Thomas V. Cash, a charismatic Drug Enforcement Administration official who ran its Miami field division during a cocaine-soaked era and as a supervisor helped take down Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, died Dec. 25 in Fort Lauderdale. He was 85.
His death, in a hospital, followed a stroke, his wife, Hillary Avenali Cash, said.
In the 2010 documentary film “The Two Escobars,” Cash, a one-time assistant director of the DEA’s worldwide operations, said that addressing the increase in cocaine trafficking became an even higher priority for the agency after college basketball standout Len Bias died in 1986 from cocaine intoxication shortly after being drafted by the Boston Celtics from the University of Maryland.
When Cash arrived in Miami two years later, the “Cocaine Cowboys” era of Colombian cartel turf wars and lurid violence that began in the late 1970s had peaked, but Miami remained a major drug-trafficking hub.
So much cocaine flooded the city in the late 1980s that the cost of a kilo fell to $14,000 from upward of $40,000. Undercover negotiations for tons of cocaine were conducted in parking lots at McDonald’s restaurants.
John Fernandes, a special agent in Miami during that period, said the city was “elephant country,” which meant “big game hunting” for the federal drug agency.
During his six years with the DEA in Florida, Cash was known as a take-charge leader; he described his style as “management by walking around.” He oversaw 771 special agents, whose jurisdiction extended from Miami to Bermuda and the Caribbean. On his watch, the agency made the first joint United States-Cuba drug bust.
In the Noriega case, Cash’s vigorous style in coordinating federal agencies sometimes rankled federal officials, said Dick Gregorie, the chief assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida at the time, adding, “But he got it done.”
Noriega was apprehended in Panama by the U.S. military in 1989 and two years later was tried on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. Some top DEA officials at headquarters in Washington were reluctant to allow Carlos Lehder, a convicted drug lord and a founder of the Medellín cartel with Escobar, to testify against Noriega and be rewarded with a reduction of his sentence of life without parole plus 135 years, said Thomas Raffanello, who led the drug agency’s Noriega investigation.
Lehder’s testimony, Raffanello said, was vital to show that Noriega was complicit with cartels in moving drugs from Colombia through Panama. Cash helped persuade the DEA brass to let him take the stand. Noriega was convicted in 1992 and died in 2017 while serving a long prison sentence in Panama.
“Selling it to headquarters was tough,” Raffanello said of Lehder’s testimony, adding that Cash “really helped us through that.”
“He spoke as an advocate for it,” he added, “because it was something that we crucially needed to win the case.”
As the special agent in charge in Miami, Cash helped supervise the DEA’s increasing pressure on the Medellín and Cali cartels of Colombia. The operations included seizing apartment buildings and other property in the United States, posing as money launderers, and using drug agency agents to track Escobar in Colombia with the assistance of the Colombian national police.
On Dec. 2, 1993, Escobar was killed by Colombian security forces in a rooftop shootout in Medellín, his hometown. Cash deserved some secondary credit for the search that led to the drug lord’s death, said Javier Peña, a former DEA agent who tracked Escobar in Colombia.
“He directed his people to go after Escobar with a full-court press in Miami and Colombia,” Peña said.
Thomas Vernon Cash was born Sept. 26, 1940, in Atlanta. His mother, Olga Louisa (Altobellis) Cash, owned beauty shops, ran an antique store and was a real estate developer. His father, Ernest Vernon Cash, was a salesperson in a furniture store.
Thomas received a bachelor’s degree in English from Georgia State College (now University) in 1962, served in the Army and began a federal law enforcement career that included more than 20 years with the DEA in Paris, Bonn, New York, Washington, Atlanta and Miami.
Cash acknowledged that he was not a micromanager. Mike Vigil, a former special agent in Miami, said agents had been allowed to improvise as long as their actions were legal. In the late 1980s, he said, two pilots who were DEA informants laced flasks of coffee and orange juice with sleeping pills to subdue a cartel security guard aboard a seaplane as they flew back to Florida from Colombia with a load of cocaine.
“The door opens, and the trafficker looked punch drunk,” Vigil said. “It took him a day to recover.”
In addition to his wife, Hillary Avenali, whom he married in 2009, Cash is survived by three children, Sheila Canavan, Megan Cash and Thomas Cash Jr., from his first marriage, to Catherine Stretch, which ended in divorce; and a son, Jesse Cash, from his second marriage, to Peggy Schiffler, who died in 2006. He is also survived by seven grandchildren.
A 1989 article in The Arizona Republic called him a “tough-talking former English major who could have been an actor.” Unlike many D.E.A. officials, Cash spoke often to the media and gave punchy quotes like, “Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.” He called his agents “doctor” in conversation, noting that they were “doctors of narcology.”
Those were his “Cash-isms,” something most who knew him would remember about Cash, Kendall Coffey, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida from 1993 to 1996, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday.
He recalled Cash as having “a brilliant investigative mind” with a unique talent to bring together local, state and federal agencies in order to oust the cartels. Cash oversaw the transition from the Medellín cartel to the Cali Cartel, which “was much more sophisticated” in their ability to conceal drugs and in money laundering, Coffey said.
When Cash was at the helm, the drug epidemic was so prolific that companies to manufacture boats for drug dealers had sprung up in South Florida, banks needed machines to count bags of cash and nightclubs by midnight were flooded with traffickers, he said.
“To some extent, you could say the DEA was challenged with changing a wave of drug use and drug trafficking that had become a way of life for a lot of people in those years,” Coffey said.
Cash oversaw a major case in which multiple attorneys were indicted in addition to leaders of the Cali Cartel, at a time when the group was emerging as a significant threat, he said.
“I don’t think that law enforcement would have had the success that it had in the war on drugs without Tom,” Coffey said. “There’s skeptics — What did the war on drugs accomplish? That’s a deep question and not easily answerable … I can only tell you that the impact on South Florida, (and) Florida, was dramatic.”
With Cash’s talents, Janet Reno, U.S. Attorney General from 1993 to 2001, wanted to recruit him to lead the DEA nationally, he said.
“But he wanted to stay here. South Florida was his home,” Coffey said.
Upon his retirement from the DEA in 1995, Cash soon after joined Kroll Inc., a global financial and risk advisory investigative firm. Founder Jules Kroll and Cash developed a close relationship and remained close up until his death, he told the Sun Sentinel.
Cash was a “highly intelligent” man who could be easily underestimated, given his “thick Georgia accent,” Kroll said. He was a natural leader with a “can-do” attitude and a sense of humor. He garnered the respect of all who worked with him; Kroll recalled Southern District of Florida Chief Judge James Lawrence King particularly thought highly of Cash.
With his unique combination of experience and relationships from working across numerous countries and his intelligence, Kroll said Cash was “as good as it got” out of his thousands of employees throughout the years. He credited Cash with developing Kroll Inc.’s business in Latin America.
“In many respects, Tom is a man for all seasons,” he said.
South Florida Sun Sentinel reporter Angie DiMichele contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.