Trailblazing prosecutor who led Cuban Five spy case steps down
A couple of years before
The Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal, University of Chicago intern Caroline Heck worked for a summer in the newspaper’s style section.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English, the aspiring journalist headed for Florida to start a job covering courts for the St. Petersburg Times.
“Every day was a theatrical production,” she recalled. But the legal stagecraft often fell short. “I found myself watching a trial, and I would watch the closing arguments and say to myself, ‘Sit down. I could do this better.’ ”
So Heck Miller left the newspaper business for Harvard Law School, then wound up at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami. Until retiring earlier this year, she worked for more than 40 years in a legal career highlighted by her role as the lead prosecutor in the Cuban Five spy case in 2001 — an internationally watched, politically charged throwback to the Cold War era.
Heck Miller came to be known as a trailblazer among prosecutors in the federal courthouse. She also was a “resident rabbi” offering sage advice on the law, ethics and trials to young prosecutors, and a polished writer who did all of her own pleadings and appeals.
“She was a role model for everybody” in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said retired Magistrate Judge William Turnoff, who in the 1980s was chief of the major crimes section while Heck Miller served as his deputy. “She and Pat Sullivan tried more huge, important federal cases than probably anyone in the history of the Department of Justice,” comparing her to a retired colleague known for taking on Miami’s most infamous criminals.
“She’s absolutely a lady, but tough,” he added. “You didn’t want to mess with Caroline.”
JOURNALISM AN EARLY PASSION
Heck Miller said she did not anticipate a life in law while growing up in Newark, N.J., where her father was a high school English teacher and her mother a nurse. Her early passion was journalism because she liked the way it let her adopt a different personality as she reported on other people’s lives. But after a few years as a reporter at the St. Pete Times, she also sensed that it wasn’t a good profes
sion to grow old in.
Still, she was confused about whether to apply to law school or pursue a doctorate in Medieval studies. Aiming high, she applied to Harvard and Yale universities for the former, and Cambridge and Oxford universities for the latter. She was accepted at Harvard and Cambridge, but then she faced a dilemma.
“That’s when reality set in,” Heck Miller recalled. “Am I really going to study Medieval studies?”
She chose Harvard Law. One of her classmates at Harvard was John Roberts, the future U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, though she didn’t know him. While most of her peers in the class of 1979 gravitated to corporate law and major law firms, Heck Miller was selected by the Justice Department for the Attorney General’s Honors Program.
MIAMI IN UPHEAVAL
The practice of criminal law — from the prosecutor’s side — would be her calling. At the Justice Department she did appellate work. But then she attended a Christmas party for a group of organized crime prosecutors and encountered Atlee Wampler, who would become the U.S. attorney in Miami. He arranged for her to transfer to the office to work on her first trial and then hired her in 1980, after two cataclysmic events: the McDuffie race riot and the Mariel boatlift of Cuban refugees.
The new decade would put Miami on the map as the international hub of cocaine smuggling for Colombian cartels dominated by Pablo Escobar and the Rodriguez-Orejuela brothers. The region was also overwhelmed by an unprecedented wave of drugrelated murders, money laundering and financial fraud.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office, which extends from Key West to Fort Pierce, scrambled to keep up with the onslaught of crimes and trials.
As a young prosecutor, Heck Miller did her share of narcotics and fraud cases and became a deputy chief of the major crimes section. She said her “role model” in the U.S. Attorney’s Office was prosecutor Linda Collins Hertz, who ran the appellate section and possessed a razor-sharp mind along with ample Southern charm. “I always liked to handle my own appeals and worked closely with her,” she said.
Heck Miller experienced her first major bank fraud case in the mid-1980s when the grand jury charged Alberto Duque, a Colombian-born entrepreneur dubbed the “Boy Coffee King” and a dozen of his associates. The indictment accused Duque’s coffee companies of inflating inventory and faking financial statements to obtain millions in bank loans from about 20 institutions in Miami and New York. After a six-month trial, Duque, 36, was convicted in what prosecutors called one of the biggest bank frauds in U.S. history — an $85 million case at the time.
Heck Miller, who worked on the case with veteran prosecutor Mark Schnapp, went up against the titans of the Miami criminal defense bar, including Roy Black,
Jay Hogan and Neal Sonnett.
“It was grueling,” she recalled, with long days, lots of stress and little eating. “I finally found a surefire diet — go to trial for six months.”
HER RULES OF LEGAL BATTLE
By then, Heck Miller was well versed in the prosecutor’s craft: Write the grand jury indictment with just enough criminal elements and legal sufficiency, but don’t give away too much to the other side. Also, know where the courthouse is and be there on time; have a goal in mind at trial and don’t be too greedy with your requests; if you make a mistake at trial, sit down, shut up and don’t make matters worse, especially if you’re already winning a case.
She followed those principles as she continued to prosecute white-collar defendants involved in complex bank, financial and healthcare fraud schemes. They were not your everyday criminals, said Heck Miller, who became chief of the fraud section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They had clever minds, deep pockets and the ability to hire the best defense lawyers in town.
Even the law on fraud, which became so pervasive in South Florida over the course of her career, was not easily defined, she said, citing a 1941 appellate court case: “The law does not define fraud; it needs no definition; it is as old as falsehood and as versable as human ingenuity.”
Heck Miller’s personal and professional life was particularly eventful beginning in the mid-1990s. She married legendary Miami Herald reporter and editor Gene Miller, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who died in 2005.
After working in a series of senior executive roles in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including as a professional responsibility officer advising prosecutors on ethics and the law, Heck Miller returned to the courtroom in two high-profile cases.
On May 11, 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 took off from Miami International Airport and crashed into the Everglades a few minutes later, killing everyone aboard,
105 passengers and five crew members. Three years later, a 24-count indictment was filed against SabreTech, a maintenance company, and its three workers, accusing them of not properly sealing the oxygen canisters that exploded and caused the ValuJet DC-9 to plunge on fire into the Everglades.
At trial, the defense attorneys argued that the SabreTech workers had thrown away the deadly canisters, and that ValuJet workers had loaded them on the plane anyway. Jurors acquitted two of the workers; the third defendant was a fugitive. SabreTech was acquitted on conspiracy charges but found guilty on nine other counts, the first criminal conviction related to a U.S. airline accident. It was ordered to pay $2 million in fines and $9 million in restitution.
Heck Miller described the ValuJet crash case as “difficult” because it was “very technical” and involved a corporate defendant. She also said that picking a jury was challenging because so many potential jurors knew about the tragedy, one of America’s worst aviation disasters.
THE CUBAN FIVE SPY CASE
During that same period, Heck Miller led a team of lawyers in one of the most politically fraught prosecutions in the history of the U.S. Attorney’s Office: The Cuban Five spy case. It was brought in a post-Cold War era when relations were still extremely strained between Fidel Castro’s government and South Florida’s CubanAmerican exile community.
She downplayed the role of politics in bringing the bombshell case, saying the Cuban spy mission was “real and extensive.”
“There was a compelling body of evidence,” said Heck Miller, who worked on the case with prosecutors David Buckner and John Kastrenakes.
The five Cuban intelligence officers, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González,and René González, were arrested in September 1998. Part of the so-called Wasp
Network, they came to South Florida to observe and infiltrate Cuban-American exile groups. At the center of the highly publicized case was the Cuban Air Force’s 1996 shoot-down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes, killing four exile members over international waters.
After a seven-month trial, the five defendants were all convicted in 2001 of acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government; three of conspiring to commit espionage; and one of conspiring to commit murder. An appeals court overturned their convictions in 2005, citing the “prejudices” of Miami’s antiCastro Cubans, but the full court later denied their bid for a new trial and reinstated the original convictions.
Asked about that case’s heightened attention, Heck Miller said: “I’ve had a number of cases that had a lot of publicity around them.”
Another high-profile case was the prosecution of four top executives of E.S. Bankest Capital Corp., who were convicted in 2006 of orchestrating a massive fraud against the Portuguese bank Banco Espirito Santo. Eduardo Orlansky, the ex-chairman of the defunct E.S. Bankest, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to pay $165 million restitution.
E.S. Bankest was a factoring company that bought other firms’ accounts receivables at a discount, then collected the bills and kept the difference. Bankest borrowed millions of dollars from Espirito Santo based on fraud and fabricated accounts receivables. The bank eventually absorbed the losses.
A former federal prosecutor who worked with Heck Miller on the Bankest case said her experience in long, complicated trials was invaluable.
“Caroline is an icon at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, not only because she’s brilliant and thoughtful, but also because she graciously mentored so many generations of young lawyers that sought her guidance on the most complex issues,” said attorney Ryan Stumphauzer, who now heads his own Miami law firm.
ASSIGNMENT: LONDON
With her retirement on the horizon, Heck Miller was picked in 2014 for a coveted assignment as an attaché in the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in London, where she handled requests for evidence in criminal cases between the United States and England. She also handled some extraditions.
But it was not all work and no play. “I was an English major. I was into Medieval poetry and was a theater buff,” she said. “I was like the cat who fell into a pot of cream.”
When she returned to Miami in 2019, she took on a final job evaluating evidence gathered by federal agents and prosecutors to ensure it was not tainted by possible violations of a defendant’s attorney-client privilege.
Last year, however, Heck Miller, 72, had a health scare. She underwent emergency surgery, which accelerated her decision to retire on Jan. 1. She now leads a quieter life at her South Miami home — reading, hand sewing and cooking — along with doing weekly cardio-rehab therapy. She’s still serving as president of her synagogue, Temple Judea, and now gets to see her son Daniel more often. He lives in Boston.
Looking back, Heck Miller said she always enjoyed the law, the writing and the trials, but what she found particularly satisfying was collaborating with her colleagues on big trials. “You can’t do these cases on your own.”