Tom Gordon person
also: Gordon, Sergeant Gordon, Sergeant Tom Gordon
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Related entities (most co-mentioned)
Daniel Blantonperson · 14Los Angelesplace · 12Nicaraguacountry · 8Ron Listerperson · 7Sandalio Sandy Gonzalezperson · 7Contrasorganization · 6Norwin Menendezperson · 5Majorsorganization · 5Costa Ricacountry · 5Riverside County Sheriff's Departmentorganization · 4Thomas Shretnerperson · 4Doug Aucklandperson · 3Floridacountry · 3Blanton Raidevent · 3Danielle Ganserperson · 2Mike Fosseyperson · 2Deputy Juarezperson · 2CIAintelligence service · 2Bradley Bruninperson · 2Ronald Reaganperson · 2Edward Hoffmanperson · 2Majors Drug Task Forceorganization · 2South Americaplace · 1Roger Sardinoperson · 1
Claims (3)
Tom Gordon carried_out_attack
Daniel Blanton documented
“It says that he did exactly what the Costa Rican DEA agent Sandy Gonzalez said not to do. He drove down to the L.A. County Municipal Court before a judge and applied for a warrant to search all of the Nicaraguan drug operation that was goin…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 18 @ 2:29
Gwinnett Blackwell appointed
Tom Gordon documented
“Gordon's charges would not be easy for the law and order Reagan administration to dismiss as the fantasies of a Sandinista sympathizer or a convicted drug dealer. This time, the accusations were coming from the police under oath. Gordon's a…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 18 @ 11:52
Joe Kelso spied_on
Tom Gordon guest_asserted
“participating in drug manufacturing. Okay, Kelso said. He said it was later determined that the two men may have been part of Norse resupply operation, which could or couldn't have been official CIA, but they were basically still working fo…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 17 @ 39:33
Mentions (50)
▶ 49:46
Though he was arrested, Sandino somehow managed to wiggle out of custody, like so many of them do, and the DEA issued a fugitive warrant for his capture. When Los Angeles detective Tom Gordon ran across Sandino's name in the drug database s…
▶ 39:22
headed by Sergeant Edward Hoffman, whose brother was a friend of Guzetta. Guzetta gathered up his Project Sierra reports and delivered them to the majors, where they landed on the desk of Detective Thomas Gordon. In 1986, Tom Gordon had bec…
▶ 42:54
The majors now had the names and addresses of everyone at the top of the distribution chain, from the Colombian importers to the Nicaraguan middlemen to the black wholesalers who controlled South Central Market and everything that went with…
▶ 43:25
This was going to be my last hurrah, Gordon said. He was scheduled to rotate out of the majors in a few months. Like anyone, I have an ego and I wanted to go out to the bank. So it's probably good to stop right there because we're at Chapte…
▶ 49:04
At another house, a brown suitcase contained 17 kilos. Ramos, who had been carrying an ID from the Colombian military, and three other Colombians were arrested. The $2 million worth of dope and a quarter million dollars in cash, not bad for…
▶ 55:24
These were the guys who, according to Grisetta, the Torres brothers were really afraid of. If they were able to frighten a pair of heavily armed, very large Nicaraguans, they must be something. On the afternoon of September 17th, 1986, Gord…
▶ 56:41
just to claim ownership in case they get busted. But you can see the problem with that. If the DEA is entering the people that they want to protect in there, this is how they do it. Because anybody investigating them has to contact the DEA.…
▶ 58:14
They have to be notified so they will get an early in or a hint that someone's on to them. Okay. Gordon, once he sees the names Roger Sandino and Norwin Menendez, decides to check them out. Sandino's criminal history included an 81 convicti…
▶ 58:51
Gordon typed in was Norwin Menendez. When his file came up, it seemed as if it would never end. It went on and on, screen after screen. This guy, Gordon observed, was in a league all of his own. Another Nicaraguan who had been in the databa…
▶ 59:55
He had a lot of associates. The report also revealed that someone else had been in Menendez's folder recently. The date of the last update was only 19 days earlier. When Gordon started checking the status of the DEA investigations in Menend…
▶ 1:00:25
cry. Gordon called up Ronald Lister's file next. It was short and sweet. He was an ex-policeman who was under an active DEA investigation. The case was so active, he noticed, that Lister's file was less than a month old. But all of the deta…
▶ 1:01:31
Then Gordon noticed that Menendez had been under investigation in Costa Rica as well. So again, this system is being used to protect the drug traffickers. When Jerry Gazzetta brought the case in the door, he'd been insisting that he'd uncov…
▶ 1:02:02
Agent Gonzalez to find out what was going on. The reaction he got was memorable. Gonzalez goes through the ceiling, Gordon said. He starts screaming on the phone line that the phone lines are going through Nicaragua and he shouldn't be call…
▶ 1:02:32
Now the detective was really baffled. So what if the phone lines went through Nicaragua? They probably went through a lot of places. What was the big deal? Gordon didn't hear from Gonzalez for five days. And when the DEA agent finally calle…
▶ 1:03:03
Local DEA agent will let you read the info. Sandy cannot talk on the phone because all the lines run through Nicaragua. Sandy asked that you don't mention anything in your search warrant affidavit. There's those Nicaraguan phone lines again…
▶ 1:03:32
that his investigation had been exposed and that bad guys knew he was investigating them. Gonzalez was telling Gordon not to put any details of his investigation into a sworn statement he had to file with his application for a search warran…
▶ 1:04:02
have been burned. It hadn't even started. The case was still sitting on the top of his desk. Nobody had done anything except run a couple of computer checks and no one besides Gary Gussetta and now the DEA even knew about the majors working…
▶ 1:04:33
of the L.A. County Sheriff's Office. And how could they burn it? When Gordon called the DEA office in L.A., as Gonzalez suggested, his uneasiness grew. No, he was told, the Costa Rican DEA office was not investigating Lister and Blanton, bu…
▶ 1:05:04
Thomas Shretner was only too happy to help him. Shretner had his hands full with other investigations, he told Gordon, and his supervisors wouldn't let him spend any time on the Blanton case. All he could do for him was pass along a little …
▶ 1:05:34
mainly for publicity purposes. It almost never handed off anything to a smaller department. Yet, here was this case involving a major international cocaine trafficking network, crack in the ghettos, multiple shipments, hundreds of millions …
▶ 3:32
to the Blanton organization, and then from Blanton to Menendez in San Francisco. This is according to the informant. For Gordon, that information, Gordon is the major's guy that's the police that's investigating the drug ring in Los Angeles…
▶ 7:26
Then Shredder dropped a new bombshell on Tom Gordon. The DEA wasn't the only federal agency that had their eye on Blanton. Just a few days earlier, Shredder related he'd met with an FBI agent named Douglas Auklan, A-U-K-L-A-N, whose office …
▶ 16:35
a blatant obstruction of justice. I'm going with option C. After LA Deputy Tom Gordon solved the lay of the land, he decided the majors weren't going to wait for the feds to get off their duffs. His crew could handle the bad boys themselves…
▶ 17:06
to take the operation down, which they had no intentions of doing. But Gordon was adamant. The majors were going ahead if the FBI didn't like it too bad. The drug ring was bringing in too much dope to sit around and wait for a lone FBI. Nob…
▶ 17:32
He now had three independent sources telling the same story. The majors had enough evidence to obtain a search warrant and bust the operation. Gordon told the FBI agent, and that was what they were going to do. Once it became clear that Gor…
▶ 18:01
He was the weak link. Gordon also had enough bureaucratic experience to know he was heading into some very dangerous political territory. Anyone who read the papers knew who the Contras were and how strongly the U.S. government felt about t…
▶ 18:32
or its proxy army for drug trafficking, he realized he'd better get someone to sign off on it. So he approached his lieutenant, Mike Fossey, the acting captain of the Bureau, and laid out the whole scenario. The allegations were that the Co…
▶ 19:00
screened them, and protected their operation. Gordon's immediate supervisor, Sergeant Ed Hoffman, decided to brief the commander of the Sheriff's Narcotics Bureau, Captain Robert Wilber, just to make sure that the top brass had no qualms ab…
▶ 33:43
Costa Rican prosecutors report had a strange experience with one of Neve's men, Sandy Gonzalez, the DEA agent who had yelled at the L.A. detective Tom Gordon about not talking on the phone through Nicaragua. Quote, information from the exis…
▶ 2:04
And it starts off in October of 1986 with the Sergeant Tom Gordon, who was the major, the squad or the team that was working the crack cocaine out in L.A. He was one of the lead guys.…
▶ 2:29
It says that he did exactly what the Costa Rican DEA agent Sandy Gonzalez said not to do. He drove down to the L.A. County Municipal Court before a judge and applied for a warrant to search all of the Nicaraguan drug operation that was goin…
▶ 2:55
distributing organization made up of over 100 people transporting and distributing cocaine for Daniello Blanton. And if you recall, the 100 people that were listed on here came from informants, primarily from the Torres brothers. Gordon lin…
▶ 4:55
Gordon listed more than a dozen locations across Southern California where Blanton and his cohorts were storing drugs and cash. He traced the money trail from Los Angeles across the country, writing that the, quote, monies gained from the s…
▶ 5:22
named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank, the monies are filtered to the Contra Rebels to buy arms for the war in Nicaragua. Gordon's sworn statement would prove to be a remarkably accurate portrait of the drug ring. A decade…
▶ 11:22
Awaiting signature, a respected Los Angeles narcotics detective was formally accusing the Contras in court of raising money by selling cocaine to black Americans. It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened to the Contra project…
▶ 11:52
Gordon's charges would not be easy for the law and order Reagan administration to dismiss as the fantasies of a Sandinista sympathizer or a convicted drug dealer. This time, the accusations were coming from the police under oath. Gordon's a…
▶ 12:22
The next day, October 24th, Gordon conducted a lengthy pre-raid briefing in the Sheriff's Training Center, handing out the raid plan, briefing booklets, and raid assignments to include radio frequencies and establishing command centers. As …
▶ 12:52
There was going to be basically a 30-day prep culminating in executing the search warrants that were going to be served at 14 locations in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Bernardino counties. The briefing books outlined the entire plan.…
▶ 13:19
The DEA, the IRF, the ATF, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's and Bell Police. Gordon split the officers into seven groups, each responsible for searching two different locations. Gordon's briefing left no doubt about who and what the poli…
▶ 13:49
is believed to be moving hundreds of kilos of cocaine a month in the Southern California area and money laundering through various business fronts, then sending the money to Florida, where it goes to purchase weapons to aid the Contras. Gor…
▶ 14:16
He was considered to be extremely dangerous. Several of the officers distinctly recall being warned that the federal government was unhappy that the Majors was going ahead with the raids. Deputy Wolfbrand said Gordon reported that he had be…
▶ 35:54
Sergeant Question Raid Leader Tom Gordon, Gordon told him they had gotten involved in something way over their head. Deputy Dan Garner saw a handwritten list of weapons, specifically AR-15s, and papers that involved transporting weapons fro…
▶ 45:06
Bothy and Garner took copies home with them to safeguard them from theft. Now imagine that. You're cops and you can't trust the evidence custodian in the cop station to protect the evidence. These guys are making copies, taking them home be…
▶ 45:39
called the sheriff's station to ask where his client was and how he could bail him out. He said Tom Gordon answered the phone and tore him a new asshole. He was a vile, vicious son of a bitch, Brennan said. He said Gordon screamed, I'm not …
▶ 50:08
well known as the Nicaraguan Mafia, dealing in drugs, weapons, smuggling, and laundering of counterfeit money. That's what the CIA cabled back. What happened next is still in dispute. After the raids, Sergeant Gordon and Deputy Juarez said …
▶ 50:38
all of the records seized in the raid. Gordon didn't believe it and went to the evidence room to check it. Everything was gone. According to Garner, Gordon walked back into the squad room and announced the evidence is gone. Juarez said he r…
▶ 54:26
Sergeant Gordon, in fact, was no longer even around. He had been promoted. According to Sergeant Hoffman's note, one of the first things the federal agents did was to put Gordon's bombshell search warrant affidavit under seal, which kept it…
▶ 58:11
The last big spender indictment to come down was against Sergeant Thomas Gordon, the chief investigator of the Blanton case, who was accused of spending stolen money to fix up his house. He was charged with money laundering, tax evasion, an…
▶ 47:07
it would come to light. But no, I haven't checked with the CIA. I don't have a reason to. Huff ignored O'Neill's stunning admission and told Finster that he should trust her to do the right thing. The judge. Why, just that morning, she remi…
▶ 1:05:45
Costa Rican shrimp company North and the Cuban CIA operatives were using to funnel aid to the Contras. The second part was a story about the parallel investigation of Contra drug trafficking done in the summer of 1986 by DEA agent Castillo …