Here’s an easy way to get a gun…

We got into a real bad patch with folks in Puerto Rico. We’d done some stories about how tons of drugs were getting into Florida. Guess where they were coming from.

Stories about how people had a hard time trying to buy a gun in San Juan. But in Florida, just slightly more difficult than, say, putting on your socks sitting down.

So guys would come to Florida with suitcases of dope, heroin, stashes of cocaine in the soles of their shoes, and trade it for guns. Thriving black market.

When you traced the guns used in crimes on the island, it always led back to Florida.

What was Puerto Rico to do? Well, for one thing, they started offering a whole lot of really rough people immunity from prosecution if they’d snitch on some rougher people. To sweeten the pot, they gave em fake identities, sanitized documents, money.

The bonus? A plane ticket to Orlando. Bottom line was, a bunch of nasties were living in the Sunshine State incognito.

And – oh yeah – nobody in Florida knew anything about it. The whole cop brotherhood thing, kind of a one-way street on this one.

That was the story that really got people in Puerto Rico upset. Bunch of cops, bunch of prosecutors, the governor. All those people denied it. Long and loud.

Consider the fact that, in those days, some of your San Juan neighborhoods were patrolled, not by police, but by the army. Guys with heavy armor… firepower. Two or three folks a day getting whacked in San Juan at the time.

The reporters with their arms around all this… Henry Curtis, Jim Leusner, a few others. Coulda found the Lindbergh baby on their lunch hour.

But now there were guys in fancy suits standing in front of microphones calling them liars. And those newspaper stories attracted a lot of attention. So the whole “those reporters are liars” thing got repeated in Tallahassee, at the state capitol, and on the floors of Congress.

That kinda hurt our feelings.

Solution…

Go find the bad guys, the ones who supposedly didn’t exist. Those mud-slinging reporters dug in. They started tracking people down.

Who’d they find? Well, there was the woman who ran a drug ring in a little town called Caguas. She was notching maybe 50-grand a week. Minor stuff.

Also very minor… the fact that she happened to be standing by in a parking lot one day when a couple of guys made four people drink gasoline. And then lit a match.

Probably some kind of misunderstanding.

She was comfortably situated in an Orlando suburb. New name, etc.

Also happily relocated:

— a dope-dealing hitman, paid by the wife to whack her tv-star husband;

— a corrupt cop;

— a teenager involved in a mass killing;

— a guy who stood by and watched as a woman got raped and murdered.

Just to name a few.

You calling us liars? Well, explain this…

Now there were more meetings in Tallahassee and in Washington. This time, though, it was Puerto Rico’s governor who made the trip.

Called on the carpet. Called north to explain, to apologize.

Yeah.. uh… that stuff in the newspaper. That was true.

Sorry. Won’t happen again.

For those slimy, lying reporters… Miller Time.