The Exploded Body

 

It was 7.30 in the evening of 4 September 1975. A police car drew up next to utility pole number 136 on Card Sound Road in Monroe County, near Miami, Florida. The police had been looking for members of the Cravero gang for months, and they'd had a tip-off that the body of one of them was here.

It didn't take the searchers long to find something in the wooded area at the side of the road. But what they found could hardly be described as a body. They were confronted by a four-foot wide crater in the ground, with fragments of bone and clothing scattered all over the place.

The story had started some years previously. Modern-day Florida has always been a pretty violent place. Smuggling is rife, with access to myriad islands of the Bahamas only a short boat or plane trip away. Beyond the Bahamas lie the diverse and often poorly policed islands of the Caribbean, and only another step further is the mainland of South America.

In the 1970s the American drug problem was just beginning to spread from specialised groups into the mainstream of society. Drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin were being smuggled in ever-increasing quantities, much of it through Florida, and illicit fortunes were being made by the dozen.

One organisation that specialised in the importation of cocaine was controlled by gang boss Richard Douglas Cravero - a violent man who had a fatally abrupt way of dealing with competitors and was scarcely less brutal with erring members of his own gang.

The Cravero gang's drug interests were enough to place them on the FBI's surveillance list. The law was on their trail when rumours began circulating that a gang member had been 'executed'. Creighton Randall 'Randy' Bethell had not been seen since 19 February 1975. But nobody could be made to talk about what had happened.

Nobody would talk, that is, until Cravero and 17 members...Read More