The real Barry Seal
Tom Cruise plays a daredevil drug smuggler in a new film based on the true story of an American pilot. We take a look at the man who inspired the movie
IT’S A story that had blockbuster written all over it: a daredevil pilot who made millions of dollars flying almost 60 tons of cocaine into the US before turning state informant and dying in a hail of bullets at the hands of hitmen.
Scriptwriters didn’t have to overtax
their imaginations when working out the plot of American Made – Barry Seal did most of the work for them three decades earlier with his crazy real-life escapades.
After losing his job as pilot for US carrier TWA he embarked on a life of crime, flying drugs for Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar before being recruited to provide intelligence to American authorities in the ’80s.
The movie – which is currently on circuit – sees Tom Cruise returning to the cockpit for the first time since Top Gun to portray the real-life pilot’s high-flying lifestyle. The superstar was probably relieved that movie bosses didn’t ask him to pack on weight to portray the enigmatic Seal, who weighed 127kg.
But as audiences watch Cruise’s antics they’ll be wondering about the real Barry Seal. His exploits as a drug smuggler – as well as alleged stints flying secret ops for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – have left him a controversial figure, linked to the Iran Contra Affair and myriad conspiracy theories.
As the first American to see the inner workings of Escobar’s powerful Medellin cartel, which was flooding the world with cocaine, Seal’s inside information – and fearless undercover work – led to historic prosecutions. But it all came at a very high price for Seal, who’s already been the subject of a 1991 TV movie, Double Crossed, starring Dennis Hopper.
Just months before he could be the star witness in a case to extradite a cartel druglord to the US, Seal’s cover was blown by a leak and the father-of-three was killed by Colombian hitmen in deep Louisiana.
Three decades on his widow, Debbie Seal (66), is still looking for answers.
“I want to find out the truth about what happened to him,” she says. “The authorities made him a sitting duck. It would’ve actually been more merciful if they’d killed us all that day.”
Former district prosecutor Prem Burns, who put Seal’s killers behind bars, says when it comes to the drug smuggler’s
life he’s still struggling to join the dots. “His story is extraordinary enough to warrant a movie but I don’t know if anybody will ever know the real Barry Seal.”
SEAL grew up watching planes take off from a local airstrip in his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Obsessed with flying, he’d already taken his first solo flight by the age of 15. A year later he earned his pilot’s licence before joining the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans in 1955.
It’s there that he’s believed to have begun earning extra money on the side, running covert ops for government agencies.
Although he revealed little about this aspect of his life, Seal boasted of running guns for the CIA to revolution fighters in Cuba in the late ’50s and flying operations for the US Army Special Forces in Laos in the run-up to the Vietnam War.
In 1964, Seal joined TWA and at 26 became one of the airline’s youngest ever captains. But the self-described “rebel adventurer” craved excitement and smuggling became the perfect fix.
“There were guys who did this because they had no choice. Some did it for money. But others did it because they liked to be on the edge of danger – that was Barry,” says veteran attorney Dick Gregorie, who later worked with Seal on drug prosecutions.
“He was an amazing pilot – he could fly a refrigerator. Some of the things he pulled off were incredible.”
In 1972 he was caught trying to smuggle military explosives out of the country. They were allegedly headed to anti-Castro Cuban fighters. It cost him his job. But on the way to a hearing the 33-yearold met a beautiful 21-year-old cashier.
“I was working at a restaurant,” says Debbie Seal, whose role in American Made is being played by relative newcomer Sarah Wright Olsen, under the
The movie sees Tom Cruise returning to the cockpit for the first time since Top Gun
name Lucy Seal.
“He stopped in there and, just like that, he asked me out.” She says he bowled her over. “He’d tell me all these wild stories about the missions he’d flown. I was young and it was impressive. He was handsome, very charismatic and always laughing. People loved being with him.”
As she started a new job training as an air hostess with Southern Airlines in Atlanta, Seal decided he wanted her by his side.
“One day he came to pick me up in his own plane. He said, ‘Come with me, I’ll take you more places than Southern Airlines ever will.’ And that was it, I left my job,” she recalls.
They married in 1974 and in the same year the case against him for explosives smuggling was dropped. Unemployed, Seal decided to push his luck.
Pioneering audacious techniques – such as flying at night with night-vision goggles, beating radars, bribing officials and using swamp airdrops – he became a prolific smuggler, bringing in marijuana from Latin America.
His good run came to an end when he was caught in Honduras in 1979, spending nine months in a local jail. On the flight home another chance meeting changed his life. Seal met a smuggler who flew for Jorge Ochoa, one of the powerful family heads who’d united to form the Medellin cartel.
Then still unknown, the Colombian druglords would soon be propelled into the ranks of true-life international supervillains, making hundreds of millions thanks to the explosion of cocaine in the US in the ’80s.
Seal, who was soon known as El Gordo (Spanish for The Fat Man), was an integral part of the success. After drawing the attention of Louisiana authorities in 1982 he decided to move his work to a small regional airport in the town of Mena, in Arkansas.
Running a well-oiled operation, he’s said to have made $60 million (then about R66 million) by 1983, bringing in 56 tons of cocaine – under the nose of then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
Debbie insists she didn’t know what her husband was doing, beyond being an airplane broker and renting out old anti-aircraft lighting for promotional events.
“I trusted him so I didn’t ask questions,” she says. “He’d tell me, ‘I’m going to such and such places’ and I wouldn’t see him for days. I never saw drugs, that’s for sure. We lived a nice upscale life but we weren’t billionaires.”
But she admits she knew about his passion for danger.
“Barry was an adrenaline junkie,” she says with a fond smile. “He loved the excitement. He had a drawing of a fox that said ‘Catch me if you can’ hanging in his office. He loved the chase and outsmarting the authorities.”
Some believe Seal was using Mena to fly guns to Nicaraguan rebels for the CIA. At the time the US government sought to secretly help overthrow the country’s communist rulers, in what’s become known as the Iran Contra Affair.
Ongoing conspiracy theories even allege federal authorities turned a blind eye to whatever he smuggled back on the return trips.
Nevertheless, during an operation in South Florida in 1983, Seal’s luck ran out. He was picked up trying to smuggle 200 000 units of the recreational drug Quaalude.
Facing more than 50 years in jail, he offered his services as an informant in the hope of a plea deal. But local prosecutors, still ignorant of the true scale of cocaine smuggling, declined.
Undeterred, Seal flew his plane to Washington and got a meeting with vice-president George HW Bush’s anti-drugs task force, who brought him on board. That he was able to knock on such an important door only further feeds conspiracy theories.
Either way the task force was so impressed, they not only allowed him to fly out of the country but also to bring back drugs as part of his undercover work. It required careful planning to make sure the drugs didn’t reach their targets, while at the same time not raising the suspicion of Seal’s famously violent Colombian suppliers.
Seal quickly proved his worth, both as a fearless pilot and informant. In just a few months he helped the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) pull off its three biggest cases. He’s been described by officials as the “most important witness” in the agency’s history.
“He tried hard to redeem himself and took a tremendous amount of risk,” says
his attorney, Lewis Unglesby.
In June 1984, while on the tarmac at a Nicaraguan airport, Seal took pictures of infamous cartel boss Pablo Escobar as well as officials from the country’s military loading up his plane – the Fat Lady – with cocaine.
The White House, desperate for support to arm the anti-government Contras in Nicaragua, wanted to go public with the pictures but Seal’s DEA handlers wanted to push on and sweep up more big names. A convenient leak to a newspaper less than a month later got the story out and effectively blew his cover – while he was still in the field. Seal got home intact but was forced to go from operator to informant.
The pictures were later famously used by President Ronald Reagan in a dramatic TV broadcast. But local authorities in Louisiana weren’t so fond of the star federal collaborator as he allegedly continued smuggling drugs on the side.
Brazen as ever, Seal approached a television station, complaining about local prosecutors’ treatment of him and boasting of his exploits.
“The exciting thing to me is to get into a life and death situation,” was one of his quotes on camera.
Journalist John Camp says during their interviews Seal liked to play the role of a “fat James Bond”. They produced a onehour documentary that confirmed to the Medellin cartel he was a snitch. And when word reached the cartel that he planned to help in the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain, they reacted ruthlessly.
“One day Barry came in and said there was a contract on him – half a million dead, a million alive,” Debbie says.
The couple discussed going into witness protection but decided against it.
“He thought we had more time. I guess he also thought Colombians would stick out like a sore thumb in Louisiana and they wouldn’t come here.”
But a ruling by a judge in one of his cases made it easy. In December 1985, Seal pleaded guilty on another drug smuggling indictment. His deal to get no jail time worked but he was ordered to spend six months at a Salvation Army halfway house with a nightly curfew set for his arrival.
“It was tantamount to signing his death warrant,” says retired district prosecutor Prem Burns, who believes the judge wanted to humiliate the drug-smuggling high roller.
And so, on 19 February 1986, two Colombian hitmen pulled into the Salvation Army car park less than a minute before Seal arrived in his white Cadillac at 6pm. Using a modified sub-machine gun they sprayed 15 bullets into the car, with three entering his upper body and four striking him in the head.
Debbie still breaks down remembering how a friend broke the news to her that her husband had been shot.
“I loaded up the kids in the car and started to drive there,” she says. “I was stuck in traffic so I stopped at a pay phone. I told them, ‘I don’t know which hospital to go to.’ They said, ‘Debbie, just go home, he’s not going to a hospital.’ I told my children their father was dead. I got them home. Then I went to the kitchen and just cried.”
BURNS got life sentences on the whole gang who’d been caught on the way back to Miami. He has no doubt it was a cartel hit, despite admitting there was federal interference in the case. But some still believe the story could have been a cover for a CIA hit to stop Seal from linking powerful government figures to shady operations. Debbie, who was too scared to go to the trial, says she had to battle the tax authorities for years. After losing most of their property and belongings she was forced to rely on Seal’s life insurance to support herself.
“The millions of dollars they said he made – if he did, he was holding out on me,” says Debbie, who now lives with her daughter. At one point she heard rumours of a multimillion-dollar offshore account in her late husband’s name but was never able to reach it.
Surprisingly she’s since reached out to one of her husband’s killers in jail. They spoke three times on the phone before prison officials cut the contact.
“I was surprised – he was very articulate,” she says. “I told him I forgave him because those were crazy times.”
But with their last chat he got her believing there could be something to the conspiracies.
“He said, ‘Miss Debbie, you come and see me and I’m going to tell you who paid me to kill your husband.’
“Now, if common knowledge is the cartel did it, why would he tell me there’s something else? I think it’s a deathbed confession. But I’m being prevented from seeing him.”
She says in the last year of his life Barry told her he was afraid of the CIA.
“He said there was no place in the world where he could hide from them.”
Whatever the truth is, and whatever side of the tale Tom Cruise’s film chooses to focus on, the epitaph Seal picked says a lot about how he saw himself.
“A rebel adventurer, the likes of whom in previous days made America great,” reads his gravestone.
Barry was an adrenaline junkie. He loved the chase and outsmarting the authorities