An American Contra : The Confused Life and Mysterious Death of Steven Carr

WAR MAY BE HELL BUT THE idea persists that only by experiencing it can man fully test himself, find out what his real dimensions are. In the movie “Platoon,” Chris Taylor, played by Charlie Sheen, has left the order and purpose and safety of college to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. He is trying to pull himself out of the dreamy modern state of being not quite real, of feeling like a “fake human being.” Steven Paul Carr had similar hopes for war. His brother had fought in Vietnam, and over and over, almost by rote (it became a kind of catechism), Steven Carr would tell people how much he hated “missing” Vietnam: “I would have gone in a minute.”

By 24 Carr had been ejected from both the Army and Navy. He had a serious problem with cocaine and alcohol. As a high school dropout with a prison record and no real profession, he was what many consider the archetype of the contemporary soldier of fortune: a man with a great deal to prove and nothing to lose.

THE DETECTIVE

MELVIN K. ARNOLD COULD NOT hide his contempt for the man whose “equivocal death” had caused him such aggravation. To the Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, the deceased was ordinary human flotsam, a young man, 27, who just couldn’t hack the straight world, who got into cocaine and showed up dead. Arnold, 42, is a tense, busy, combative man with pale-blue eyes. The dead do not by virtue of being dead automatically engage his sympathy. One of the many reasons he had for not liking Steven Carr was the Marine Corps tattoo on Carr’s left shoulder, described in the autopsy as “a polychromatic tattoo showing a skull with a dagger in its mouth, surrounded by red flames and the words ‘USMC Death Before Dishonor.’ ”

“He was never in the Marine Corps,” Arnold noted with heavy irony.

Arnold’s phone is always ringing. It rang again. It was the FBI looking for a Gypsy with a glass eye. Arnold switched the call to the Gypsy expert at a nearby desk in his crowded Van Nuys Civic Center office and got back to Steven Carr. “I’ll tell you the one true thing about Steven Carr: He was a snitch.” Arnold paused for emphasis. “Out of all those who were involved in that stuff down in Costa Rica he was the only one who talked.”

Here lay the crux of the judgment, then: In addition to claiming, via the tattoo, to be something he wasn’t, Carr was also the thing that a policeman most depends on and most despises--a snitch, a turncoat. Then add the clincher--all the attention that Carr’s death had attracted (causing all that aggravation to Arnold)--and you had the source of what the detective was feeling. “It’s a prime example of how things get blown out of proportion and rumors and innuendoes cause such turmoil.”

Carr, who had collapsed in an apartment house driveway in Panorama City, was pronounced dead at 4:05 on the morning of last Dec. 13. He was wearing a blue robe and gray shorts. A preliminary report filed by a coroner’s investigator at 6:40 the same morning suggested that his death might have been either an accident or a suicide: “A possible o.d., cocaine,” the investigator had scribbled. No note was found.

It was an “equivocal death,” and Mel Arnold was assigned to investigate. The phone calls began. The first was from a lawyer for the Christic Institute, a liberal legal foundation in Washington, D.C. (It brought the successful Karen Silkwood suit against Kerr-McGee). The second was from the dead man’s brother. The third was from the office of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). After that the reporters started in.

But what was this all about? It was a lot to put together from Mel Arnold’s Van Nuys desk. Who was this guy to have Time and Newsweek, Mother Jones and the Nation, the New York Times, Spin, the Village Voice, the New Republic, Sen. Kerry and the Christic Institute so intently interested in the circumstances of his death? The final autopsy would take five weeks, and before its release stories circulated of arsenic found in his bloodstream and traces of caustic substances in his throat. There was a lot of talk of three inexplicable puncture wounds on his elbow.

Carr had ridden with an illegal arms shipment from Florida to El Salvador. He had fought briefly alongside some contras in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and he had talked to the press about his experiences. The suspicion was that he had been killed to prevent him from talking anymore and that a cover-up of some sort was being used to disguise this fact. Mel Arnold had no use for this suggestion.

Arnold is a marathon runner. On the wall behind his desk is a poster featuring a large running shoe and the line: “Worn and Tired but Worth It.” A busy man, he began eating an early lunch at his desk. In five minutes he was due at a meeting. “Any more questions?” he asked.

SOLDIERS

THERE WERE ALL THESE military-minded men and no war at hand. Many were Cubans, members of Miami’s Cuban League or Brigade 2506, men still looking to get even for what happened April 17, 1961, on Cuba’s Gibron Beach at the Bahia de Cochinos. Many of the others in the scattered free-lance army Lt. Col. Oliver L. North was channeling funds to under his “Project Democracy” banner were older men who’d had a successful war of their own but often acted as if they’d enjoy another. John Hull, 66, was one of these. He is an American--from Indiana--and for 20 years has been a prominent cattle rancher and farmer in Costa Rica. A key contra supporter and reported CIA go-between, Hull had been a flying ace in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. “I went to fight fascists in 1939, and now I’m fighting communism in Nicaragua,” he has said.

Added to the Cubans and vets like Hull and retired Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub were the free-floaters, young men inspired by their fathers’ war experiences. Or, as in Steven Carr’s case, a brother’s.

The Steven Carr who joined this shadow army was a little slumped, expressionless, yet somehow cocky at the same time, a not-young 24, with a receding hairline and the beer belly of a middle-aged man. He had failed at everything, and even his dream of military glory seemed shopworn. “It’s not so much I want to kill people,” he later told a reporter, “but finding a war is about the only way I’m going to find out what I’m capable of.”

He was just out of prison in late 1984 when Project Democracy was getting off the ground, and he was shopping for a war. He’d already tried the peacetime Army, the Navy, the Marines and the merchant marine. In his teens he’d been a Sea Scout and a plane spotter for the Civil Air Patrol, and the only class he had liked was ROTC. High school had been a washout: “I majored in parking lot,” he said. He’d dropped out in the 11th grade to join the Army. He was discharged after a year for alcohol-related offenses. Discipline was not his thing. (Stationed in Korea, he had once opened fire with a machine gun on the DMZ for no particular reason.) The Marines wouldn’t have him, and after three months in the Navy he was discharged for selling marijuana.

He often seemed two people at once. One of them was soberly middle class, politically conservative and eager to please. His father was an IBM executive painfully removed from Steven’s life when Steven was 7 and his parents divorced. He grew up in the tidy, affluent tourist and retirement community of Naples, Fla. He believed in Ronald Reagan and his causes. The other Steven Carr was always defying authority, always escaping, always in trouble.

Carr’s brother, Edward, 10 years older, had hated the war in Vietnam, and even went into combat with “Make Love Not War” decals on his helmet. He came out with a 100% disability pension, a bitter and unhappy man. “I want to make up for what happened to you in Vietnam,” Steven often said. Edward thought that this was “b.s.” “You can’t make up for it. No one can.”

But Steven Carr had a way of not listening, of keeping the fantasy going no matter what. Cocaine was his drug of choice. He loved it and used it regularly from high school on. Early in 1984, a drug dealer he owed money to threatened his life, and Steven stole two rings from his mother and cashed $2,000 worth of forged checks on her account to pay the dealer. She turned him in to the police, and he served four months on a felony theft conviction before being paroled.

Carr’s usable resume was about nil at this point, and when through a family connection he heard about a rancher in Costa Rica who was involved in hiring “trainers” for contra troops, he jumped at the possibility and even went down there to check it out. The rancher, Bruce Jones, told him to go home and learn Spanish. Carr didn’t do this, but he did make more connections with the network of itchy Bay of Pigs veterans in Miami. Soon enough they would become active in the National Security Council’s far-flung network of arms and men, and Steven Carr was in, traveling on March 6, 1985, with a former Dade County Prison guard and Brigade 2506 member named Jesus Garcia aboard a chartered DC-3 to Ilopango military airport in El Salvador. The arms they carried--including automatic rifles, mortars, a 14-foot cannon, a sniper rifle and thousands of rounds of ammunition--had been collected from garages around the Miami area in which they’d been stored. Now they, and Carr, would be shipped to a contra base in north-central Costa Rica. It was a hopeful time for Steven Carr.

“Steven became a mercenary like someone else might join a football team or a club,” his former attorney, Gerry Berry, said later. “He thought he’d make friends and people would look up to him because he was in a macho role. He was a man with a good heart, someone you’d want to have on your side in combat.”

THE CAMP

THERE WERE FIVE LIKE-MINDED young men who went to Costa Rica to train a small band of contras. (The unit’s mission would be to gather information and provoke trouble as a kind of “dirty tricks” squad, the Katzenjammer Kids meet the Sandinistas.) Two were bright, look-alike, young Englishmen--Peter Glibbery and John Davies, both 24. Another of the group was a big, angry, black-bearded Frenchman, an ex-paratrooper named Claude (Frenchy) Chauffard who hated communists and wore a “Kill ‘Em All and Let God Sort It Out Later” T-shirt. Then there were the two Yanks--Robert Thompson, 52, an ex-Florida highway patrolman, and Steven Carr.

Pocosol Camp was out in the sparsely populated boonies near the central part of the Nicaraguan border, on property allegedly managed by the American farmer John Hull. It was a clearing in the tall grass and trees, with a few wooden pallets for tents and a large, thatched open-air meeting place. Mango and water-apple trees dotted the lazy little Rio Frio, which wound through nearby rice fields. Maybe if you squinted you could imagine you were in Vietnam. But Nicaragua was just across the river, and six or seven kilometers through the trees and grass was a Sandinista camp, La Esperanza.

At Pocosol, no one quite seemed to know what they were doing. Here, in the spring of 1985, had gathered some 40 men--Miskito Indians, Sandinista deserters, Cubans, Costa Ricans and the non-Spanish-speaking trainers. They had arms but too few and in poor condition--AK-47s, Russian RPGs, and American M-16 assault rifles. The honcho here was a 5-foot-1 veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Rene Corbo had a narrow, weathered face and was given to fits of temper. Hating communists as he did, he would explain the unit’s mission like this: “We are gonna go over there and do some bad stuff, man. We gonna throw some stuff at those cabrons .” Corbo did not like taking orders from gringos; he had his own agenda. Because of his size and temper the men called him “the poisoned dwarf.”

One of the “dirty tricks” they planned was a hit-and-run attack on the Costa Rican border town of Los Chiles, after which they’d leave some Soviet mortars behind and some bodies (who the dead would be was not known) dressed in Sandinista uniforms (to suggest a Sandinista attack). Like much of what they discussed, it never happened. Their most notorious scheme, a plot to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis A. Tambs, and blame the Sandinistas seems to have consisted mainly of loose talk. The plan became so well known that they had to abandon it, Carr told a reporter. “It was like the Keystone Kops.”

There were at this time about 15,000 contras under arms, the bulk of them operating out of Honduras and down through northern Nicaraguan. The so-called southern front--the Costa Rican border area--was always sputtering with “incidents” without quite catching fire. Costa Rica, of course, was a neutral country, and the United States had pledged to respect its neutrality. At the same time, Ambassador Tambs had said, as reported in the Tower Commission Report, “I really have only one mission: to form Nicaraguan resistance on the southern front.”

THE FRONT

IT WAS A DIFFERENT SORT OF war, or pre-war, here on the sleepy southern front. A certain open-house quality prevailed. Late in 1984, Soldier of Fortune magazine had sponsored a group of “private sector military professionals” on a tour of the area and up into Nicaragua, offering training tips. Afterward, many contras wore Soldier of Fortune shoulder patches. (Publisher Bob Brown offered a $1-million prize to any defecting Sandinista pilot who got away with a Soviet-made Mi-24 helicopter). What was really being offered in Costa Rica was the chance to fulfill one’s fantasy of war, outside of the usual military restrictions. Here one could “free-lance.”

Carr wore the usual camouflage fatigues, the smoked sunglasses, the combat boots and web gear, and to that added his own highly theatrical touch: a live grenade on a string, dangling around his neck.

Eventually Carr and Glibbery would become good friends, but on first sighting Glibbery was not impressed. “Do you suppose there’s any way we can get rid of this guy?” he asked John Davies.

The most disturbing thing about Carr, besides his wishful flamboyance (he had given himself the jaunty nom de guerre of Carlos Caballo--”Charlie Horse”), was his confessional compulsion. Within minutes of meeting Glibbery, the good Carr was relating bad Carr’s transgressions--he had stolen from his mother, he had served time in prison, he was heavily into cocaine. “He seemed to think this was his last chance,” Glibbery said.

Before going to Pocosol, Carr squeezed in an appearance at the San Jose offices of U.S. consul Kirk-Patrick Kotula. “He came in to report on some counterfeiters he had knowledge of,” Kotula says. “Then he told me he was wanted by the police in the States and was on his way north to join some contras. (He) seemed very immature, and I said: ‘Look, it’s the real world up there. No big helicopter is going to land and take you to a nice hospital if you get hurt. If you get shot they’ll leave you. You’ll starve and die.’ He answered with some macho b.s. He didn’t hear me at all.”

ACTION

THERE WAS A MORALE and discipline problem at Pocosol. The Englishmen, Glibbery and Davies, had taken it upon themselves to shape things up a little, establishing morning “stand-tos” as they had in the British army. But there was much dissension in the ranks and there were too many aimless “patrols” that did nothing to satisfy the men’s need for action. Once a small band led by a Cuban known only as Pedro (he was said to have fought with Che Guevara in Cuba and Colombia) came upon a Sandinista camp just inside Nicaragua. It was night. No guards were in evidence, and Pedro and his men were seriously considering throwing a little lead at the Sandinistas when their position was given away by a herd of cows that had seen them and started to moo. The cow-alerted Sandinistas launched some mortars in Pedro’s direction, and he and his group had to split. It was embarrassing.

Some weeks later, with that experience still fresh, a patrol of 20 men, Steven Carr among them, came through a grove of trees six or so kilometers inside Nicaragua and saw, 50 yards away, the green-plastic tents and cookhouse shack of the Sandinista camp La Esperanza. It was toward dark on a pleasant evening and the men were inside eating. The peaceful clink of busy forks could be heard in the quiet.

Leading the patrol was Rene Corbo, the man who had for so long been threatening to “throw some stuff” at the Sandinistas but had not yet thrown any. The word, filtering down the complex chain of command, was still against direct action. But Corbo opened fire, and his men followed suit.

The racket they made, the smell of gunpowder. This was it for Steven Carr, who unloaded one clip of his AK-47, a round at a time, and then switched his weapon over to automatic fire and emptied a second and a third clip in sweeping, convulsive bursts, the gun barrel fighting to pull upward and Carr fighting to keep it down and the rounds somewhere on target. Down the line another man opened fire with a rocket launcher.

“We caught them in the chow hall and lobbed three rocket-propelled grenades right into their laps,” Carr would tell a reporter later. “We used AK-47 assault rifles to finish off those in front of the place. I’m sure a few of them were smart enough to hit the ground, but we killed a bunch of them.” Enemy dead were estimated at anywhere from 12 to 30.

It all lasted about five minutes--the one time in Carr’s life when the dream and the reality would truly merge; he often said later it was the high point of his life. Now one of Corbo’s own men, a hefty Costa Rican, began to scream. The Sandinistas had started returning fire, and he had been hit in the leg. Glancing around, Carr found that he was alone with a screaming man who could not walk.

It did not help that Carr spoke no Spanish and the Costa Rican no English. And with enemy soldiers due at their position any second, and Carr furious at being left behind in this situation, he could have just retreated. Yet he draped the much larger man across his shoulders and dragged him into the woods and then several hundred yards farther, to where the others were regrouping.

Cool to their welcome (after all, they had run off and left him), he set about improvising a dressing for the wounded man’s leg. “Carlos Caballo” had raised his stock considerably.

When they got back to Pocosol--a day-and-a-half trek with the wounded man--Carr announced: “I’m not fighting with Corbo anymore.” But it was over anyway. Higher-ups had judged the La Esperanza raid a disaster and had relieved Corbo of his modest command. Two weeks later, on April 24, a unit of the Costa Rican Rural Guard arrived and were greeted as friends. Many of the men had visited the camp before. Some of them had assisted the troops in canoes across the Rio Frio for the La Esperanza episode. But something had shifted within the highly factionalized Costa Rican government down in San Jose, and the guards now surrounded them and told them they were under arrest. (But the Costa Ricans, with their long history of neutrality, were by nature non-confrontational and uncomfortable with such brusque behavior, and soon after the arrest Carr and some others went with the arresting colonel into a nearby town for a beer.)

Charged with violating Costa Rican neutrality and possession of explosives, the five gringos were eventually transported to La Reforma Prison outside San Jose. Carr would be there 13 months.

PRISON

LA REFORMA PRISON SITS IN THE middle of farmland and orchards 15 miles north of San Jose. For the first 10 weeks the five gringos shared a 12-by-20-foot cell with 10 other prisoners. Then Frenchy Chauffard got into a fight and was sent to solitary. Around the same time, John Davies and Robert Thompson got themselves moved to other cells.

They wanted to distance themselves from the publicity campaign that Carr and Glibbery had planned. They were all feeling hung out to dry by then. No one had come forward to help them, and Glibbery and Carr had decided to go on the offensive and tell their story to the world press. Their thinking was that if they told what they knew, the presiding powers would be embarrassed and they’d be let out.

But Glibbery and Carr didn’t have a firm grip on who those powers were, or how they operated. They were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in “Hamlet,” minor characters in a complex drama they knew mostly at second hand. Once they made a pyramid chart of the names of all the 20 or so men they thought to have contributed to their predicament. At the top--hardly more than a rumor--was Lt. Col. Oliver North.

“It’s surprising how transient loyalty is between employer and employee,” Glibbery, the philosophical engineering school dropout, remarked.

“When it comes down to it, all you have to depend on is your friends,” Carr said.

The FBI came to look into the matter and so did a representative of contra-aid opponent Sen. John Kerry. Still nothing happened.

“I’ll tell you what is weird,” Steven Carr said to Peter Glibbery. “For the first time in my life I’m telling the truth, and nobody believes me.” More to the point, perhaps, was that 18 months before the Iran-contra scandal broke, and nearly two years before the Tower Commission Report, people simply didn’t care very much.

TELEVISION

THE GRAY-HAIRED MAN ON THE HORSE was being asked some questions by an American reporter. “I’m an Indiana farm boy,” the man was saying. “Absolutely nothing else.”

“Just an Indiana farm boy?”

The man on the horse was drinking a Coke and did not flinch when the interviewer suggested that maybe he was more than he said. That maybe he also did some work for the CIA in his part of Costa Rica. Hadn’t he been helping the contras, staging raids into Nicaragua? “I only give humanitarian aid,” John Hull said.

American television viewers saw John Hull last June on a segment of CBS’ “West 57th Street.” And he didn’t look like a CIA man. Nothing slick or shifty about him at all. Short gray hair, generous schnoz, plain shirt. Farmer all the way.

Then, a young man appeared on the screen. He didn’t look like who he was supposed to be either--an American who fought with the contras. Deadpan, round face that a mustache didn’t do much for. He said John Hull gave him his orders, told him where to go.

When they went back to Hull and told him what the young man had said, Hull momentarily lost his easygoing manner: “Steven Carr is the dregs of humanity,” he said. “He’s been in trouble all his life. He’s the kind of dregs the communists use to push their side.”

Carr, in turn, did not appear even slightly perturbed by Hull’s denial. “I wouldn’t know anything about John Hull unless he told me,” he said a little wearily. “Anyway, how many people could come up to you and admit, ‘I’m the CIA guy in Costa Rica?’ ”

The interviewer, Jane Wallace, had no answer.

PRISON, CONTINUED

FOR STEVEN CARR, PRISON WAS A TIME for writing letters and giving interviews. He also read the Bible cover to cover twice. He told Glibbery his conclusion: “I think God has me in here to keep me out of trouble.”

The months passed and still no sign of release, no trial date, nothing. Not that La Reforma was the worst prison in Central America--it might even have been the best. Money helped, and Carr’s father, the IBM executive, sent him a hundred a month via the American consul. With it he could buy from the prison store such necessities as Coca-Cola and razor blades and, from other sources, marijuana. This was slightly ironic: There were men serving 10-year terms at La Reforma for growing outside what they could buy inside.

Carr’s interview persona was consistently cool and blase, yet in reality he was moody and down a lot, unsure of himself. Sometimes he banged his head against the cell wall and yelled in frustration. Once he said to Glibbery: “You know this stuff just isn’t worth it. When I get out I’m going to give up all this mercenary crap.”

Then the two of them would find themselves drifting into more “merc” talk, fantasizing about international “hot spots” like Suriname and Angola and New Caledonia where a good mercenary could get work. Carr often talked about joining the Foreign Legion or of hiring out to the white farmers of South Africa to battle the “black insurgents.” “Mercenary” was as close as he’d come to finding a profession. “I did that job in Nicaragua because you have to start somewhere,” he told the Miami Herald. “When I go up to my next employer, I can say, ‘Yeah, I was on that one.’ That’s when I can start demanding the bucks.”

There was a small market at this time for men who would talk about their mercenary experiences. Sen. Kerry’s office would, in fact, pay some of Carr’s legal expenses. And his lawyer in Florida, Gerry Berry, later suggested to him that his story might make a book, if Carr would stop giving away the product with all his interviews. Carr refused. “He enjoyed the attention too much,” Berry says.

FREEDOM

CARR AND HIS COHORTS WERE FINALLY bailed out of La Reforma the same weekend--this was in May, 1986--that Sandinista-hero-turned-contra Eden (Commander Zero) Pastora turned in his men’s arms at a ceremony on the Nicaraguan border. It was attended by a large gathering of the press. Pastora said from then on he would seek “political” solutions to the area’s problems. Yet the arms he turned in--about 200 World War II German Mausers--did not really seem to be all the arms he had, as if maybe he’d buried the rest for future action or sold some. Who knew?

Nobody knew a lot in Costa Rica. They “suspected”; there were “rumors.” Everything had begun to have a slightly fictional aura, like the “CIA-constructed secret airfield” rumored to exist in a remote north-central section of the country. Even after it was found and photographed--a wide, plowed gash in the bush--its existence was denied, yet it was ultimately confirmed in the Tower Commission Report. Infrastructure was a word used a lot, referring to the secret airfield, the new coast road and the prefabricated “Bailey bridges” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was rumored to be quietly putting in place in case the Reagan Administration should want to move great numbers of men into combat against the Sandinistas. “The conflict is coming,” U.S. and contra spokesmen told the New York Times the same month. “And it is going to be bloody.”

Meanwhile, the five gringo “mercs” were allowed out on bail. Why? Nobody knew. Maybe it was the hunger strike that Chauffard had been on for the last month, or simply a matter of cleaning up old business on the part of Costa Rica’s new president, Oscar Arias Sanchez, a man determined to be less dominated by U.S. wishes and eager to return his country to its former neutrality. (Though it was Arias who, a few months later, bowed to U.S. pressure and canceled a press conference he had called to denounce the secret airstrip. According to the Tower Commission Report, Ambassador Tambs had threatened Arias with the loss of $80 million in U.S. aid.) Also, there was a libel trial due to begin a few days after the five men were let out on bail. This was to try, in Costa Rican court, a complaint brought by John Hull against two American free-lance journalists--Tony Avirgan and his wife, Martha Honey--who had frequently described him in print as a CIA contact. Hull would lose the suit. Both Steven Carr and Peter Glibbery were to testify but, along with John Davies, Carr had jumped bail by then and escaped from Costa Rica.

Robert Thompson also subsequently jumped bail, and by October of 1986, only Peter Glibbery and Frenchy Chauffard were there to receive five-year sentences for violating Costa Rican neutrality. Chauffard, whose size, temper and unintelligibility had prompted local journalists to nickname him “The Monster Idiot,” lunged at Glibbery when the sentence was read. “You communist pig!” he screamed, lifting a small Costa Rican to whom he was cuffed, swinging him like a puppy on a rope.

Carr’s new freedom was short-lived, if it could be said to have existed at all. Just after getting out of prison, he met a young Costa Rican woman named Roxanna and spent three romantic days with her before sneaking out of Costa Rica, busing down to Panama and flying back to the States. Roxanna would complain that the weekend Carr left he had promised to take her to the beach.

Back in Naples, Fla., he had six months to do for breaking parole on his 1984 felony conviction. In many ways Carr was an ideal whistle-blower. A man society had firmly placed in the loser column was now holding forth in his Florida jail cell for a stream of eager journalists on U.S. policy in Central America: “The public is being lied to about what is going on down there,” he told the Fort Myers News-Press with all the easy authority of a U.S. senator. “The money that is supposed to be going for the contras is actually going into the pockets of certain politicians. They are getting rich.”

Something surely had cracked in his world, and so it was that on the morning of July 28, Carr, sitting in his Collier County Jail cell, would read that his brother, Edward Carr, 36, the Vietnam vet he had so idolized, had flipped out the day before. Edward, the newspapers reported, had emerged on the porch of his Naples home in full battle dress: helmet, a U.S. Army T-shirt, fatigues. Looking a bit like Frenchy Chauffard with his full black beard, the hefty Carr had taken potshots at a street light and at a police car, and while the local SWAT team deployed, Edward retired to his living room to watch a rerun of “MASH.” Afterward, he told police that he was suffering “Vietnam flashback,” and he was removed to the David Lawrence Mental Health Clinic for observation.

But Steven Carr had plenty of problems of his own to worry about. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to dust me off when I get back to the States,” he had said in a prison interview with the Tico Times, an English-language newspaper in San Jose. Prophesying his own death became a regular thing with him. “I’m not too popular with a lot of people because I tell the truth,” he told a reporter. “I won’t feel very safe walking down the street after this is over.” To Frances Reynolds of the Fort Myers News-Press he said: “One of these days they’re going to find my body. They’ll probably call it a cocaine overdose.”

Reynolds did not use that quote in the story she wrote, but it came back to her when she heard of Carr’s death. “Well, Steven,” she said to herself, “it happened just the way you said it would.” The suspicion that he had been murdered was planted, to a considerable extent, by Carr himself.

THE END

A FEW WEEKS AFTER STEVEN CARR DIED, a story in the Nation reported that he had been found dead in a “Van Nuys parking lot” under “mysterious circumstances.” This was written by Costa Rica-based journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. Asked what they based their description on, Avirgan said: “A lot of people didn’t believe it was an accident.” The difference between “Van Nuys parking lot” and the Panorama City driveway in which Carr actually died might seem slight, but it is indicative of the paranoia the Carr story inspired. A “parking lot” is a shade more ominous than a “driveway,” more suggestive of foul play.

There was much to suggest that Carr had died exactly as the autopsy would state: of “acute cocaine intoxication.” High levels of cocaine and its metabolite, benzoylecgonine, were found in his blood, bile and urine, the report said. But there remained unknowns and unknowables to be interpreted any way one wished.

Carr had come to Los Angeles directly after leaving prison in Florida. He had a sister in Reseda, and he had rented a room in an apartment belonging to a friend of hers. Why had he come here? He was afraid for his life, he told people. He imagined a “Cuban hit man” on his trail and is said to have slept with his lights on, his door locked.

Carr was scheduled to testify in two contra-related trials in Florida and, it was rumored, at some future congressional hearings. But how important a witness was he? At one point, when no one else was talking, he was very important; at the time of his death, increasingly less so. He was one of 28 witnesses scheduled to appear at a trial stemming from the 1984 bombing of an Eden Pastora press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua. Of his importance in the other case, involving alleged guns-for-drugs trading with the contras, Assistant U.S. Atty. Ana Barnett said: “We were not really relying on him as a prime witness.”

He had a minimum-wage job lined up, but meanwhile he had gone in with a man he met upon his arrival in Los Angeles on $960 worth of cocaine. Ostensibly, this was for resale, but at the time of his death he had been on what witnesses said was a “56-hour cocaine streak.”

The 22-year-old daughter of the woman in whose apartment he had his room was awakened by Carr at 3:25 in the morning. He was acting drunk, and she followed him outside. He said he had to get something from his car. Carr then collapsed in the driveway that ran between the apartment buildings. He went into convulsions, but before he died, the daughter heard Carr say, “I paranoided out. I ate the whole thing.” It was a whispery voice, barely audible.

Some assumed he had literally eaten small bags of cocaine, but no such bags were found in his stomach. Was it a way of saying that he had simply used up all the drug? Did “thing” refer to cocaine at all? No one knew, but the phrase, “I paranoided out” seemed more straightforward. Carr had drifted to the center of where powerful and shadowy forces met and warred, and he had been marked by that battle. As for his actual death, it seemed a matter of interpretation. What was it finally that he was trying to confess? Steven Carr was the only one who knew. But it was typical of his compulsive honesty to try to tell us something. As Mel Arnold succinctly put it: “He was the best witness to his own foul play.”

Meanwhile, Peter Glibbery was heading into what he hoped was his last year in La Reforma. He had liked Steven Carr in the end. “He tried to be a redneck but he was really a good guy,” Glibbery recently said of Carr to a friend. “Very responsible, very irresponsible. Not too good, not too bad. I cried when I heard he died.”