taking a reporter's business card and staring at it for a moment. "But not now. I'm very busy tonight."

With that, he shut the door. He never called back.

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The Irish Connection

If federal investigators are correct about Vidal's ties to a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army, he's far from the first South Florida connection to the violent struggle in Northern Ireland.

In fact, Miami and Broward have had as many IRA-connected busts in the past 25 years as any region in the nation, outside New York and Boston. Federal agents in recent years have busted attempts to buy a Stinger missile, export explosives detonators, and smuggle dozens of guns from Florida to Ireland.

"No one here is surprised by connections between the IRA and American underworld figures," says Mick Fealty, a Belfast native who lives in England and writes about Northern Ireland's politics. "That's been the modus operandi of these groups for quite some time."

The first major case — and one of the most significant ever prosecuted against IRA operations in the United States — began in 1989 inside a smoky Riviera Beach pub called the Chateau Bar. A 33-year-old Irish expat named Kevin McKinley liked to get drunk there with friends.

Like many Irish immigrants, McKinley never truly left behind the troubles of his homeland; the 400-year conflict between British-aligned Protestants and Irish-aligned Catholics was part of his upbringing.

McKinley spent hours at the Chateau Bar bragging about his plans to get guns to the IRA, the group that was then fighting for Northern Ireland's independence.

One night in the winter of '89, he met two men who said they could help. They showed him Polaroids of a stolen Stinger missile — a 35-pound rocket capable of shooting down 747s.