Ed Edwards'* mother married a cousin of mine when he was around ten years of age. Did he respond to a rather strict upbringing by stealing rare books from the library of the ivy league university where he was a freshman and attempting to sell them in New York ? We cannot say, but he was expelled from school for that stunt. Having evaded the long arm of the local draft board (conscription was still in force at that time) by faking homosexuality, he fled his parents' wrath by traveling to London, where the British branch of his mother's Boston family resided.

He knocked around then-fashionable Carnaby Street (it was the 1960s) until he tired of working as a sales clerk, returned to Miami, and resumed his education. He obtained a degree in philosophy, and then joined me in law school, where I had enrolled after my military service in Vietnam and Cambodia. Determined to make his mark in international law, he left his first job as a law firm associate to open his own shop with a lawyer who specialised in representing local foreign diplomats posted to Miami.

It was then that his fertile but twisted mind conceived the "perfect crime." His extensive reading of the obscure Trading with the Enemy Act led him to erroneously conclude that crimes against states hostile to the US could be committed without risk of arrest. Cuba was at that time, and still is, subject to a trade embargo as the result of the expropriation by its communist government of US private property, as he chose it to be his target.

At that time, Cuba was in dire need of coffee for its citizens, and Ed figured that presented an opportunity to commit a massive fraud upon that island nation's government.

Ed put together an operational team right out of a "Mission Impossible" movie; a Miami policeman, a fireman, an upper-class Haitian, a German coffee salesman. an American businessman, and a Dutch woman exporter who incidentally was also a heroin trafficker on the side. Their goal was to steal millions of dollars from the Castro regime.

The fraudsters:

• Formed a corporation in the Netherlands Antilles, for as Americans they could not deal directly with the Cuban government.
  

• Traveled to Germany to purchase a freighter, which was ostensibly to carry the coffee from the Dominican Republic to Cuba.
  

• Entered into a contract with an agency of the Cuban regime to sell and deliver, in Havana, over $8m of coffee beans grown in the Dominican Republic.
  

• Bribed customs officials in Santo Domingo to certify that the coffee beans had been loaded on board the conspirators' vessel, which then left port ostensibly bound for Cuba.
  

• Presented the fraudulent documents at the Canadian bank handling the transaction, which trustfully disbursed US$8.8m to the gang.
  

• When the ship failed to arrive on schedule, Cuban naval vessels commenced a search. Ultimately, the ship was found abandoned, with no coffee cargo on board.
  

The fraudsters fled to the four corners of the Caribbean, save Ed who, thinking he had committed no US crime, returned to his law practice. As you can imagine, both the Cuban and Canadian governments were livid, and bent on  revenge and justice, in that order.

 The Cuban authorities immediately began searching for the players, and finding two of them in Jamaica, whose Manley government was then friendly to Cuba, proceeded to kidnap them and imprison them in Cuba. The suspects received terms of imprisonment in excess of 25 years, and whether they still are alive is unknown.

Perhaps there were no violations of US law, but Canada charged the gang with a number of criminal offenses, and after several of them were then apprehended and extradited, they served short terms of imprisonment in Canadian prisons.

As for Ed, he had never practised criminal law, and had neglected to research that catch-all American crime, wire fraud, where one uses the instrumentalities of international communications, such as a fax machine, in furtherance of a crime. But Ed had other, even more serious problems, for he was also a narcotics trafficker, and he was about to sell 8 kilograms to still another coffee salesman, one who was cooperating with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

NEXT:  When  you have two different federal criminal cases pending against you at the same time, what do you do ? How does one escape with one's skin intact ?
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* The names have been changed, not to protect the guilty, but to save their innocent families from further
unfair and unwanted publicity. They have suffered enough.