SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

I'm sorry it went down like this. Someone had to lose.
It's the nature of the business, It's the smuggler's blues. Glenn Frey

The dead man behind the wheel of the white Cadillac was Adler "Barry" Sealdaredevil pilot, secret government operative, convicted drug smuggler. Seal estimated he had made $50 million flying drugs into the United States.

The night he was murdered, Feb. 19, 1986, Seal was less than one month into a six-month, court-ordered stint at the Salvation Army halfway house.

The federal judge's order sending him to the halfway house had been the most contentious part of a plea agreement Seal and his lawyers had worked out with the government following his three drug smuggling convictions, convictions that could have landed him behind bars for the rest of his life.

Seal wasn't a common, run-of-the-mill smuggler. He was the best, most well connectedon both sides of the lawconvicted smuggler in the country.

He had done what no other drug-smuggler-turned-informant had ever done. While working for the U.S. government, he had infiltrated Colombia's Medellin cartel and brought back photographic evidence that its top leaders were involved in a conspiracy with officials of Nicaragua's Sandinista government to ship cocaine to the United States.

Seal's ingenuity and courage won the respect of his government handlers. "I have never met someone who has as much potential and produced as much as Mr. Seal did," said veteran Drug Enforcement Administration agent Robert Joura.

Donald Campbell, a federal prosecutor in Nevada, where Seal had orchestrated the biggest drug bust in that state's history, said, "Barry was the single most important witness in the United Stateshell, anywhere in the worldon major narcotic traffic."

But Seal's success came at pricea high price.

The Medellin cartel had offered $500,000 for Seal's murder, $1 million if he could be captured alive.

And the U.S. government knew it. Still, U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola in Baton Rouge sentenced Seal to a very public stay at an unsecured halfway house. When Seal asked if he could furnish his own licensed and armed bodyguards, Judge Polozola said no.

David Campbell, a government prosecutor, flew to Baton Rouge, along with other law enforcement officials, to plead with the judge not to send Seal to the halfway house. To do so would be a death sentence. "Barry could be dead within a month," Campbell said.

Twenty-seven days later Barry Seal was assassinated.