Thomas V. Cash, a charismatic Drug Enforcement Administration official who ran its Miami field division during a cocaine-soaked era and as a supervisor helped take down the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and the Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, died on Dec. 25 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 85.
His death, in a hospital, followed a stroke, his wife, Hillary Avenali Cash, said.
In the 2010 documentary film “The Two Escobars,” Mr. Cash, a one-time assistant director of the D.E.A.’s worldwide operations, said that addressing the increase in cocaine trafficking became an even higher priority for the agency after the college basketball standout Len Bias died in 1986 from cocaine intoxication shortly after being drafted by the Boston Celtics from the University of Maryland.
When Mr. Cash arrived in Miami two years later, the “Cocaine Cowboys” era of Colombian cartel turf wars and lurid violence that began in the late 1970s had peaked, but Miami remained a major drug-trafficking hub.
So much cocaine flooded the city in the late 1980s that the cost of a kilo fell to $14,000 from upward of $40,000. Undercover negotiations for tons of cocaine were conducted in parking lots at McDonald’s restaurants.
John Fernandes, a special agent in Miami during that period, said the city was “elephant country,” which meant “big game hunting” for the federal drug agency.
During his six years with the D.E.A. in Florida, Mr. Cash was known as a take-charge leader; he described his style as “management by walking around.” He oversaw 771 special agents, whose jurisdiction extended from Miami to Bermuda and the Caribbean. On his watch, the agency made the first joint United States-Cuba drug bust.
A 1989 article in The Arizona Republic called him a “tough-talking former English major who could have been an actor.” Unlike many D.E.A. officials, Mr. Cash spoke often to the media and gave punchy quotes like, “Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.” He called his agents “doctor” in conversation, noting that they were “doctors of narcology.”
In interviews, several former agents said he had sought to protect their safety by arming them with submachine guns that could be sheathed in tennis racket covers. He once refused a delivery of Chrysler K cars from the D.E.A.’s procurement office, considering that boxy model to be embarrassing in a glitzy era when the undercover, drug-busting Sonny Crockett character on the TV show “Miami Vice” drove a Ferrari.
In the Noriega case, Mr. Cash’s vigorous style in coordinating federal agencies sometimes rankled federal officials, said Dick Gregorie, the chief assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida at the time, adding, “But he got it done.”
Mr. Noriega was apprehended in Panama by the U.S. military in 1989 and two years later was tried on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. Some top D.E.A. officials at headquarters in Washington were reluctant to allow Carlos Lehder, a convicted drug lord and a founder of the Medellín cartel with Mr. Escobar, to testify against Mr. Noriega and be rewarded with a reduction of his sentence of life without parole plus 135 years, said Thomas Raffanello, who led the drug agency’s Noriega investigation.
Mr. Lehder’s testimony, Mr. Raffanello said, was vital to show that Mr. Noriega was complicit with cartels in moving drugs from Colombia through Panama. Mr. Cash helped persuade the D.E.A. brass to let him take the stand. Mr. Noriega was convicted in 1992 and died in 2017 while serving a long prison sentence in Panama.
“Selling it to headquarters was tough,” Mr. Raffanello said of Mr. Lehder’s testimony, adding that Mr. Cash “really helped us through that.”
“He spoke as an advocate for it,” he added, “because it was something that we crucially needed to win the case.”
As the special agent in charge in Miami, Mr. Cash helped supervise the D.E.A.’s increasing pressure on the Medellín and Cali cartels of Colombia. The operations included seizing apartment buildings and other property in the United States, posing as money launderers, and using drug agency agents to track Mr. Escobar in Colombia with the assistance of the Colombian national police.
On Nov. 26, 1991, the D.E.A., working with what was then the U.S. Customs Service, made what Mr. Cash and other federal agents called the second-largest cocaine seizure ever in the United States — nearly 12 tons hidden in concrete fence posts that had been shipped from Venezuela by Cali cartel traffickers to two warehouses in Miami. (A follow-up investigation led to the seizure in Miami of seven-and-a-half tons of cocaine concealed in shipments of broccoli and okra.)
On Dec. 2, 1993, Mr. Escobar was killed by Colombian security forces in a rooftop shootout in Medellín, his hometown. Mr. Cash deserved some secondary credit for the manhunt that led to the drug lord’s death, said Javier Peña, a former D.E.A. agent who tracked Mr. Escobar in Colombia.
“He directed his people to go after Escobar with a full-court press in Miami and Colombia,” Mr. Peña said.
Mr. Cash understood that the drug war was hardly won, telling reporters at the time that the Cali cartel was happy to be rid of its chief competitor.
“Ask yourself,” he said, “what would the Japanese say if General Motors went out of business?”
Thomas Vernon Cash was born on Sept. 26, 1940, in Atlanta. His mother, Olga Louisa (Altobellis) Cash, owned beauty shops, ran an antique store and was a real estate developer. His father, Ernest Vernon Cash, was a salesman in a furniture store.
Thomas received a bachelor’s degree in English from Georgia State College (now University) in 1962, served in the Army and began a federal law enforcement career that included more than 20 years with the D.E.A. in Paris, Bonn, New York, Washington, Atlanta and Miami.
Mr. Cash acknowledged that he was not a micromanager. Mike Vigil, a former special agent in Miami, said agents had been allowed to improvise as long as their actions were legal. In the late 1980s, he said, two pilots who were D.E.A. informants laced flasks of coffee and orange juice with sleeping pills to subdue a cartel security guard aboard a seaplane as they flew back to Florida from Colombia with a load of cocaine.
“The door opens, and the trafficker looked punch drunk,” Mr. Vigil said. “It took him a day to recover.”
In addition to his wife, Ms. Avenali, whom he married in 2009, Mr. Cash is survived by three children, Sheila Canavan, Megan Cash and Thomas Cash Jr., from his first marriage, to Catherine Stretch, which ended in divorce; and a son, Jesse Cash, from his second marriage, to Peggy Schiffler, who died in 2006. He is also survived by seven grandchildren.
After retiring from the D.E.A. in 1995, Mr. Cash joined Kroll, a private investigation firm. He left the company in 2009 amid a controversy about his connection as a consultant with the financier R. Allen Stanford, who was accused at the time of masterminding a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.
In 2012, Mr. Stanford was convicted and sentenced to 110 years in prison without parole. Mr. Cash was not charged with wrongdoing. Former D.E.A. agents interviewed said they stood by him.
“If the D.E.A. was a Navy,” David Tinsley, a former Miami special agent said, “he was the last of the big battleships.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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