Fernando Is A Good Man

"Fernando is a good man." How many times would I hear that one? Yeah, more than a few!

Fernando might have been a good man. The definition of a “Good Man” depends on your point of view. Seeing the obvious signs of wealth, largely earned (let's say accumulated) and squandered, bullet holes throughout his past and wherever he had traveled, made it clear he was bad news.

Fernando was from Columbia. I don't know much about him before his arrival and activity in the area near Tampa. Perhaps he had been a good friend to many, and a mentor to some. His friends were from Columbia, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, a few from DC and maybe Arkansas. Fernando owned some nice properties, including the one I came to be caretaker of on Abraham Road where this story rolls out.

The very first thing I learned about Fernando was that he was in jail and not likely to be a free man anytime soon. Charged with possession of Marijuana with intent to distribute didn’t sound that serious to me. How much pot were we talking about here? Well, ummm, three and a half tons. Did I just hear that right? Three and a half TONS? The guy was caught with seven thousand pounds of marijuana, just standing beside it when the cops came. They alleged that he owned the plane it came out of. Of course, he had no knowledge of who the dope belonged to, or anything at all about it.

Damn that’s a lot of drugs! Enough to load a DC-3. A couple of years later I heard some of the neighbors talking about "El Gordo" whom I later discovered was Barry Seal.

Seal, an actual CIA guy and immune to the law, flew a big C123 cargo plane and could land 11 tons of dope in a grocery store parking lot. As a CIA operative, one of his bosses was GHW Bush. Seal’s dealings and betrayals ended in his assassination at the hands of Columbian killers in Louisiana. Not surprising that he had GHW Bush's private number in the trunk when he was killed!

On the few occasions any interaction happened with the Latino neighbors, I tried to ask a few questions about what went on, and the people who knew always told me three things. "Don't ask,” "Porque no sé" (Why, I don't know), and "Fernando is a good man...".

Fernando ran a cock fighting joint among other things, and held huge games, providing drinks and barbecue to his guests in east Tampa. Thousands of dollars changed hands in these gambling games at-tended mainly by Hispanics. Fernando was married to a Marielita beauty named Esmeralda who was from Havana, a raven-haired beauty with a wild streak a mile wide.

In the Mariel boat lift she, two brothers, and a few other relatives escaped Castro's clutches on the sunny shores of Florida. They intuitively set up shop near the old Cuban community of Tampa, where there was less competition than Miami. Their business interests included drug dealing, robbery, theft, gambling, prostitution, insurance scams, and car theft. Mainly they liked to buy and sell drugs and trade in guns. Stolen guns, cheap guns, automatic weapons, ammo, silencers, anything that fired a bullet. Esmeralda and her family fit right in among the rougher elements in the old community of Ybor City.

Esmeralda wasn't very loyal to Fernando and had several affairs. The home Fernando built for her at the Farm was very nice compared to where they'd come from, with a fine stucco finish, beautiful furniture, built-in’s, several bedrooms and bathrooms. In front of the house was a shrine to Santeria, where offerings and rituals were held. Another was also in front of the house down the road at the farm.

I was working at a car dealership in Tampa, and the Service Director and his assistant manager had taken a liking to my ability and dedication. I was their rising star in the Service Department. They knew I would do whatever they needed to make the department run smoothly. The ASM knew I was struggling and was always doing things to help me out. He was a family guy, and aside from being our number two guy in the service department, was also a practicing attorney, working with a former judge in downtown Tampa.

After a few months of watching me struggle, he said, "My Law partner, “The Judge,” has a farm and needs someone to take care of it. It has a great house on it, and if you'll take care of it and watch after the animals, you can get it cheap.” "How cheap?" "REAL cheap!”

I met “The Judge” out there one afternoon. It was twenty acres, what you'd call a hobby farm, at the end of Abraham Road about a mile south of what is now the Selmon Expressway. It was surrounded by smooth open pastureland, which, coincidentally, was plenty long enough to land a fully loaded DC-3. All you needed was a guy to make sure the cows were out of the way. There were five residences on Abraham Road, two nice homes, two single wide mobile homes, and at the dead end of the road was the farm. The house was a newer doublewide with a huge deck at the back and a mother-in-law suite built like a secure unit. 100 yards south of the house was the 4000 square foot barn built in three sections. In front of the house was a small building, used as a shrine to Santeria, with some religious icons and stuff I didn't understand.

The first thing I noticed was shingle roofed enclosures, about six feet square and filled with hundreds of metal cages. A long row of thirty or more ran in the direction of the barn. At the North end was a brick smoker large enough to cook any animal on earth. Well, maybe not an elephant, but you get the picture. It had a solid steel door and was the size of a modern elevator.

Far out in the back, east of the barn was a small pond surrounded by elephant ears and local vegetation. Just big enough that you couldn't cast a fishing lure across it, and it was deep, obviously manmade as the banks dropped straight off. This was “The Judge’s” Duck Pond where he kept a large flock of Muscovy Ducks and a few Mallards. He also had three horses who hated people, a pair of Holstein Cows, one young bull, and some chickens and guineas.

Inside the barn, was a large and very expensive looking cock fighting ring made of fiberglass and ex-pertly built and finished. The second I laid eyes on it, I knew what this farm had been all about, or at least I thought so…

“The Judge” and I struck a deal. I live in the house, look after the place, pay less than the going rate for rent, pay the utilities and trash pickup, and maintain the yard. It was a great deal for me, a dream come true. No traffic, good clean place, room for the family, bus stop at the end of the road. Wow! I jumped at it.

Often guests would comment on the bullet holes all over the house, and yeah, there were at least twenty-five or more, a few in each room. They were all 5.56 mm, fired from an M-16 rifle. Fernando was a jealous man and Esmeralda had given him plenty of justification. One night the relatives got drunk and laughed at Fernando because his wife was playing him for a fool. That was the last straw! He failed to kill Esmeralda, but only because he missed! Focused on killing the guy she was currently sleeping with, Fernando was convinced the guy was hiding in the house somewhere and fired through all the walls and doors until he realized the guy wasn’t there. He caught Esmeralda sitting on a barstool in the big house next door and shot the stool out from under her. The legs were four inches square and one of them splintered. It looked like he had used a .357 handgun. Allegedly Fernando finally scored his target in the barn, where he dispatched the guy with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Evidence of undetected crimes could be found if one cared to look. One time, the water table got very low, I noticed what looked to be a cut up vehicle down in the pond. We got the tractor and a long steel cable and started hauling out the pieces. A Chevy Blazer 4x4, a couple of years old when it went into the water. It had been cut into several pieces, but was all there, including the VIN plate. “The Judge” arranged to have it hauled away, with some BS story of how it had been "a lemon” and they reported it stolen for the insurance. I figured it had something to do with that shallow "grave sized" depression in the ground on the East side of the barn. "Porque no sé"

“The Judge” was Fernando's attorney, and had received the farm as payment for keeping Fernando from a more serious penalty. He wanted to own all the property, offering to buy it many times. Esmeralda kept saying, ”No, Señor." One day, I saw him put on a big smile and say, "Esmeralda! Fernando is getting out of Jail" as if expecting her to be happy. She turned white and said, "Oh NO Señor!" Esmeralda became a motivated seller overnight, selling him the big house in an all cash deal. After put-ting the cash in a bag, she rode off on the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle.

One day the light over the master bathroom vanity went out. Changing the bulbs in the dark, as I pushed the rectangular fogged plastic cover up, something fell out and landed on the countertop. It was a rather crude sex toy. Let’s leave it at that.

I quickly replaced the bulbs and reached in to see what else was hidden. Three objects. A heavy, solid gold chain. I held my breath as I pulled out a baggie full of cash, $3,000.00 in tens and twenties. A God-send! I was in such deep financial stress, just barely keeping the bills paid. Never was there a better finder’s-keeper’s gift!

The third was a 4x6 black notebook full of notes and phone numbers in Spanish, and a lot of little scraps of notes. A few pages had calculations of huge amounts of cash. There were dates, but no years. Back then, 40+ years ago, Narco traffickers had so much cash they were weighing it instead of counting it. There were stories of bags full of cash, stuffed into 55-gallon plastic drums, and buried all over. Was this little black book a collection of maps to such treasures?

Remember the village back in the 90’s where all the people became enormously wealthy overnight? They had dug up barrels containing $20+ million dollars. Nice vacation, up in the mountains beyond San Juan.

The friends I met there had no trouble reading Spanish.

Later, on Christmas Day, I awoke to find the new Jaguar XJS in my drive, titled in my name, and a card with a small gold bar inside that simply said, “Feliz Navidad, Luis”.

Over the years, people showed up at the door looking for Fernando. One I'll never forget was a gigantic man, well dressed, wearing a Rolex, chains and a heavy gold bracelet and driving a new decked-out bright red Ford 4X4 Pickup. His English and my Spanish was abysmal, but I managed to tell him Fernando hadn't owned the property for a few of years.

Seriously, no kidding, he told me "Fernando is a good man...."