ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 8, 1996 TAG: 9611080105
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: A deal with a killer
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Mark Garrett, a 25-year-old from Charlotte, N.C., died in 1987 during a fight with a co-worker, who shot him in the back of the head and dumped his body on a back road.
Since the killer was apprehended in 1991, Garrett's family members have taken some comfort in the belief that he was doing hard time in federal prison.
They were wrong.
Javier Cruz, an admitted cocaine trafficker from Colombia, served about 16 months in the Salem-Roanoke County Jail and a few days in a North Carolina prison for killing Garrett. He is now running a Roanoke County nightclub and living in a $288,000 home in Clearbrook - with help from the federal government.
A fugitive once on North Carolina's most-wanted list and sought by the FBI, Cruz parlayed his ties to the Cali cocaine cartel into a career in Roanoke as an undercover informant that has lasted more than five years.
He's helped the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in one of the biggest undercover investigations in the country, law enforcement sources say. In exchange, agents helped him get a plea bargain on a first-degree murder charge and have put drug trafficking charges against him on hold for five years.
Garrett's family knew of the plea bargain - and opposed it - but were assured federal drug charges would keep Cruz in prison for years, longer than he might have gotten on a murder charge. They were unaware of Cruz's whereabouts until contacted recently by a reporter.
"As a family, we don't talk about it a whole lot," said Mark Garrett's younger brother Maurice, 34. "It's so hurtful. There was so much injustice."
Cruz, 39, works at his wife's Colombian restaurant and lounge, Temptations, on Virginia 419 in Roanoke County - free as long as the DEA's operation continues.
"I have as much contempt for the judicial system and the prosecutors as I do for Cruz," Maurice Garrett said. "They're the ones who let him get away with it."
For several years after the killing, Glenda Garrett had to drive by her son's cemetery to get to work each morning.
"Every day, I'd be hysterical by the time I'd get to work," she said. "Some days, I'd scream in my car."
She is enraged that Cruz is walking free.
"Tell me how a man who murders someone, is wanted on all these drug charges - how this could happen?" Glenda Garrett asked. "Why is this man so special?"
Garrett's death
Mark Garrett was a subcontractor who owned two dump trucks and wanted more. He met Cruz when the two worked together on the Piper Glen project, a golf course and subdivision complex in Charlotte, N.C.
Cruz also owned dump trucks and excavation equipment, although he didn't appear to work much, said Sgt. David Graham, the Mecklenburg County, N.C., homicide detective assigned to the Garrett case.
The Garretts first heard their son, Mark, talk about "Jimmy" Cruz two or three months before his death. Glenda Garrett said Mark was impressed by Cruz and his apparent success with his business, evidenced by the money he displayed and the fancy trucks he drove. Cruz was a success in the business, something Mark could strive to be.
"He was impressed that [Cruz] was making so much money without working his trucks much," she said. "Mark said, 'Have you ever seen a dump truck with chrome wheels, Mom?'"
Police in various locations were investigating Cruz for dealing cocaine even then, Graham said.
But the Garretts never suspected that Cruz might be involved in anything illegal, and they say their son didn't use cocaine. After Mark was killed, an autopsy revealed no drugs in his system, and none were found when police searched his apartment.
The night of the shooting in July 1987, Mark Garrett met Cruz and a woman Garrett had dated at a nightclub. The three left together. They had been drinking, and there are conflicting stories of how Garrett was shot.
According to the homicide detective, the killing happened like this: At some point during an argument - police say Garrett was hitting the woman - Cruz stopped the van, and he and Garrett began fighting. Cruz pulled a gun and several shots were fired. One hit Garrett in the back of the head. Cruz opened the door and pushed Garrett's body out of the van on a rural road.
Cruz and the woman then drove to a motel and spent the night. The next morning, she called area hospitals and the medical examiner's office to see if they had found Garrett. When she got back to the motel, Cruz was gone.
In a recent interview, Cruz said Garrett was trying to choke the woman. Fearing Garrett was going to kill her, Cruz picked up a gun he kept in his vehicle and told his friend to stop. He said the gun went off accidentally during a struggle.
He fled, Cruz said, because a friend told him police wouldn't believe him and would seek the death penalty because he is a Colombian.
Glenda Garrett said her son was killed because he was planning to take legal action against Cruz. Mark Garrett had bought a dump truck from Cruz the week before, and Cruz couldn't produce the title for it, but wouldn't give Garrett his money back, she said.
But Cruz insists he is not a murderer.
"If I was a guy who wanted to kill people, I have so many opportunities out here in five years" while working undercover, he said. "In this business, everybody make you mad."
Turning informant
After killing Mark Garrett in 1987, Cruz fled North Carolina.
He was declared one of North Carolina's seven most-dangerous fugitives in 1990, and the FBI issued a federal warrant for his arrest for fleeing to avoid prosecution. Graham, the detective on the case, got reports from time to time that Cruz had been seen, but he couldn't find him.
"I chased him for three or four years all over the United States," Graham said. He was trying to get the case featured on "America's Most Wanted."
Police speculated that Cruz returned to Colombia, then made his way back to the U.S. through Miami using an alias. His wife and two young sons, whom he had left behind in North Carolina, disappeared soon after he did.
Cruz showed up in Floyd County in 1989 with New York plates on his car, posing as a dairy farmer named Luis Florez. The Cruz family milked 30 to 40 cows on a 105-acre farm and appeared to their neighbors to be legitimate, if unknowledgeable, farmers.
An informant told police the Cruzes were selling cocaine from the farm, according to a DEA affidavit filed in Roanoke federal court. Cruz denies that.
And the IRS had opened a file on Cruz and his then-wife, Pamela, after area banks reported suspicious, large cash deposits in the couple's accounts. More than $238,000 - all in cash - was deposited over 18 months, and the IRS was unable to determine a legitimate source for it, according to the DEA affidavit.
In 1990, Cruz quit farming and opened a used-car lot in Roanoke called Like New, Inc. The family moved to Salem, although Cruz split his time between Virginia and Florida.
The Roanoke DEA began watching Cruz in 1990 as part of an investigation into money laundering involving a number of car dealerships in Western Virginia. It wasn't until several months into the investigation that they realized whom they had: the transportation man for a major U.S. cocaine trafficker with ties to the Cali cartel, according to the affidavit.
Cruz was trafficking in massive quantities of cocaine, using Roanoke as a base. The car lot, which provided good cover for buying and moving a lot of vehicles, was the center of transportation for distributing millions of dollars' worth of cocaine across the U.S. and Canada, the affidavit said.
Cruz was in charge of distribution for a major Colombian trafficker, Leonardo Rivera-Ruiz of New York, according to the DEA's affidavit. Cruz said Rivera was the largest U.S. trafficker for the Cali cartel.
"He's the guy that moved tons," Cruz said. "I was the guy that drive the car."
Informants said Cruz moved hundreds of kilograms of cocaine at a time, using pickup trucks, cars and campers equipped with remote-controlled secret compartments called "traps," according to the affidavit.
Rivera would get 1,000- to 2,000-kilogram shipments at a time through Mexico, according to the DEA. Cruz's job was to transport the coke to distributors in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Canada, the affidavit says. One kilogram of cocaine, 2.2 pounds, carries a wholesale price of about $20,000 and up.
Still known to the DEA as Florez during much of its investigation, Cruz's identity was discovered in 1991 when police arrested a man in Wilkes County, N.C., with five kilos of cocaine. He told them Florez was his supplier. Further investigation revealed Florez was really Cruz - and that he was wanted for murder.
When they arrested Cruz, DEA agents seized $37,000 in cash concealed in his Buick parked in the garage of his Salem home. Another $300,000 was found hidden behind the back seat of his Cadillac in Florida, according to the affidavit.
Still, Cruz said recently that he worked as a major cocaine trafficker only three or four months before being arrested.
The DEAarrested him on the outstanding murder warrant instead of on drug charges, apparently so his associates wouldn't know that police were aware of his drug trafficking, preserving his value as a potential informant.
An agent from the DEA flew to Charlotte to urge the prosecutor to drop the charge in Garrett's death, arguing that his help could lead to arrests of major international traffickers.
Although the prosecutor, Steve Ward, refused to drop Cruz's murder charge outright, he did agree to a plea bargain on the reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter. Ward defends that decision, saying the evidence could support the self-defense theory.
The woman in the van was uncooperative and was so drunk she couldn't remember whether it happened the way Cruz said it did, Ward said.
"I'd have an impossible time disproving his story," Ward said. "This was a good disposition given the circumstances."
The federal agents were willing to bring Cruz back to North Carolina to get the case resolved, something they didn't have to do because he was in federal custody, Ward said. Because the DEA had helped him, he was willing to help them.
"We could have taken it to trial and maybe done better," he said. "Then again, maybe we would have done significantly worse."
Graham, the detective in Garrett's homicide case, now works in internal affairs for what's now the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. He said he doesn't believe the story the DEA put forth that Cruz acted in self-defense.
At Cruz's guilty plea hearing in 1992, Garrett's family didn't realize who Cruz was.
"I expected him to be marched in in an orange suit," Maurice Garrett said.
Instead, Cruz was in a coat and tie and walked around the lobby before the hearing unshackled, according to the family. He was escorted by federal agents.
The prosecutor urged Glenda Garrett to remain calm, but she began screaming at Cruz in the courtroom.
"He just looked straight at me," she said. "You're talking about a mean person. He didn't even flinch."
Convicted, but free
The Garretts were told that after Cruz finished helping the DEA on its drug case, he would come back to be sentenced for involuntary manslaughter.
In August 1992 - 16 months after his arrest - Cruz was brought back to Charlotte. But neither Garrett's family nor the police were notified.
Court and prison records indicate that Cruz received a three-year sentence Aug.21 and that he was taken to a North Carolina prison. But he was credited with almost 16 months for time already served, and he walked out of the prison Aug.27, 1992, according to North Carolina Department of Corrections records.
Cruz denies that he got special treatment, saying that he was sentenced based on the evidence.
The jail time Cruz was credited with apparently was served in the Salem-Roanoke County Jail, where he and Rivera - who also agreed to cooperate - were locked up by themselves on the sixth floor.
The DEA was "real secretive" about the two prisoners, who were kept isolated from other inmates, Roanoke County Sheriff Gerald Holt recalled. Federal agents visited them almost daily, and they were released from jail and returned more than a dozen times each, for periods ranging from a few days to two months.
Rivera is now in the federal Witness Security Program, Cruz said.
The Garretts said they were assured that Cruz would eventually serve more time in prison on the federal drug charges than he would have on the North Carolina charge.
Whether Cruz serves any prison time on the drug charges pending against him will be up to a federal judge, who will hear about Cruz's cooperation with the government once the investigation is over. Cruz said he hopes his activities for the U.S. government are enough to convince the judge not to incarcerate him.
"I did a lot of work. They catch me [doing] this, I die."
Staff writer Betty Hayden Snider contributed information to this story.
A federal drug investigation involving Javier Cruz began in 1990. The Roanoke Times has known about it since 1991 but agreed not to publish a story to keep from jeopardizing the case. Our intent was to report the story once the investigation was concluded and all indictments handed down.
In recent months, however, we learned that the investigation has faltered.
More importantly, we recently learned about a murder charge against Cruz and how the Drug Enforcement Administration had intervened to try to get the charge dropped.
Editors and a reporter from The Roanoke Times met with representatives of the U.S. Attorney's office and the DEA this week to discussed the status of the drug investigation. After that meeting, we decided it was our responsibility to the community to tell the story of Javier Cruz.
Wendy Zomparelli
Editor
LENGTH: Long : 250 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Don Petersen. 1. Glenda and Larry Garrett were assuredby CNBthat the man who killed their son would spend years in prison on
federal drug charges. 2. DEA informant Javier Cruz served only about
16 months for the slaying of Mark Garrett. color. 3. This family
photo of Mark Garrett was taken in 1987, the year he was killed by
Cruz. 4. After shooting him fatally, Cruz dumped Garrett's body on a
rural road outside Charlotte, N.C. This photo is from videotape
taken by a Charlotte TV station. Graphic: Map by Andrew Svec.