TRUE CRIME

What are the best true crime reads for the long weekend? Pick one of these

Steve Wagner — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 02:55:00 GMT

If you're looking for a long read to immerse yourself in over the long July Fourth weekend, look no further.

The staff at The Vault, which aims to dive into the archives to tell the best stories of true crime in the Midwest, have been working on several reporting projects.

In case you're new to The Vault's work, looking to catch up or simply want a summer diversion, here is some of our recent work.

The Minnesota Vice series was a year-long reporting and fact-finding mission for Jeremy Fugleberg, editor of The Vault, which gives readers an unparalleled look into the brash and bizarre lifestyle of Casey Ramirez.

Reporter C.S. Hagen revisited the "Babysitter Killers" case by diving into newspaper archives, visiting the U.S. courthouse in Fargo to sift through court documents and interviewing the victim's family and the man convicted in her death.

Meanwhile, reporter Trisha Taurinskas has left no stone unturned in a series of cold cases, including one that recently concluded with the conviction of a killer 50 years after the crime.

Taurinskas takes her storytelling beyond the page, however. If listening is more your style, she also hosts The Vault podcast.

While the podcast covers some of the stories published online, some of Taurinskas's best work is exclusive to audio. Find The Vault podcast on any major podcast provider, or click below to begin listening.

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New Hulu docuseries to re-examine Jodi Huisentruit case

Jeremy Fugleberg — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:59:12 GMT

A new docuseries to stream on Hulu starting July 15 will re-examine the 1995 missing persons case of TV anchor Jodi Huisentruit. Friday marked 30 years since she vanished, and the case remains unsolved.

The impending three-part docuseries is called "Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit." The series will "follow a major break that reenergized the case," said ABC News in a June 27 press release, and will feature new information and never-before-seen material.

"Her Last Broadcast" was produced by Committee Films and ABC News Studios for Hulu.

Huisentruit, a Long Prairie, Minnesota, native was well known from her broadcast work in Minnesota but was working at KIMT-TV in Mason City, Iowa, when she didn't show up to work on June 27, 1995.

Evidence surrounding her car in the parking lot of her apartment building indicated signs of a struggle and a likely abduction.

Family, friends, colleagues and community members marked her disappearance on Friday, commemorated in news coverage.

“We’ll close this at some point, and justice will be served at that point,” Mason City Police Chief Jeff Brinkley told WOI TV in Des Moines. “That's our goal as the police department.”

Huisentruit was declared legally dead in 2001.

The upcoming Hulu docuseries will feature over 20 new interviews with family, friends and colleagues, "rare" access to KIMT-TV where Huisentruit's desk remains untouched, and "exclusive, real-time access to the investigation and breaks in the case," ABC News said.

The "major break" referenced by ABC News in its press release reportedly took place after the airing of the ABC 20/20 special about Huisentruit in 2022 entitled "Gone at Dawn."

"The Investigation into her disapperance heated up after a 20/20 episode when a new tip led local police to share a long-hidden clue," said a sneak-peek of the new Hulu docuseries that aired on ABC's "GMA" show on June 27.

"'Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit' breathes news life into one of the country's most haunting unsolved mysteries," ABC News said.

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How a Halloween grave robbery led investigators to a dancer, two college students and a missing head

C.S. Hagen — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:55:00 GMT

WHITE ROCK, SD — As a senior in high school in 1969, Steve Johnson was a little bit of everything. He was a student and played wide receiver on the nearby Rosholt High �� football team. He helped embalm corpses at the local funeral home and drove ambulances. He worked the family furniture store business and he listened when a hysterical woman came in the day after Halloween.

“I was in the furniture store and we were unloading La-Z-Boys and this woman came in and she was really wound up. She said somebody dug up a grave at the cemetery. My dad said she was nuts, and I told him we better go out there anyway,” Johnson told Forum News Service in a recent interview.

The sight at Lake View Cemetery was true, and gruesome.

“We went out there and sure enough the grave was dug up, it was Halloween night they did this, and we called the sheriff and coroner. We buried this man. His name was Warner Wilson. He was a farmer and an old bachelor,” Johnson said.

“Usually, we buried people in cement vaults, but that was a wooden vault we used to bury him,” said Johnson. As he stood over the grave, he realized the culprits had to be close to home.

“Somebody had to have been at that funeral to know. They smashed that crate and took the head off,” Johnson said.

Johnson knew Wilson, a humble, elderly farmer and lifelong bachelor.

“We had buried him a couple years earlier, and this bothered me. The sheriff came out and the coroner, we took the body back to the funeral home in a body bag to try and find the head,” Johnson said.

White Rock

Wilson was born to Swedish immigrants, Swan and Hannah Wilson, who bought third class tickets on the S.S. St. Louis to Ellis Island, New York, in 1901, according to the U.S. Immigration records. Their ship was the same ocean liner that 38 years later brought more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror to American shores, but was turned away. Many of those on board were later sent to concentration camps, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

A farmer, like his father before him, Wilson was 57 when signed up for the draft during World War II. By the 1950s, his younger brother, Ben, lived with him on the family farm passed down from his parents, and subsequent immigration records noted that they reported their birthplaces as Minnesota.

The township of White Rock, once a bustling frontier village along the Bois de Sioux River, which defines part of the border between Minnesota and both South Dakota and North Dakota. The town was named after a pale granite boulder lying near the Fargo line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway.

Founded by Swedish settlers in 1884, it once had about 600 people who built churches, saloons, banks, stores and schools. When the railway moved, the businesses left.

By 1969, the year Wilson’s grave was unearthed, White Rock was nearly a ghost town. One watering hole, named Helen's Bar, was still open, and on the weekends it was a magnet for teenagers who hit the 18-year-old milestone from Minnesota and North Dakota, where the drinking age was 21.

“On certain nights of the week, two or three towns would meet in White Rock, and there were no police around. There could be 1,000 kids on the weekend there, they would come across the border to drink,” Johnson said.

The investigation

The Roberts County Sheriff’s Office told Forum News Service that they no longer had the case file on the grave robbing incident. The investigating officers, who have since died, spent two weeks investigating the incident, according to news reports in 1970.

Johnson remembered that one of the suspects was struck by a guilty conscience and confessed. Two students from the North Dakota �� of Science at Wahpeton, North Dakota, were given LSD or mind-altering drugs by a female nightclub entertainer who worked in Fargo, North Dakota, Johnson said.

“One of the boys, it was probably his conscience that got to him, came down off the acid, and he must have told somebody where the head was. It was out on a farm in an old shed,” Johnson said.

News reports at the time made no mention of why the head was taken, but Johnson said the crime was committed for a satanic ritual.

“She was a witch, she was into devil worship. She wanted that head for rituals. Those poor kids ... were stupid," Johnson said. "I’m sure she was cute. She found a couple kids, and I think their testosterone was going pretty well."

The two-week investigation started in a Wahpeton nightclub “first as a heckling of the girl’s act and then as a dare that magnified into a bizarre action,” The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reported. Police arrested Eddeana Belle Wood, 22, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the Fargo night club entertainer better known as “Dusty” Wood; along with two college students.

All three were charged with “wanton and malicious removal of part or all of a dead body,” according to the Grand Forks Herald.

The trio were sentenced in South Dakota to serve two years probation and ordered to repay $1,090 in costs for their grave robbery.

“The three admitted entering a rural White Rock, SD, cemetery in the early morning hours last Oct. 30 and opening the grave of a man buried there. The head of the corpse was recovered several days later at a vacant farm near Breckenridge, Minn.,” The Forum reported on June 12, 1970.

The head of the corpse was about 80 years old, according to The Forum. A mound of fresh dirt attracted the attention of a passing farmer. “No attempt had been made to cover the coffin,” The Forum reported.

After their arrests, they all had to pay $2.50 per day for room and board while at the Roberts County Jail in South Dakota.

“It was sad. That poor man was very humble," Johnson said. "I knew him. And to have that happen is just sad."

Johnson continued: “Everybody knew what happened, and I don’t think they knew what to do with these guys. It sounds far-fetched, but that’s what drugs will do to people.”

Three years later

Wood was caught in a “large round up” of known drug offenders in Fargo in October 1972, according to The Forum.

Wood, whose last name had become Iverson, was caught selling amphetamine tablets, and was sentenced to one year in jail.

She spent part of her sentence aboard a state-owned airplane after Judge Ralph Maxwell sentenced her to the all-male North Dakota State Farm in Bismarck, North Dakota, a place where those found guilty of misdemeanors would sometimes go and work. The farm was renamed the Missouri River Correctional Center in 1991, according to the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Before she could get settled in on the 45-man dormitory — which had no separate services for women — Robert Landon, the warden at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, sent her and another woman by car to a women’s prison in Yankton, South Dakota.

Not long after, Landon had to answer for his decision to Maxwell in court, and said if he had the chance to change his decision, he still would have sent them away, according to multiple newspaper reports in March 1973.

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He dismembered his wife in 1980. Now, he's a free man living in northeast Minnesota

Trisha Taurinskas — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:55:00 GMT

DULUTH, Minnesota — The man who was convicted in 1981 of dismembering his wife and dumping her remains in a Maple Grove lake is a free man, under supervised release in Duluth.

David Francis Hoffman first reported his 26-year-old wife missing on Aug. 10, 1980, claiming her purse was found on a nearby rural road. Just nine days later, he admitted to authorities that Carol Hoffman was dead, and that he killed her in their Corcoran home — about 20 miles northwest of Minneapolis — while their two children slept.

He directed authorities to Weaver Lake in Maple Grove, where he said they would find her dismembered remains inside at least two separate bags.

David Hoffman joined law enforcement for the search, according to appellate court documents.

He wasn’t lying. Carol Hoffman’s remains were found submerged in nearly 30 feet of water.

David Hoffman was charged with first-degree murder, yet pleaded not guilty under the defense of insanity. The argument didn’t work. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

His mother, who was allegedly home at the time of the murder, was charged and convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, based on her son's confession.

Her conviction was later overturned by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Despite David Hoffman’s life sentence, he was released on parole in 2017. Now 79, he resides in Duluth, according to a Forum News Service background check.

He remains under supervision with Arrowhead Regional Corrections.

A nightmare unfolds

David Hoffman strangled his wife to death before he attempted to feed her remains into their garbage disposal, according to The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office.

When that didn’t work, he reverted to another plan: Cutting her up and placing her remains in a duffel bag and a gunny sack.

David Hoffman’s initial confession was born out of what he referred to as a religious conversion, according to appellate court documents.

Before giving his detailed confession, he said he believed the end of the world was near — and asked officials with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office if they “believed in the Lord.”

“He broke down four or five times during his oral statement when he referred to his children and his mother,” court documents state.

At trial, officers who were present for David Hoffman’s confession refuted the argument that he was in a state of impaired mental illness at the time of the confession.

Officers cited a letter David Hoffman wrote and signed during the confession.

David Hoffman’s defense team, on the other hand, claimed the confession contained false information because he was suffering a psychotic break at the time the confession was given.

Three psychiatrists took the stand, too — only one claimed he did not realize the torture inflicted upon his wife was wrong, according to a 1981 Minnesota Star article.

David Hoffman was swiftly convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

A release from confinement

After multiple failed attempts, David Hoffman was promised freedom.

It was David Hoffman’s fifth attempt — and the fifth time Carol Hoffman’s family waited, terrified, for the parole board’s decision.

“I'd be afraid I'd be the first one he's going to come after, because we kept him in there,” Carol Hoffman’s mother, Phyllis Stebbins told Fox News 9 in 2016.

This time, their fears about his release came to life.

The news was handed to Carol Hoffman’s family in 2016.

The parole board approved David Hoffman's release, under the condition that he serve time at the Moose Lake Correctional Facility for educational classes designed for re-assimilation.

By Oct. 12, 2017, David Hoffman was released on supervised parole.

“We Speak for Carol,” a Facebook group dedicated to Carol Hoffman, has an array of posts voicing opposition to the release, including one post which states, “With the release of David this week the family is struggling to come to terms with what the parole board had decided last year.”

Records indicate David Hoffman continues to call Duluth home.

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Remembering the helicopter ride from Princeton benefactor Casey Ramirez

Rob Beer — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:25:00 GMT

PRINCETON, Minn. — Forty years later, I still get questions. I just don’t have all the answers. I was just 11 years old.

A few years ago at the NCAA Fargo Regional hockey tournament, I chatted up Star Tribune columnist Patrick Reusse, introducing myself as a disciple of retired Princeton Union-Eagle editor Luther Dorr, as we set up shop near each other in the media room.

Understanding my Princeton connection with Dorr — a good friend of Reusse's — the sports columnist quickly pivoted to mention Casey Ramirez.

The mystery man, Casey Ramirez.

Ramirez arrived in my hometown in the early 1980s. He showered the town with cash. Why? One could only suspect. Where did his money come from? No one really knew at the time, though not many thought Casey’s generosity was simply in good faith, either.

Dorr, the longtime newspaperman in Princeton, died in September 2023. I worked with Dorr as his Union-Eagle intern in 1991 and had several discussions with him about Ramirez, the man people knew so little about yet had a past that was virtually nonexistent.

While the city of Princeton and its mayor tied their futures to the mystery man, Dorr never bought into the hype. He struggled, like much of the state and even national press, to pin down exactly

why

Ramirez was planting palm trees at city hall, helping fund a hockey arena, leasing those light-blue Volkswagen Rabbits to the city for $1 to use as squad cars and taking an entire senior living complex out to dinner, perhaps more than once.

As kids, we had a running joke that those VW Rabbits topped out at 50 mph, so any pursuit was pointless.

Meanwhile, during this cash shower, Ramirez helped upgrade the city’s small airport to handle larger aircraft.

Something smelled fishy, but when you’re in elementary school and the internet is still some 15 years away, you leave it to the adults to figure out what’s going on. And the feds for that matter.

Ramirez had cash. A small town coming off the high inflation of the 1970s didn’t seem to turn its back to the green stuff. Ramirez was charming when you bumped into him. Rumors floated that he was flipping $100 bills to pay for purchases at the nine-hole golf course with $10 green fees or, as we believed, throwing out the occasional Benjamin with the candy during a city parade.

I didn’t see any $100s in my loot. Neither did my friends.

You really didn’t know the truth. Of course, there was growing concern he was involved in illegal activities, but either none of the cityfolk cared or Ramirez would simply deflect those questions. When WCCO-TV brought its I-Team to town to investigate, the evening news was a must watch.

Ramirez’s generosity spanned all ages. During a school field trip in the early ’80s to the then-downtown Dairy Queen, a few of us elementary-aged kids spotted Ramirez walking out of a bank next door. We wanted the guy’s autograph.

We approached Ramirez, who turned down our requests. Instead, he invited us kids to the airport that coming Saturday. Casey was going to give us a helicopter ride, something that he did at times for residents.

I had never flown before, so this was a big deal. That next morning, my grandparents came to visit from their farm just outside of town. We asked them to join my mom and I to watch their grandson get a ride from the money man.

As other classmates arrived to take Ramirez up on his offer, Casey, in his ever-charming self, invited my mom and my grandparents too into this deluxe chopper. With four Beers in the air, we pointed out the city’s landmarks from high above. ��, my great-grandparents’ laundromat, golf course, our home. Nonetheless, thrilling.

Dorr, I know, was frustrated early on, trying to find exactly who this man was. While Ramirez appeared in the Union-Eagle many times for his civic outpouring, the newspaper continued to find out the real story.

Then Ramirez got caught.

He did time.

About 15 years ago I pondered writing a book, but living 200 miles from sources would have made it difficult. In the summer of 2018, I heard Ramirez had at some point returned to the work force in east-central Minnesota. The juices flowed again.

Two summers ago, I stopped in at the Mille Lacs County Historical Society, a place that hasn’t changed much since I was last there in 1991. Surprised, yet totally unsurprised, there was no Casey Ramirez display or anything depicting that era in plain sight. It’s not the city’s bragging point, that’s for sure.

“What do you have on Casey here?” I asked a few of the workers, poking my head into the office. Of course, you say Casey in Princeton, everyone knows who you’re talking about.

“Get the Casey file,” one woman said to another, who then reached into a back cabinet to pull out a heaping, oversized folder.

Inside, headlines screamed “Mystery Man,” “City benefactor” and everything in between.

I kept thinking, if I was a reporter back in those days, what could I have found out about Ramirez? What did those top-notch reporters from various local and national publications find out then? I sat and read for an hour, fascinated, yet stonewalled. Ramirez’s stories and the news articles about his wealth always had a different twist.

Returning this gem of a folder, the workers and I began talking. One woman, from Cambridge, recalled those residents being incredulous to what was happening in the town 20 miles to the west.

Suckers!

It’s all old news and dare you utter the syllable “Cas--” today, most Princetonians will shut you down. People want to forget.

The museum workers did mention, however, there was still a palm tree in town.

“Where?” I asked, enthusiastically.

Sure enough, if you travel north on Highway 169 to the edge of town, there was a palm tree in a large planter outside a business. This May, it was moved to another location.

Ramirez was convicted in 1984 of conspiring to smuggle cocaine and income tax evasion. Despite various attempts by colleague Jeremy Fugleberg to contact Ramirez for this series, he did not oblige. He just may have moved on. The city certainly has.

You can still dig up the WCCO I-Team report on the internet, among other articles. A circa 1992 episode of “Top Cops” completely butchered the story in a reenactment. Pro-tip: Princeton does not have mountains.

But it does have its memories.

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My search for the real Casey Ramirez, and answers about Princeton

Jeremy Fugleberg — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:25:00 GMT

This is the conclusion to the

Minnesota Vice

series.

PRINCETON, Minn.—I went to look for Casey Ramirez one last time.

It was Sunday, June 8, and I'm at the Lions Club fly-in pancake brunch at the Princeton, Minnesota, airport.

Some folks had told me Ramirez liked to show up to this event, one he started back in 1981.

I found pancakes and planes, but no Casey. That's about what I had come to expect.

When I first started reporting this story, I thought it would be easy to find Princeton's most notorious one-time citizen.

These days, it usually is. Most of us leave a lot of footprints in public records, digital breadcrumbs on websites and social media. An address here, a phone number there.

Ramirez was different. I found almost nothing.

Once, his arrogance had been his greatest weakness. But he has apparently worked hard to stay off the radar since 1997, when he got out of federal prison after serving about 13 years for smuggling cocaine.

I tried to contact him any way I could. I called any phone number I found for him. I visited his alleged home address, not far from Princeton, in the northern Twin Cities suburb of Blaine.

There, I talked to a woman, a Princeton native herself, who I had been told was his girlfriend. She promised to deliver a hand-written letter I brought for him. He never responded.

Crickets.

Ramirez is under no obligation to talk to me, of course. He’s done his time. But I had questions for him, ones that have never been answered.

Why Princeton? Why base your cocaine smuggling operation there? Why flaunt it?

I had one question I wanted to ask more than all the others. I think it's one he would most hate to answer, because he seems like a man who loves to be liked, but hates being known.

Who are you really, Casey?

Keeping the saga alive

Princeton has never been able to fully shake Ramirez and his shenanigans from the town’s reputation.

Nearly every Princetonian I talked to about Ramirez had a story about people asking them about him. None of them liked it very much.

At the Princeton Area Chamber of Commerce & Tourism, incoming members of the Chamber’s Leadership Series training are always shown the WCCO I-Team investigation of Ramirez.

It's presented less as a cautionary tale and more as part of the town’s history (attendees also watch a news story about a local radio station, and one about breaking the Mentos/Diet Coke World Record in 2011).

“We then discuss how these events are all part of our history of Princeton,” said Kim Young, executive director of the Chamber, in an email. “We spend the entire day talking about the history of Princeton — that is just a small part of it.”

There does remain something of a living memorial to the Casey Ramirez era in Princeton — a single, small palm tree that has somehow survived its bizarre debut in Princeton in April 1981.

It's now parked in front of the business of Ramirez's long-time ally, former Mayor Richard Anderson (Read more on that in this column from my colleague, Princeton native Rob Beer).

Getting to the truth

I have dug deep into Ramirez’s history. I’ve found his New York City birth record (He's listed as Ramirez, Male, July 2, 1947. Certificate No. 12967).

I found a 1950 census taker’s notes logging young “Diego” Ramirez’s presence in a Bronx walk-up apartment, at age 3, adjacent to the rumble and squeal of the Third Avenue elevated train.

I’ve tracked the deployment logs of the U.S.S. Josephus Daniels, the ship he crewed as a Navy sailor, that seems to match his claims of when and where he met Kathleen Bredemus, his claimed reason he first visited Princeton, Minnesota.

I’ve researched his endless stream of pseudonyms (I’ve counted 18 so far). There was a 2016 obituary for a Blaine, Minnesota, woman that expressed gratitude for the friendship of "Joe Ramirez."

I was floored to stumble across a 2012 feel-good Twin Cities TV news story featuring him. He was a Verizon salesman at the time, helping a man get his elderly mother on Facebook.

Like he had so often before, he used a pseudonym, calling himself “Joseph Ramireza.”

After all my research of him, it was a shock to watch the video and see an older version of the man who I felt like, in some ways, I had gotten to know. Except, I knew, I really hadn’t. Not really.

Kevin Odegard, a Princeton native who touched fame after playing on Bob Dylan’s legendary “Blood on the Tracks” album, told me in an interview about an experience he had with Ramirez that stuck with him.

Odegard had attended the Princeton fly-in and Lion's Club pancake breakfast and ran into Ramirez, who recognized him.

As they stood at the syrup table, Ramirez mentioned Odegard’s beloved deceased brother Steve, who once ran the family’s local car dealership. He twisted the knife.

“‘You know, Kevin, you're not fooling anybody,’” Odegard recalled Ramirez saying. “I said, ‘What do you mean, Casey?’ Casey said, ‘Your brother knew everything. Your brother knew it all. He knew everything that was going on. He was not deaf, dumb and blind. He knew everything.’”

“He wanted me to know that he had completely conquered the town, including my family, my brother,” Odegard told me. “His conquest was entire and complete.”

There, laid bare, was the younger Casey Ramirez of my research and my interviews— all jokes and smiles, and helping the old folks, but underneath, always ready to puncture your self-righteousness and remind you of your part in his scheme.

Complicit.

There were many in Princeton who were not taken in by Ramirez. Many had questions and doubts. But most Princetonians reasonably trusted their leaders to do the town’s business the right way, with the right people.

That trust was misplaced.

Ramirez ensnared key leaders of the city. Some of them, most notably Mayor Richard Anderson, were allies to the end. Others seemed almost indifferent, right up to his guilty sentence, uninterested as long as he kept paying for things for the town.

Long after Ramirez was tagged by WCCO’s I-Team as likely being involved with drugs, even after it was clear federal investigators were digging deep into his activities, Princeton leaders still got into bed with him, right up until he got sent to prison.

I struggled to understand Princeton's leaders' near-universal shrug.

But Greg Withers, the former Princeton city manager, helped me understand.

A big bag of cash

Withers told me about a personal experience he had with Casey Ramirez, one that probably took place in mid-1984, before Ramirez was on trial.

This was well after it was clear Ramirez had an purposely obscured background, no clear, legal source of money, and was under federal investigation.

Ramirez still owed Princeton about $10,000, money for work on the town airport, and invited Withers to a meeting at the office of his local lawyer, Tom Meinz.

There, Ramirez and his pilot pal Kent Moeckly told an obvious cock-and-bull story about an odd paper bag Moeckly had supposedly found outside, near a large trash bin. Allegedly, Moeckly had toted the bag inside and put it a basket in the office.

It was just sitting there. Right in front of Withers.

Ramirez suggested to Withers: Why don’t you take a look inside?

“So I pull out this brown paper bag, and there's approximately $10,000 cash,” Withers said.

What a wild coincidence.

Withers could have walked out the door. Obviously this wasn’t the way business was normally done.

But Withers didn’t walk out the door. Instead he had a question for Ramirez.

“Who do you want me to make the receipt out to?”

It was a revealing story. To Withers, Ramirez wasn’t really his problem. Instead, getting the bill paid, and getting the right paperwork for it, were the real problems to solve, among many for a busy city administrator.

That’s how easily responsibility—accountability—can slip away. In that one moment, Withers, like many other leaders in Princeton, made himself a complacent collaborator in Ramirez’s deceptions, while also absolving himself of responsibility.

Just like that.

That's how easy it is to become complicit to corruption.

Withers’ recollection shocked me—the nakedness of it, a payoff involving a literal bag of cash.

What would I have done when confronted with $10,000 in cash? What would you have done?

I asked him: So knowing what you know now, what would you advise yourself to do differently?

Withers paused and thought about it. Then answered.

“People have asked me that before, and I've said, 'No, I don't recall anything that I would do differently, no.'"

Ramirez was everybody's problem. Which meant he was nobody's problem. Not really.

Maybe, Withers said, he could have suggested the city council first get some insight into the source of Ramirez's money before accepting his largess?

But, "I don't know how that kind of motion would have ended up," he said.

He's right. Until late in the game, the council was content to not ask too many questions.

It was easier to just not worry about it.

<<< Read Part 7 Read the entire series]]>

At trial, Casey Ramirez’s small-town generosity revealed as sordid shield for his cocaine smuggling

Jeremy Fugleberg — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 14:25:00 GMT

This is Part 7 of the

Minnesota Vice

series.

ST. PAUL — Casey Ramirez, awaiting trial in August 1984 for conspiring to smuggle cocaine, didn’t have to wait too long for sympathetic residents of Princeton, Minnesota, to bail him out.

Then he promptly squandered their generosity.

A magistrate judge had set his bond for release during the trial at $500,000, equivalent to about $1.5 million in 2025 dollars. But after five Princeton residents offered to put up their personal property as collateral for Ramirez's release, the judge reduced his bond to $200,000.

Shortly after his arrest, about 25 people from Princeton showed up at Ramirez’s bond hearing to demonstrate their support for him.

First up to sign the supporter list at the hearing was Lois Bredemus, matriarch of the Princeton family that had all but claimed Ramirez as their own. Under “Relationship” she wrote “Step Mom.”

At the hearing Ramirez’s bond was chopped down further to $20,000 cash. Princeton friends covered the cost.

His bond had been conditioned on him turning his pilot’s license into the feds, to reduce the chance he would be a quite-literal flight risk. But after reporting he couldn’t find his license he was called into a hearing in front of federal Judge Edward J. Devitt.

Called to the stand, Ramirez spoke casually, offering rambling answers to many of Devitt’s questions. He informed the judge he was really forgetful and absent-minded lately, adding, “My mind has been quite busy the last couple of days, [with] things I’ve been thinking about.”

Devitt was not amused by Ramirez’s lackadaisical attitude toward the court, especially with freedom on the line.

“Defendent was generally unresponsive and evasive in answering questions …His demeanor on the stand was poor. He appeared unconcerned and cavalier,” Devitt wrote in his order denying bail. He called Ramirez’s testimony about himself “not credible, and his promise to appear when required untrustworthy.”

Ramirez had been a free man for 11 days. On Aug. 14 his bail was revoked. His Princeton friends’ goodwill had been wasted.

The next month, an appeals court reversed Devitt’s ruling and partially allowed Ramirez to be released on bail, but only during daytime on weekdays, for the duration of his trial. He would sleep and spend his weekends in jail.

SEPT. 26, 1984, TRIAL DAY 3 — St. Paul federal courthouse

The Ramirez prosecution team was riding high after a couple of good days of testimony that sketched out details of a high-flying drug smuggling ring. Witnesses revealed Ramirez’s pattern of ferried flights between Minnesota and Florida, and numerous encounters he seemed to have with large bags of cash.

Florida dry cleaner Marvin Osheroff told of a particularly vivid memory. Ramirez, whom Osheroff knew as “Dr. Ramirez,” had visited his business in Hialeah, Florida, in early 1981, just about when Ramirez started throwing serious money around in Princeton.

In the dry cleaner’s back room Ramirez had dumped about $1 million in cash out of a duffel bag into two briefcases, claiming he had sold an airplane. He left the duffel bag behind. Osheroff had kept it. It later tested positive for a residue of cocaine.

“Marvin Osheroff was a home run,” said John Boulger, member of the joint task force that investigated Ramirez, in a recent interview.

The prosecution was busy painting a picture of Ramirez's hidden world, one kept obscured from Princetonians and and held largely separate from the small town and its vision of him as a generous philanthropist.

William Morris, a convicted drug smuggler himself, who described the drug smuggling world in South Florida, and discussed times he and a colleague had interacted with Ramirez in his cocaine smuggling efforts.

The on Sept. 26, 1984, the prosecution called for Jack Raymond Devoe to take the stand.

Devoe made quite an impression as he raised his right hand and swore an oath to tell the truth.

“He looked like a son every mother would want to have,” said Boulger, who was sitting at the prosecution table that day. “He was articulate, he was well-spoken, he was clean shaven, he had a blue blazer with khaki pants and a red tie.

“I mean, he was the all-American boy. He was the poster child. And he was smart as hell. He was successful in whatever he did.”

Until recently, Devoe had been wildly successful at trafficking cocaine. Devoe, a pilot, had run in South Florida smuggling circles for years. From 1981-1983 he even ran a small commercial airline—Devoe Airlines—as cover for his drug runs.

He finally got busted in early 1983 in an undercover sting, accused of running the largest known cocaine smuggling ring authorities had ever seen up to that point. They estimated he and his ring were responsible for flying nearly 16,000 pounds of cocaine — with a street value of about $2.2 billion (about $6.8 billion in 2025 dollars) — into the U.S. between 1982-1983.

Calling Devoe as a witness triggered significant legal wrangling in front of the trial judge. The defense team tried to bar him from taking the stand. To the defense, Devoe was basically a snitch with incentive to lie … a lot.

Part of his plea deal with authorities offered, in return for singing like a bird about anyone he was asked about, limited prison time and enrolling into the federal witness protection program.

That meant that for the next two years of Devoe’s life, the feds would fly him around the country to testify in numerous drug smuggling trials, and shield him from rumored cartel assassination plots.

Devitt allowed Devoe to testify, overruling the Ramirez defense team. The next trial day would be the Devoe show.

The Ramirez trial was one of the first at which Devoe would testify. His testimony would be crucial to pull back the curtain on the seamy world of South Florida drug smuggling, and show Ramirez’s place in that world — so much different than the quite main street of Princeton.

SEPT. 27, 1984, Trial day 4 — St. Paul federal courthouse

Devoe told the jury he first met Ramirez in the mid-’70s, when he was introduced by a smuggler named Tony Randazzo at the Opa-Locka, Florida, airport.

At the time, both Devoe and Randazzo were smuggling marijuana from South America to Florida.

Devoe essentially offered Ramirez a job: fly to a beach-side airstrip near Santa Marta, Colombia and pick up a load of marijuana, then fly back the next day.

He was to fly a specific route, from the Opa-Locka airport, to The Bahamas, south over Haiti to avoid communist Cuba, and then on to Colombia. Stay overnight. Then return the same way.

Ramirez took off in a Cessna 207, a small, high-wing seven-passenger plane, and headed out. The next morning, at about 2-3 a.m., Devoe got a phone call. It was Ramirez, who wasn’t due back until much later that day

“Jack, I’m back,” he said Ramirez told him.

Ramirez had decided not to stay in Colombia overnight, and he had flown back over Cuba, the most direct route but also dangerous, putting Ramirez and his cargo at risk of getting shot down by Castro's forces.

Devoe and Ramirez then wrestled the bales of marijuana— about 300-400 pounds in burlap wrapped in plastic—out of the Cessna and stuffed them into Casey’s car, a Volkswagen.

They then drove to Ramirez’s mother’s modest house in nearby Hialeah, Florida, and stored the pot for future sale.

That was the start of a mutually beneficial relationship. Devoe recounted smuggling cocaine out of Bolivia and having to leave his plane with the drugs at an airstrip in Venezuela. He then arranged with Ramirez for the two of them to fly together to recover the drugs.

That wasn’t the only help Ramirez was able to provide.

“Casey mentioned that he knew of a credit union in Minnesota, a place where you could deposit money,” Devoe said.

It was Jerry Davis’ Princeton Co-op Credit Union. Devoe, through Casey, stashed about $100,000 there. It was both money stash diversification and a sign of trust.

Devoe knew others in Ramirez’s crew too. He pointed them out in court. Kent Moeckly had brought him money at some point. “Uncle Bill” Coulombe had delivered a plane from Ramirez at one point—Devoe recalled seeing his cowboy boots and thinking he must be a Texan.

(There was no mention of Pamela Jackson, Ramirez’s former girlfriend, on trial for the same two main charges as the others.)

That wasn’t all. In 1981, at the Opa-Locka airport, Ramirez flew from Princeton and met up with Devoe. He had a proposition for him.

“(He) mentioned Medellin, Colombia, where he was familiar with some people in the cocaine business,” Devoe said. “He asked if I was interested ... in smuggling cocaine with him.”

But Devoe was already running cocaine from Colombia. For smuggling a 300-pound load of cocaine at the time, then worth between $4 million to $6.8 million. Devoe’s cut would be 10 percent, between $400,000 and $680,000 (About $1.4 million to $2.4 million in 2025 dollars).

It was a fortune for two-days work.

Devoe described a now-familiar smuggling pattern worked out with a fellow narcotics trafficker named Profella "Prof" Mondol.

The pilots would work as high-risk, undercover couriers, essentially as contractors for the Medellin Cartel.

They would take off from Florida and fly their small planes to pick up Colombian cocaine—kilos taped up in plastic, stuffed in green duffel bags then padlocked shut—from either Colombia or another transshipment point. They'd then fly north, dogleg around Cuba and head back to Florida.

They would try to return looking tourists returning home. They would fly through The Bahamas on their way back to Miami on weekends to better blend in with flyers on pleasures trips plying the short hop between Florida and The Bahamas.

And, to keep an eye on Customs surveillance, they would send up fellow pilots in spotter planes to keep watch and call on the radio if they spotted anything.

Once on the ground, they’d pass the cocaine-filled duffel bags to Colombians from cartel and receive their cash payment for the flight.

OCT. 4, 1984, Trial day 9 — St. Paul federal courthouse

The prosecution wrapped its case and the investigators felt good about it. Schmidt had, as promised, revealed the events of the fateful day when Bill Coulombe tried to escape the feds and landed on a remote Bahamas road with Ramirez’s plane full of cocaine.

The Bahamanian law enforcement witnesses testified to the chain of custody of the captured cocaine, their own testing, and investigation.

Devoe “was a home run .. Gregory Byron Schmidt was a home run, the Bahamanians were a home run, you know?” Boulger said. “It was like an all-star game.”

Kent Moeckly had taken the stand in his own defense, agreeing to a portrayal of himself as an idealistic but naive kid from South Dakota, and insisting the day of Coulombe’s flight he had merely been doing touch-and-goes at a local airport.

It was now the turn of the defense team, led by famed attorney Ron Meshbesher. But first, Devitt had a ruling to make. He was letting Jackson go.

“It is my reasonable opinion there is no evidence against Jackson … she is discharged,” the judge said.

“Pamela Jackson wept softly in her chair,” wrote Mary Ellen Klas, reporter for the Princeton Union-Eagle, who was in court that day. “Shortly after Devitt’s ruling, Jackson left the courtroom and was quickly surrounded by her parents, son and daughter, and several Princeton friends.”

“‘Pam, we’re so happy,’ said one woman. ‘Our prayers have been answered,’ said another.”

The Ramirez investigators were disappointed, but not surprised by Devitt’s ruling.

“I think she knew and just didn’t ask the right questions or wanted to know, but she participated,” said DEA special agent Michele Leonhart, Ramirez investigator, in a recent interview. “It’s just a matter of evidence. And that’s why I would have much rather had her as a witness than I would as a defendant. You could have filled in a lot of blanks.”

The defense team wrapped up quickly, after largely using their time to poke holes in the investigative team’s work. Meshbesher had done much of his work in questioning and cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses.

Meshbesher, rising to make his closing statement, employed the famous slogan of Wendy’s hamburger advertisements regarding the cocaine at the center of the case.

“Where’s the beef?” He asked. “Where’s the beef in this case? I have been asking everybody: Where is the cocaine?”

He held up Ramirez’s flamboyant giving of gifts in Princeton — the hockey arena, police cars, free meals — as a reason the jury should doubt the accusations against him.

“To all of us this man is a mystery man," he said. "If he is a drug smuggler, he’s the strangest drug smuggler the world has ever seen, because he advertises it all over."

Meshbesher characterized Schmidt and Devoe, among other flipped witnesses, as “tattletales.” Devoe, who under cross-examination had admitted to cocaine use and ensuing hallucinations, came in for particular scrutiny.

“That’s the man the government wants you to believe. He’s burned out from cocaine. He’s got a plea agreement to save his soul,” Meshbesher said.

Prosecutor Thor Anderson used his closing statement to — among other things — address what he called Meshbesher’s “Robin Hood defense,” claiming Ramirez couldn’t have been a drug dealer because of what he did in Princeton.

Princeton had some culpability in Ramirez’s action, too, Anderson said.

“We heard it briefly alluded to. ‘Mr Ramirez is so nice to people in Princeton. ... here’s Robin Hood doing all these wonderful, pure, holy things,” Anderson said.

Ramirez, Anderson said, needed a base for his planes away from Florida, a place to deposit his money, and a place to “succour and nourish his cohorts and conspirators and live in a friendly atmosphere where people are constantly not hassling him.”

“Princeton turned out to be that place,” he said. “And they accepted on blind faith and they accepted with open arms all of the things you’ve heard that they received … making possible the things he was doing in Florida.”

The jury began deliberations. They would deliberate for nearly sixteen hours across two days.

OCT. 6, 1984, THE VERDICT — St. Paul federal courthouse

The wait for the jury’s decision had stretched on. Meshbesher wore a t-shirt Ramirez had given him emblazoned “Where’s the Beef?” in reference to his closing statement.

Defendants, U.S. marshals and defense attorneys mingled with the media. As did “Uncle Bill” Coulombe. Someone brought out a set of “Aviator” playing cards, drawing a playful wisecrack.

Luther Dorr, editor of the Princeton Union-Eagle, had driven down to be at court for the jury’s verdict, and recorded the scene. There were arguments about what TV program to watch.

Then came the word: “There’s a verdict.”

It was Saturday, Oct. 6, 1984. About 3:30 p.m.

“One minute Bill Coulombe was deciding whether or not he and his bridge partner could make ‘five hearts’ and the next he was walking toward a courtroom where he would hear a sentence pronounced that could mean 30 years in jail.” Dorr wrote

In the courtroom, the jury forewoman declared the verdict.

“Ramirez clasped his hands and swallowed as the verdict was read,” wrote the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Ramirez, Moeckly and Coulombe had been found guilty of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine and intent to distribute it. Moeckly was also convicted of two of his three perjury charges.

OCTOBER 1984 — THE FALLOUT, Princeton

The Princeton-Union Eagle, in an editorial entitled “We shed no tears for Casey,” was unsparing in its final assessment.

“His was not a crime of anger nor sudden impulse but a deliberate, carefully-planned, long-operating scheme to violate the laws of the country and profit substantially. Even his benefactions to the city and people of Princeton have been distorted.”

The editorial ticked down the list: The contractors at the ice arena didn’t get paid, the discount prices on aviation gas was just a front, Jerry Davis – former manager of the Princeton Co-op Credit Union — was in prison.

“That he had a winsome style and seemed happy doing favors for others is not denied, nor that he endeared himself to some people — but when we think of the sorrows that come to people who get caught up in the drug habit, we feel contempt for those who participate in that traffic in any way whatever.

“No, we will shed no tears for Casey.”

There were decidedly mixed reactions to the verdict elsewhere in Princeton. The Union-Eagle gathered opinions ranging from “‘He deserves it!’ to ‘I feel sorry for Casey,’” it reported.

“The bad cancels out the good,” said Barb Crapser, comparing Ramirez retirement home supper club trips to his smuggling in cocaine. “He was feeding the grandparents one thing and the grandchildren another.”

Town officials largely defended their actions with Ramirez. “I am not personally convinced that the city did anything that we should not have done,” said city administrator Greg Withers.

Roger Taylor, president of the Princeton Youth Hockey Association, addressed the knowledge, now, that drug money paid for the construction of the ice arena.

“I do care where the money comes from,” he said. “But now that the arena is already built, we should try to make the best of it. Maybe the money is spent better than if it went to buy drugs and prostitution.”

George Pederson, a former city council member, indicated he wasn't entirely on board with former mayor Richard Anderson and the broader council support of dealing with Ramirez.

"I always felt uncomfortable dealing with him," he said. "I always had second thoughts about doing what we did but I don't know if I would have done anything any differently."

Jeff Kleinbaum, another former city council member, questioned why the federal government had waited so long to prosecute Ramirez, and said he felt the council did the best it could with the information it had at the time.

“Since there was no real benefit to Casey doing this, that I could possibly see, I couldn’t see in any way how we were aiding his position,” he said. “So I didn’t see we were doing Casey a major plus, and I didn’t see we were doing us any harm.”

Linda Schleif, chairwoman of the town airport commission, told the Union-Eagle she felt used, like a pawn. She made the power nature of the Ramirez-Princeton relationship clear.

“There is no free lunch. They are going to want something from you,” she said she had learned. “We’ve seen that from Casey. He had came into city hall and said, ‘I did this, so will you do this?'"

Faith Zwemke, Princeton's new mayor, framed Princeton as the real victim: “In one sense I feel we were kind of victimized and, because of all the activity, we’ve been in a position to always have to defend Princeton … but Princeton is so many more things than just Casey.”

Anderson, the former mayor and steadfast Ramirez booster, was unstinting in his support for the man.

“He meant to be a good citizen in Princeton and he has probably done as much or more for Princeton than anyone in the past or will in the future,” he said. “I don’t think anything he did in Princeton was for personal gain. It was from the bottom of his heart, his own generosity. .. I still feel he’s my personal best friend.”

NOV. 13, 1984, SENTENCING — St. Paul federal courthouse

At the Nov. 13 sentencing hearing, Devitt took a firm line, especially for Ramirez. He got 20 years in prison and $50,000 in fines. Coulombe was sentenced to 10 years and $15,000 in fines, Moeckly got seven years and $10,000 in fines.

Before handing down sentences from the bench, Devitt turned a stern eye on Ramirez.

“You are not a mystery man any more, but a convicted drug smuggler. And that is bad,” Devitt said to him. “It is too bad that, as a facade for this criminal conduct, you chose to visit your tainted largess on the trusting people of Princeton, Minnesota. But charity which does not originate in the heart and comes from one’s own hard-earned pocketbook is not charity at all, but a subterfuge for personal profit.”

“Even your winsome ways cannot mitigate the seriousness of the crimes you have committed.”

After the verdict, a Mr. And Mrs. Jim Alekson of Princeton wrote Devitt a letter, one he kept in his permanent personal papers, praising him for his sentencing statement to Ramirez.

One of their mothers was one of the Oaks Apartments residents who Ramirez had treated to dinner at a local supper club, they said.

“From the beginning of Casey’s lavish outpourings upon the city and people of Princeton, we were suspicious of his probable involvement with drug trafficking,” they wrote. “We are sorry so many of the council members and others were so foolish to not inquire about the source of Casey’s income before accepting generous gifts. Some inquired, but did not pursue until they received an answer, obviously.”

“We are sorry that Casey Ramirez chose this kind of life, but feel justice had been done in this case in saving from ruin the lives of several others through drug abuse.”

WHO WAS CASEY REALLY?

As part of Ramirez’s sentencing process, federal investigators worked up what was known as a “presentencing report” about him that stripped away the ever-shifting identity he had worked so hard to maintain for years.

According to the probation officer who assembled the report, a jailed Ramirez had been approached and asked to fill basic facts about his background into a probation worksheet that would aid in writing the presentencing report.

But Ramirez politely refused to cooperate, claiming “I didn’t have a chance from the beginning.”

“Get the information from the government,” he said.”They have it all, they know all about me … I just cannot participate in this.”

The probation officer did just that, aided by a completed worksheet Ramirez eventually submitted via his attorney.

Information about Ramirez in federal files was assembled and combined with evidence and testimony gathered by the Ramirez investigative team over the previous several years.

What they found painted the clearest picture of Ramirez ever known, a wealth of personal details, ones he had frequently attempted to obscure.

***

Joseph Ramirez was born in New York City on July 2, 1947, to Raymond and Josephine Ramirez. He was the fourth of five children.

His parents separated when he was four years old, and he was raised, along with his siblings, by his mother in New York City.

“My father visited on weekends until I was 10 years old at which time he moved to Puerto Rico,” Ramirez wrote in his worksheet. “My brothers and sisters and mother are a very close and loving family.”

He attended DeWitt Clinton High �� in Bronx, New York, and was a below-average student in chemistry and math, although he did better in other classes. At graduation in August 1967, he ranked in the 17.9 percentile in the class, graduating 1,043 out of 1,271 students.

“I learned to fly in 1964 and have been in love with flying ever since,” Ramirez wrote in his worksheet.

While Ramirez’s employment records were incomplete, they showed a young man who couldn’t seem to find his place, and misrepresented himself to get jobs.

“Over the years, he has worked many short term, low paying jobs and was fired often from these jobs during the 1970s,” the probation officer wrote.

Ramirez worked at Grolier Reading Programs in Danbury, Connecticut, as a computer operator for 7 months in 1972 after lying on his employment application claiming he had a B.A. degree in chemistry from Brooklyn College. He was fired after getting three formal reprimands. It was noted that “his performance is below average.”

He stayed in Danbury and worked at Energy Research Corp. as an assistant chemist, after claiming in his application he had both a "Ph.G" in pharmacy and an "L.A." in chemistry, as well as an M.S. in chemistry from Western Connecticut State College. He was fired after two and a half months.

He later moved with his mother and family to Hialeah, Florida.

In 1973, he worked for a month as a driver for Mac Papers Inc. in Jacksonville, Florida, but was fired after a month. He was fired again after working three months at Northside Bank of Miami in 1974.

That year, on May 20, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve and was stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for a year before he was transferred to the U.S.S. Josephus Daniels, a guided missile cruiser. In 1975 and 1976, the U.S.S. Daniels cruised the Mediterranean, shadowing Soviet ships, and did a stint in the Arctic.

Ramirez seemed to have wanted to stay in the Navy. He applied for technical training but didn’t pass the tests to qualify. He was honorably released from service on Sept. 20, 1976.

His father, Raymond Ramirez, interviewed by IRS agent Ed Fisk, was now 84, a retired jeweler, and living in Rosario, Puerto Rico. He said the last he saw his son in 1977 (Casey Ramirez disputed this) when his son gave him a check for $200.

His mother, now age 74 and a retired homemaker, still lived with her brother in a “rather modest home” in Hialeah, where they shared expenses.

She said she didn’t know he had joined the Navy, didn’t know her son went by the name “Casey,” and said she saw him only infrequently. She never got large amounts of money from him but only received small gifts from him on her birthdays and holidays, she said.

“She did not know where Joseph lived and he had not helped her on her limited income,” investigators reported. (Ramirez disputed this, saying he regularly sent her money while serving in the Navy and since, and he insisted she did know him as “Casey.”)

Ramirez was, at sentencing, 5’ 8’, 160 pounds, with brown eyes and brown hair.

“It is apparent from the offense that he committed, and from the control he exhibited over the behavior of other people (for example, his codefendants), that he had an ability to manipulate the behavior of others,” the probation officer wrote.

***

Moeckly served four-and-a-half years in prison, and was released on May 19, 1989. He is 79 and lives back home in South Dakota. Coulombe served nearly six years in prison, and was released on Aug. 27, 1990. He died four years later at age 68 on Sept. 11, 1994.

Ramirez would serve the longest term of the three convicted men.

At a pre-release hearing he listed as his personal property a gold ring — a “keepsake engagement ring of nominal value.”

“It was a gift from my fiancée,” he told a magistrate.

Ramirez also denied Diego was his middle name and misrepresented his birth date.

In paperwork filed to a magistrate before he was, he said Anderson, the former Princeton mayor, had offered him a sales job at his business.

He was released from federal custody on Nov. 14, 1997, at age 50, after serving 13 years in prison.

Today he would be 77.

In Princeton, not everyone knows who he is. But he is not forgotten, and certainly not gone. Ask for the Casey Ramirez file at the local museum, and while you get handed artifacts of history, you’ll also receive a perhaps surprising update:

“He’s still around.”

<<< Read Part 6 Read Fugleberg's epilogue column >>> Follow the series
NOTES: This article was based on interview for this series with Boulger and Leonhart, as well as Ramirez trial transcripts and other related documents stored in the National Archives branch in Chicago, microfilmed copies of Princeton newspapers housed in the collections of the

Minnesota History Center

in St. Paul, Princeton Union-Eagle photos archived by the

Mille Lacs County Historical Society

in Princeton, U.S. newspapers archived by

Newspapers.com

, material stored in the Ramirez file of the

Mille Lacs County Historical Society Museum

and Judge Edward J. Devitt’s papers in the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections at the University of North Dakota. Anderson, Jackson, Moeckly and Ramirez never responded to multiple interview requests. Davis and Stottrup declined to be interviewed. Deceased: Andersen (2003), Coulombe (1994), Devitt (1992), Dorr (2023) and Meshbesher (2018).]]>

The feds were closing in on Casey Ramirez. Then a turncoat agreed to testify. Was this the end?

Jeremy Fugleberg — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:25:00 GMT

This is Part 6 of the

Minnesota Vice

series.

MINNEAPOLIS — Casey Ramirez was scrambling. So, like he so often did, he decided to do something audacious.

He went straight to the feds.

It was May 3, 1983.

Ten days before, he had been rescuing his pilot, Bill Coulombe, from the jungle undergrowth in The Bahamas after Coulombe landed and abandoned a small plane full of hundreds of pounds of cocaine for investigators to scour for clues.

As investigators would soon figure out, the plane was directly linked to Ramirez. It was registered to him. His fingerprints were on the maps inside. On torn stickers affixed to equipment in the plane was Ramirez's name, and the name of Princeton, Minnesota.

Meanwhile, Ramirez's crew was falling apart.

Coulombe, old "Uncle Bill," was still with him, like always. So was assistant Kent Moeckly. But after the debacle in Florida, his girlfriend, Pamela Jackson, had left him and flown back home to San Diego.

Another pilot, Greg Schmidt, had flown back to Princeton and seemed to be distancing himself, moving his things out of Ramirez’s hanger into those owned by other friends.

Then Ramirez’s attorney, Ron Meshbesher, got in touch. He had been advised by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis on April 25 that Ramirez was the target of a federal grand jury investigation.

The heat was on.

So here was Ramirez in enemy territory, in the federal building in downtown Minneapolis, bluffing. He sat down and met with DEA Special Agent in Charge Steven Cummings and spun him a story.

“Ramirez indicated he had been approached by individuals to fly ten 400 pound loads of cocaine from Colombia to the United States for which he was to receive $100,000 per load,” a court document stated.

He offered to help the DEA with its investigation into this matter.

It was hard for the DEA to take seriously. By this time, of course, its joint task force investigation into Ramirez was two years old, and the agency had just gained crucial evidence in the form of Ramirez’s downed plane in The Bahamas—of him running just kind of “mission” he was describing. And Ramirez knew it.

Needless to say, the DEA was not interested in Ramirez's offer to help.

This wasn’t the last time Ramirez reached out to the feds. In fact, over the next year, he appeared to make a habit out of it.

In a later pretrial court motion filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thor Anderson wrote almost a plaintive note about Ramirez’s regular pestering.

"The defendant Ramirez has the annoying habit of calling government lawyers and law enforcement agents on the telephone and sharing with such auditors the deepest confidences, most of which are probably not true and some of which are arguably incriminating,” Anderson wrote.

Michele Leonhart, the DEA agent investigating Ramirez, said the DEA meeting and the random phone calls were his way of trying to get information.

“Casey would call somebody and try to cooperate. But it was never about him. He was just fishing,” she recalled in a recent interview.

MAY 1983 — Minneapolis

The team investigating Ramirez was now on a roll. It had gained some additional firepower by early 1983.

The Reagan Administration, looking to escalate its War on Drugs, created a new kind of multi-agency task force in late 1982, mirroring the South Florida joint task force that had seemed so successful.

It was called the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program, and the country was subdivided into 12 regions, each with its own OCDETF.

The Ramirez case was numbered Z001, the first task force case out of the Minneapolis office, in the North Central OCDETF.

The new task force structure was designed to break down barriers between agencies — such as the DEA, the FBI, the IRS and others — so they could more easily work together to investigate an individual or organization, like Ramirez and his crew.

Of course, the Ramirez investigative team — Leonhart and John Boulger with the DEA and Ed Fisk with the IRS — was already essentially working as a joint task force. But making Ramirez an OCDETF case also opened up more funding.

“Our bosses told us, ‘Well, to do this case, it’s bigger than our little Minneapolis budget. And this is a separate pot of money that we can use for our travel, for informants, for investigative expenses,’” Leonhart said. “So we wrote it up.”

The team soon had a few surprises for Ramirez and friends.

The U.S. attorney had approached Jerry Davis, the one-time Princeton Co-op Credit Union manager, with a plea deal that involved taking a lie detector test and answering questions about Ramirez.

“We thought Davis would roll over,” said Boulger, in a recent interview. “He's the odd man out on the whole deal.”

Davis, who was now the manager of the Ramirez-bankrolled Princeton ice arena, declined the offer because it didn’t include assurance Davis would avoid prison.

Instead, now, he would face a jury trial.

On May 5, 1983, Jerry Davis, former manager of the Princeton Co-op Credit Union, was indicted on 15 charges of illegally failing to file records of currency deposits totaling $962,256.

The indictment didn’t mention Ramirez, but it seemed highly likely the indictment was connected to Davis’ involvement with Ramirez—at least that was the claim of an unnamed source printed in Minneapolis Tribune reporting about the indictment.

The Princeton Union-Eagle provided the context for that quote.

“Davis, 37, resigned as manager of the credit union in October 1981 and shortly thereafter became manager of the Princeton Youth Hockey Arena which was built with a $500,000 interest-free loan provided by Casey Ramirez,” the indictment article stated.

Davis pleaded not guilty.

Davis was a well-known and respected member of the community. The Princeton paper, in an editorial entitled “Indictment is not a conviction,” cautioned readers to let the justice system process play out.

“One thing is certain, Davis would have no lack of willing character witnesses if they should be sought,” the editorial opined. “He has had an exemplary career of private and public service.”

Later, during the trial, Ramirez claimed he had been asked to stay away from the courtroom because his presence might intimidate jurors.

MAY 13, 1983 — The Bahamas

The week after Davis' indictment, Leonhart and Ed Fisk, the lead IRS member of the federal task force, flew commercial to The Bahamas to examine evidence from Ramirez’s ditched plane.

They got a happy reunion with 6608 Charlie, Ramirez's Cessna 210, at the Freeport airport. Bahamanian police pulled out the spare fuel tanks and the avionics — the radios and other electronics — gathering information about where they were installed, how they were linked to Ramirez.

There were the stickers and labels tying the gear to Princeton and Ramirez himself. Maps of the Caribbean and South America in the cockpit were bagged as evidence.

“It was just unreal, because this was exactly what we needed. And 6608 Charlie was one of the first planes we knew,” Leonhart said. “It was my impression that 6608 Charlie was one of Casey’s favorite airplanes because he was in it, or on invoices for it, quite often.”

The Bahamanian police had opened one of the 12 duffel bags from the plane, cutting off the locks that held it shut and snipping open the top. They then opened the rest, finding a total of 181 plastic-wrapped packets of white powder. Each weight a kilogram. One hundred eighty one kilos, about 400 pounds.

To nobody’s surprise, they tested positive for cocaine. The Bahamanian police agreed to send a sample to Minnesota to be tested.

The evidence from The Bahamas was quickly adding up.

“I think we would have had a conspiracy case but it would have been based on witness testimony and would have been a lot harder to prove,” Leonhart said. “This should have put to rest what he was smuggling. It would have taken us more time. We were getting there, though.”

Fisk was making strong progress on a separate income tax case against Ramirez, but the drug smuggling side of the investigation was taking more time.

In August 1983 the investigative team got a judge’s approval to place a tracking device on 5296 Yankee, the Cessna that Ramirez had been flying over Miami the day Coulombe and the cocaine went down in the Bahamas. They suspected Ramirez was still running drugs.

Boulger said the team estimated Ramirez had run about 10-11 other drug smuggling flights before 6608 Charlie was ditched in April 1983 — two years after he made national headlines for the City Hall palm trees and a year after the WCCO I-Team’s exposé aired.

“They would have screwed up sooner or later,” Boulger recalled in a recent interview. “I can’t imagine why, after all the spotlight, he would continue to do that, or why you wouldn’t take a break for six or eight months, but yeah—that’s a personality thing.”

SEPT. 8, 1983 — Federal courthouse, St. Paul

Davis, the former Princeton Co-op Credit Union manager, was found guilty on Sept. 8, 1983, on all counts of not reporting Ramirez’s large cash deposits. He faced up to 75 years in prison and a $150,000 fine.

The guilty finding included the credit union, meaning its very existence was imperiled. It had about $4.5 million in assets. The penalty fines, possibly up to $7.5 million, were so big they could wipe out the credit union.

While the credit union scrambled to find a way to stay open, the current management — and the Princeton Union-Eagle newspaper — reassured members their money was safe. The Union-Eagle, in an editorial, also seemed somewhat perplexed about the trial.

“It has been a difficult situation for the community, as well as for many people and one of Princeton’s important financial institutions,” it said. “Although serious mistakes were made no evidence was presented indicating that either Davis or the credit union received any wrongful gain from the transactions.”

There was no mention of two things, of which the newspaper was aware, that were prominently discussed in Davis’ trial: his use of Ramirez’s cash to fill the tills of the credit union and the Ramirez-bankrolled ice hockey arena that Davis left the credit union to manage, to realize his dream of building up the local youth hockey program.

Floyd Bischel, the foreman of the jury that convicted Davis and the credit union, told the Union-Eagle's Mary Ellen Klas the former credit union manager was obviously “bright” and knew about the Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) he was supposed to file for Ramirez’s big cash deposits.

“We thought it very odd that he could remember lots of things but couldn't remember certain conversations. We don’t think he told the complete truth,” Bischel said. “I’ll pray for him and hope that things will come out alright and I hope the judge isn’t too strict with them.”

At Davis’ sentencing in December, the prosecutor had a message for those who thought Davis hadn’t taken pay-offs for not filing the required CTRs.

"I would submit that Mr. Davis did take payoffs,” he said. “The building of the hockey arena was a matter of supreme importance to him and obtaining the $500,000 interest-free loan helped him achieve his dream."

Davis was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and the credit union was assessed a $30,000 fine. It had already agreed to merge with Twin City Co-ops Credit Union, a move that would eliminate any fear it would have to close.

NOVEMBER 1983 — Princeton

Ramirez was uncharacteristically lying low as 1983 came to a close in Princeton.

It seemed the Ramirez gravy train had left the station. There was no longer any big spending, optimistic airport plans, fly in giveaways, free meals or paid-for rounds at the bar.

Ramirez even shut off his aviation fuel station at the town’s airport, upending its operations.

"The airport had run out of gas," wrote reporter Joel Stottrup in the Nov. 3, 1983, edition of Princeton Union-Eagle, somewhat tongue in cheek.

A December article reminded readers that the Princeton food pantry was busier than ever.

Instead, Princeton was getting subpoenaed.

"Although Casey is in and out of Princeton frequently he is maintaining a very low profile,” wrote Princeton Union-Eagle publisher Elmer L. Andersen in his regular column. “Business firms and offices in the city are being requested by the Internal Revenue Service to give details on any financial transactions with Casey and the letter is signed by the same individual who did the investigating that led to the indictment of Davis."

That individual, of course, was Fisk, who leveraging grand jury subpoenas to full back the curtain on Ramirez's spending and other actions in Princeton.

The City Council found itself picking up the pieces of a number of Ramirez efforts. It was struggling to re-open Ramirez’s fuel operation so there would be fuel available at the airport. It was working with the Princeton Youth Hockey Association to figure out how to stablize the finances of the Ramirez-bankrolled ice arena.

The airport's woes worsened. Its runway was defective. Spring thawing kept causing soft spots that made it hazardous to flying. A big X was placed on the runway to show it was closed.

Pilots couldn’t get fuel there anyway.

The council kept trying to cajole Ramirez — or rather, whatever lawyer was representing him at the time—to re-open the airport fuel facility.

“Council members decided Thursday they no longer like being the horse that follows the driver’s carrot dangled in front of them to pull the cart forward, only to never reach the carrot,” wrote Stottrup in the March 15 Princeton Union-Eagle.

He quoted council member Steve VanHooser grousing about Ramirez, saying the council needed to stay on him to reach a deal: “If you take the pressure off, he’s in Hawaii.”

By April the airport was about back in familiar territory. It was broke. It would run out of money in May, and it still had unpaid bonds for the original airport expansion under Mayor Richard Anderson to the total of $150,000. Pilots at one airport commission meeting passed a hat, raising $750 to repair holes in the airport runway.

While the Princeton City Council grappled with deteriorating operations at the town airport, and prepared to bail out its finances, it seemed Ramirez had other worries.

He contacted the DEA and IRS to tell them that he believed someone from the DEA was telling news media he was a government informant, and said he had recently traveled to Colombia to convince “certain unnamed individuals” that he was not, in fact, a U.S. government informant.

This was an extremely odd thing to inform the U.S. government about.

***

Leonhart and Boulger had a personal visit to make. They were raising the pressure on Ramirez’s crew, seeking to flip them to testify about what they knew. Their targeted Schmidt, Ramirez's pilot.

In April they showed up in Minneapolis at Republic Airlines, Schmidt’s workplace, to talk to him. They turned the screws. Schmidt was married, and was a young father to two children. He had a lot to lose if he went to prison.

“You better get a lawyer,” Boulger told him, Schmidt testified later.

In April 1984, Schmidt was indicted and charged with two counts of lying to a federal grand jury. In May, Kent Moeckly was indicted and charged with three counts of perjury in grand jury testimony. Both pleaded not guilty.

A trial jury wasn’t convinced by the government’s case against Schmidt. They acquitted him.

But by now, Schmidt had had enough.

“In the courtroom, after he was found not guilty, his attorney approached all of us and said, ‘He’s going to cooperate,’” said Fisk, in a recent interview. “We didn’t go see him; they came to us.”

Schmidt and his lawyer soon had a deal in hand from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Schmidt would come clean about what he knew about Ramirez and his crew. In exchange, he wouldn’t face further prosecution.

In June, the last month Ramirez would be a free man, it seemed like the feds were everywhere in Princeton. Elmer L. Andersen, publisher of the Princeton Union-Eagle, noted as much in his regular column on June 7.

"For months, now extending into years, the IRS and the FBI have been interviewing everyone in the Princeton area who has had any relationship with Ramirez,” he wrote. “Some say the interviews get tough to the point of harassment."

Well yeah, said Fisk in a recent interview, “It’s always harassment if you don’t like the question.”

In early July, Jerry Davis, the imprisoned former head of the Princeton Co-op Credit Union lost his appeal over his 1983 sentencing for not filing the Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) required for Ramirez’s big cash deposits in the credit union, which effectively laundered Ramirez’s drug money.

After the ruling he told the Princeton newspaper he believed he had done nothing wrong, and what he had done certainly wasn’t linked to the Ramirez-bankrolled ice arena for which he became the first manager.

He said not filing the CTRs “did not cost anyone anything and no one was killed or raped,” he said. “It hardly seems fair.”

The Princeton Union-Eagle stood by Davis, insisting in an editorial he shouldn’t have been sent to prison, since he was a good man, was non-violent, and had a clear and clean previous record.

“He neither sought nor received personal gain and, as nearly as can be determined, his motivation was to accommodate a person who had aided the community in getting a youth hockey facility which was a high priority for Davis,” the editorial said.

Furthermore, the editorial pointed out, Ramirez had not been found guilty of anything.

But that was about to change.

It was about that time that Joel Stottrup, at the Princeton Union-Eagle, got a rare call from Ramirez. He was about to get indicted, Ramirez said. When Stottrup asked if he’d post bail if arrested, Ramirez told him he didn’t plan to spend a “dime on that bull.”

JULY 26, 1984 — Princeton

On July 26, 1984, Ramirez was indicted on charges of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine, as well as tax evasion. He turned himself in, was arrested and jailed.

"THe charge of not paying taxes and his reported business transactions using paper bags of large amounts of money have added to the mystery or Ramirez," wrote Stottrup in the Union-Eagle.

The rest of Ramirez's crew — Kent Moeckly, Bill Coulombe, Pamela Jackson — faced the same charges. Moeckly was still dealing with grand jury perjury charges.

Schmidt was named as a co-conspirator but notably was not charged with anything.

The arrest and charges hit Princeton like a thunderbolt. Now it was the media’s turn to swarm Princeton, looking for quotes about Ramirez.

A WCCO TV reporter, looking for Mayor Richard Anderson, got his father Lyle instead.

“I don’t question where you get your money,” he said, before insinuating that, for all he knew, the TV reporter was involved in cocaine smuggling.

Other local residents seemed more circumspect.

“My grandfather settled here in the 1850s and I hate to think of Princeton being brought to the forefront as being taken in by something like this,” Arnold Whitcomb told the Princeton Union-Eagle.

If the accusations were true, he said, they would cancel out a lot of the goodwill Ramirez earned by his gift giving. It would mean the entire town was being “taken for a ride.”

“People like to think of others as honest, some think otherwise, but you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. You don't want to offend anybody. You want to pass it out of your mind that the person isn't for real,” he said.

Luther Dorr, the Princeton Union-Eagle editor, directed attention in an editorial to the culpability of the Princeton City Council in allowing Ramirez so much access to town business.

“That, I think, is the main question Princeton, as a town, has to answer,” he wrote. “Ramirez’s trial, when it finally comes, will answer a lot of questions.”

Nearly 50 miles away in Monticello, Minnesota, the Monticello Times publisher called for some humble perspective, when considering the strong support there for the Northern States Power nuclear power plant in town.

“Before we become too critical of Princeton and its people for their romance with Ramirez, let’s consider how many outsiders view Monticello and its citizens concerning their relationship with the nuclear plant,” Donald Smith wrote. “Because NSP has been such a tax bonanza for the governments here, the charge goes, we’re less critical of nuclear power than we should be.”

JULY 1984 — Minneapolis

The Ramirez investigative team had been preparing for this moment for months, but they were still nervous.

Despite their meticulous investigation, despite 6608 Charlie, despite flipping Schmidt, there was always the concern the trial could blow up. All Ramirez would need was one resistant juror to produce a hung jury and scuttle the trial.

“Any time there's a jury trial, you have a lot of angst, because it takes one juror to hang it all up,” Boulger said. “I've been through two of those in my life, and you can't figure out what you've done wrong until the judge declares a mistrial, and then the other jurors come and tell you that the one that hung it up was a whack job.”

The prosecution team did have a trick up its sleeve, two busted drug smugglers from Miami named William Morris and Jack Devoe who had made their own deals with the government and were prepared to tell everything they knew about Ramirez.

Morris had told Leonhart and Boulger he had been involved in the same cocaine smuggling flying subcontractor world as Ramirez in South Florida, and had even once visited him in Princeton to withdraw some money from the Princeton Co-Op Credit Union.

According to the DEA's investigative report documenting Morris' interview, Ramirez told Morris he had Princeton in his pocket.

"Ramirez said he had the people in town liking Ramirez because he kissed babies in town and did other things,'" the agents reported Morris telling them. "Morris asked if Ramirez if he was being watched and Ramirez said, 'No, I bought the cops their cars.' ... Ramirez told Morris that 'his guy' at the credit union had been fired."

The Ramirez trial was assigned to federal Senior Judge Edward J. Devitt. He was 73, an Eisenhower appointee with a long, storied career on the bench.

In 1961 Devitt had overseen the trial of Minneapolis gangster Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld, arguably the biggest name in Minnesota organized crime, proclaiming at his sentencing, “you have led a bad life, Isadore.”

Devitt had co-authored the rules for Federal Jury Practice, literally writing the book on a major component of the Ramirez trial.

Devitt was known as a judge not to be trifled with by any prosecutor or defense attorney — or a flamboyant, charming defendant.

<<< Read Part 5 Read Part 7 >>> Follow the series
NOTES: This article was based on interviews with Boulger, Fisk, Leonhart and Princeton native Kevin Odegard, as well as Ramirez trial transcripts, microfilmed copies of the Princeton Union-Eagle archived by the Minnesota History center, material stored in the Ramirez file of the Mille Lacs County Historical Society Museum, The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force Program (OCDETF) five-year summary report for 1983-1987 obtained via FOIA, documents about Ramirez archived by Odegard. Anderson, Jackson, Moeckly and Ramirez never responded to interview requests. Davis and Schmidt declined to be interviewed. Coulombe died in 1994. Meshbesher died in 2018.]]>

Casey Ramirez’s drug-filled plane was down, its pilot vanished and his cocaine captured. What now?

Jeremy Fugleberg — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 14:25:00 GMT

This is Part 5 of the

Minnesota Vice series.

KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. — Today was the day that would wreck Casey Ramirez’s life, but at the moment, his biggest immediate problem was the banners.

He had paid two aircraft to fly over the beach at Key Biscayne, trailing banners behind them.

The first was a declaration of love for his girlfriend Pamela Jackson, or P.J, as he called her. The second was a vulgar message for two members of his crew, pilots Kent Moeckly and Greg Schmidt. It was going to be a great joke.

Tomorrow, Jackson would abruptly leave him and fly back to California, angry at him. Before long, they would break up. Next year, Ramirez and Moeckly would be convicted of federal cocaine charges. Schmidt would flip on his pals and be the prosecution’s star witness.

But that was later. Today was April 23, 1983, and life seemed pretty good, considering Ramirez and his crew were in the midst of a major drug smuggling operation. So where were those planes?

They had all awoken at daybreak as Ramirez had insisted. He had hustled all four of them from the Silver Sands Motel to breakfast and down to the beach on the Atlantic coast for the big show.

The beach could be crowded, but this early only a few people were there. It was windy, about 30 mph gusts. Some people were practicing wind surfing on the sand.

Finally a low hum, and there was the first plane overhead, streaming its banner. But instead of the declaration of love, it carried the message for his friends: “Kent and Greg, sit on it and rotate.”

Oops.

Then the love banner flew past, and the plane circled back around. Ramirez scratched a heart into the beach sand. Greg snapped a photo of Ramirez and Jackson embracing in front of a heart, as the plane flew overhead with the most important banner: “P.J., I love you. Casey.”

The planes circled back around. The foursome looked up, shading their eyes against the morning sun.

It was just like Ramirez to make an extravagant gesture paired with a bit of humor. And never more so than at this moment.

Despite the light-heartedness, there was a deep underlying anxiety in this group.

Their friend “Uncle Bill” Coulombe was now likely airborne, returning from a “mission” far to the south.

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE BUST – APRIL 21, 1983 - Pembroke Pines, Florida

It was evening outside a row of modest townhouses in the Miami suburb of Pembroke Pines. A trio of men stood near the townhouses’ mailboxes.

It was Thursday, April 21, 1983.

One of the men, a man with Hispanic features and a tousled, boyish haircut, was in charge. Casey Ramirez. Standing with him, deep in conversation, were two tall white men.

“Casey was talkin’ about a ‘mission,’” Schmidt recalled later in court testimony.

Specifically, who should fly it.

Ramirez had brought the two men outside the townhouse with him because he was convinced the feds were listening in.

“Casey was paranoid that the townhouse was bugged, and he didn’t want to talk in the townhouse or on the telephone,” Schmidt said.

He wasn’t entirely wrong to be concerned. The federal team investigating Ramirez had been surveilling and tracking activities at the townhouse for some time now.

Ramirez decided: The pilot for tomorrow’s “mission” would be Bill Coulombe, or as Ramirez called him, "Uncle Bill, and he would get paid $50,000 upon his return.

Coulombe was an experienced pilot. He had been flying for Ramirez since 1981 and at age 56, was the most senior pilot in Ramirez’s crew in both age and experience. He was a tall, lanky man, who sometimes wore cowboy boots.

Coulombe had flown for the CIA’s secret Air America transport service in the Vietnam conflict, where his colleagues nicknamed him “The Priest” because of his faithfulness to his wife, his Catholic devotion and his strict avoidance of drugs and drinking. He was now retired.

He was brother to Lois Bredemus, Ramirez’s “mom” of his adopted family in Princeton. Hence, "Uncle Bill."

These days, besides flying for Ramirez, Coulombe was trying to get a fishing business going in Rockport, Texas. The $50,000 would go a long way toward jumpstarting his plans.

Schmidt, an Republic Airlines maintenance supervisor in Minnesota, had met Coulombe in Arizona in 1979, and Ramirez a few years later.

Schmidt was a regular pilot for Casey, ferrying aircraft and such. But he had never flown the main event, the long journey south and back.

The trio went back inside, and Schmidt helped another of Ramirez’s flyers, Kent Moeckly, make a half-dozen sandwiches for Coulombe’s long flight tomorrow — bread, butter, bologna.

They put the homemade sandwiches in a plastic bag, in a fridge. Then they all hit the hay.

ONE DAY BEFORE THE BUST – April 22, 1983 - Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport

The next morning they awoke early, about 4:30 a.m., before sunrise.

Ramirez, Coulombe, Schmidt and Moeckly left the townhouse and got coffee.

As the sky lightened into dawn, they drove to the Sunny South Aviation hanger at the Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport, a sizable airport in the Miami area.

One of Ramirez’s small fleet of Cessna aircraft was parked outside on the airport tarmac.

There, the four men went to work. They placed five blue 15-gallon gas containers in the passenger compartment in the plane Coulombe was going to fly that day — a Cessna Turbo 210N. It was painted light tan with blue stripes down the side. It was N6608C, "6608 Charlie."

They connected the gas containers to a pump in the plane that would push fuel from the plastic containers into the wing tanks.

This lengthened the plane’s range. Each plastic fuel container gave the plane about an additional hour of flying time.

Schmidt and the others put survival gear, a raft and tools, maps of the Caribbean and South America, and for Coulombe’s long “mission,” soda pop and the sandwiches made at the townhouse the night before.

Then a Hispanic-looking male, who didn’t seem to speak English, hopped into the Cessna, crouching down in the passenger seat so nobody could see him on takeoff.

Ramirez knew him. He was to be the navigator. Coulombe would fly across the ocean, the navigator would make sure he landed in the right spot in the jungle.

With the navigator ducked down low, Coulombe taxied out, his plane heavy with aviation fuel from his topped-off wing tanks and the gas cans behind him in the cockpit, and took off into the warming sky. He had hours of flying ahead of him.

For everyone else, it was time to wait.

Ramirez seemed to be in a jubilant mood. It was time for a Friday night out. The four drove from the townhouse to the Silver Sands Motel in Key Biscayne.

Miami had always been sun-soaked retirement destination, but it wasn’t considered particularly glamorous in April 1983.

It was about this time that a television writer named Tony Yerkovich took a drug-fueled boat ride into Miami harbor and envisioned a TV show that would become “Miami Vice,” a hit show about stylish cops fighting crime in a cocaine-saturated tropical paradise.

The show would remake Miami’s image and spark an entire generation’s neon dreams. But the show’s pilot wouldn’t air until late next year, September 1984.

In reality, Miami didn't look like a color-soaked TV show. Miami was sunbaked beige, corrupted by the booming drug business, and many there were bone-tired of it all.

Silver Sands was a one-story beach resort that looked out over the ocean. It had been built in 1956 and was a staple on the beach. It had long been a popular destination for tourists and locals alike, and while it might be showing its age a little, many considered it a throwback, even charming.

The group opted for a Japanese restaurant that evening before going to bed.

THE DAY OF THE BUST – April 23, 1983, 1 p.m., Pembroke Pines, Florida

Back at the Pembroke Pines townhouse the next day, Ramirez told Schmidt and Moeckley that Coulombe was on his way back, and should return just before sunset.

Meanwhile, there was some work to be done. They got ready to do what Ramirez called “flying cover,” keeping an eye out for both a returning Coulombe and patrolling Customs aircraft. Both pilots had flown cover before.

On Ramirez’ instructions, Schmidt and Moeckly headed back to the airport and each got in their own small Cessnas, heading to Boca Raton Airport where they would circle the airport, landing and then immediately taking off, a procedure known as a “touch and go.”

They would look like they were practicing landings. In reality, they would essentially be circling, keeping their eyes open.

Flying cover.

Ramirez told them the radio frequency they should all use and told them to flip their radio call signs to let the group know that they had spotted Customs aircraft.

Ramirez would be flying a Cessna with the tail number N5296Y, so he would combine the plane’s ID with his own flipped initials as a radio call-sign: 96CR, for Casey Ramirez. Over the radio, if all was well, he'd identify himself as “Niner-Six-Charlie-Romeo.”

But if something went wrong, he would sound the alarm by flipping his initials backward: 96RC or “Niner-Six-Romeo-Charlie.”

The Miami area was littered with about a dozen airfields large and small, some busy ones with air traffic control towers and others were quiet non-commercial airfields. Some were essentially paved landing strips. Unguarded.

Ramirez assigned a codeword to use for each significant local airport that could be a landing location: Alpha for Boca Raton, Bravo for Fort Lauderdale-Executive, Charlie for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Delta for the practically deserted Opa-Locka West.

“Bill Coulombe would be returning through a corridor projecting northeasterly from an area between Boca Raton Airport and West Palm Beach,” Schmidt later testified in court. “Casey would be flying in that area along the coast, be lookin’ for Bill.”

All three took off, each piloting their own planes — three small specks aloft in Miami’s busy airspace, circling between scattered cumulus clouds.

They were airborne for about an hour when Schmidt heard Coulombe on the radio, and Ramirez.

“Niner-Six-Romeo-Charlie,” Ramirez said, using his flipped callsign. That was it, the alarm signal. Something had gone wrong.

Ramirez must have seen something. He was warning Coulombe. Don’t go to Alpha, Bravo or Charlie, Schmidt heard Ramirez say. Essentially, avoid Florida.

Coulombe responded with his own flipped call sign. Red alert.

That’s when Schmidt saw a plane and a helicopter in the sky that looked to be U.S Customs Service. Uh-oh.

Schmidt heard Ramirez talking to Coulombe about remaining fuel, and told him to go somewhere called the “west end.” Where was that?

It was all going sideways. Schmidt, extremely nervous, headed back to the Boca Raton Airport with Moeckly.

Upon landing, they almost ran their planes into each other.

Inside, out the heat, Schmidt asked Moeckly: Where was Coulombe going? Where was the “west end?”

Moeckly seemed to know.

The Bahamas.

THAT AFTERNOON, 4:30 P.M. – over Grand Bahama Island

Customs pilot James McCawley had pulled up his twin-engine plane tight alongside the fleeing Cessna. He noted its tail number: N6608C. "6608 Charlie." Light colored with blue trim.

The Cessna was trying to land on the Grand Bamaha island’s West End airfield. It circled around twice, wheels down, acting like it was going to land.

McCawley stayed on the Cessna, flying off its wing, less than 100 feet away. Practically flying in formation through the hot, hazy Bahamas air. They were close, predator and prey.

His co-pilot snapped photos of the plane and its pilot, an unidentified man.

It was Bill Coulombe.

Coulombe broke off then and juked back to the island coast, then sped up and swung low, lining up with a long, straight road, looking to land

This was Perimeter Parkway, a grandly named yet remote road in the jungle scrub of the island interior.

It was a notorious landing spot for drug smugglers, including some who never managed to make the landing. The wreckage of several planes festooned the sides of the road.

Coulombe was, whether he knew it or not, flying into a narrow gap in law enforcement coverage.

The Bahamas was a different nation. The U.S. had recently gotten diplomatic permission for its government pilots to patrol into Bahamas airspace, but that permission didn't extend to chasing or apprehending suspects on land.

Bahamanian officials could arrest smugglers on their own soil, of course, but in early 1983 they weren’t communicating with U.S. agencies in real time about suspects chased onto remote island roads, like Coulombe.

The Cessna made the landing, McCawley saw him touch down. The Customs pilot pulled up and circled the area. His quarry was so close, but so far away.

Down below, Coulombe was frantic. He knew the Customs plane was somewhere overhead and he could hear the thwack-thwack of an approaching helicopter. He felt hunted.

He jumped out of 6608 Charlie's cockpit, leaving the plane key still in the ignition, and fled into the foliage on the side of the road — low scrub bushes interspersed by palm trees.

The key wasn't all Coulombe left behind.

The Cessna’s cockpit was littered with trip snacks, candy wrappers, empty soda cans and sandwich bags.

There were flight maps for the Caribbean and Colombia including math notations made with a ballpoint pen: a "180," a "22" and “396.” (In cocaine terms, 180 kilos, times 2.2 conversion rate, equals 396 pounds.)

There were also, in the back, several large green canvas duffel bags.

Just then, Customs pilot Vincent Tirado in his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter arrived on scene, newly refueled and coming in for a closer look at the ditched Cessna on the remote road — the most the U.S. pilots could really do.

Observe and report.

He pulled out his camera.

The Black Hawk hovering about seven feet above 6608 Charlie, the helicopter rotor's powerful downdraft flattening back the scrub brush and buffeting the small craft, pushing it slightly off the road into the adjacent grass.

Tirado peered into the plane but didn't see a pilot. He did see something significant, though.

“I saw green duffel bags in the rear of the aircraft,” Tirado said.

In this part of the world, that usually meant only one thing:

Cocaine.

THAT EVENING - 9:30 p.m., over the Atlantic Ocean

Schmidt was back airborne, flying around thunderstorms in the dark. Lightning flashed between clouds as he headed due east from Miami.

Ramirez had called. He was in Freeport, on Grand Bahama Island. He didn’t say it on the phone, but he had followed close behind Coulombe and the feds, tailing the chase to The Bahamas.

Not long after U.S. Customs aircraft left the area above Coulombe’s ditched plane, Ramirez had flown over, and had been incensed to see the Cessna still intact.

Ramirez didn't say any of that over the phone. Who knows who might be listening. Instead, he said he wanted Schmidt to fly to Freeport ASAP with $500 cash and a tool set, allegedly to fix something on Ramirez’s plane.

Schmidt landed and met Ramirez at the Freeport airport. It was about 10:30 at night — the airport was closing.

On the tarmac, Ramirez quickly filled Schmidt in on what was actually happening.

“Bill Coulombe’s down, the airplanes down,” he said.

In a borrowed car, the two headed away from the airport, down the main island highway, into the jungle scrub.

The plane was probably a lost cause. Instead, they would look for Coulombe, but would have to do so carefully.

They were driving into a maze. Real estate developers had carved out an entire town’s worth of roads into the middle, forested part of Grand Bahama Island, including Perimeter Parkway, where Coulombe had landed.

From the air, it looked like a lot of people might live here — lines in the bush marking neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs. But in reality, none of these development dreams had come true.

These were ghost roads. The biggest and longest was Perimeter Parkway, partly paved, partly dirt.

“We got out away from the airport, and I think it was away from any buildings, or — it was kind of like out in the jungle, and Casey was calling for Bill out the window as we were driving,” Schmidt said.

No luck.

Schmidt and Ramirez got out and walked down the road looking for him, calling into the bush.

This morning they had been relaxing on a Florida beach. Now they were tramping through the jungle scrub in the Bahamas, slapping insects, looking in vain in the dark.

Coulombe should have burned the plane, Ramirez said, but he had flown over the landed plane and knew he hadn’t. Ramirez was upset. But he also wanted to reassure Schmidt. He said he takes care of his men — he’d get Coulombe out of this.

They finally found Coulombe, who emerged from hiding for hours in the underbrush. He was injured, dehydrated, smelly, and punctured with insect bites.

“It was mostly a glad-to-see-you-you’re-okay reunion,” Schmidt said.

They had to leave. For all they knew, the authorities were right on their tails.

Ramirez yelled at Coulombe as they drove back to Freeport to the Princess Hotel, a new and sprawling resort and casino, considered the nicest place in town.

They only had one room for all three of them — the hotel was full. One of them was going to sleep on a cot. It was pushing 2 a.m.

They went to the bar, and sat at a table. It was near closing time. Coulombe was still shaken up from the day’s events and ordered drinks. Schmidt drank a Coke.

“Damn, 400 pounds,” Coulombe said.

Ramirez angrily cut him off.

“You should have burned it,” he said.

Back in the hotel room the three were going to share, Coulombe was still nervous, and wanted to smoke a cigarette, setting off a whole new argument with Ramirez, who didn’t drink or smoke.

It all made for an anxious, uncomfortable night.

THE DAY AFTER THE BUST - April 24, 1983

The arguments didn’t end the following day, even after Ramirez, Schmidt and Coulombe made it out of the Freeport airport without any trouble, flew back to the U.S., cleared customs (their plane was registered to “John Key”) and returned to the Pembroke Pines townhouse.

Ramirez and Jackson got into it — a lover’s spat. Ramirez had lied to her the previous day about where they were and now had to come clean. She would get on a jet for San Diego that afternoon.

Then Coulombe and Ramirez were arguing again. Coulombe wanted to get paid. He needed that $50,000.

That day both Schmidt and Moeckly flew back to Princeton, Minnesota. So far away from Miami.

The word of the capture of 6608 Charlie quickly made its way to the DEA field office in Minneapolis.

Michele Leonhart, John Boulger and Ed Fisk, the investigators on the Ramirez case, were all in the office when the word came in. It was a bombshell of the best kind.

“Michele did her happy dance,” Boulger recalled, remembering “elation.”

“I was screaming,” Fisk said.

“I remember, it was like ‘This is it, this is it, this is what we were waiting for,’” Leonhart said.

She knew 6608 Charlie well. It was one of the planes she spotted when she undercover at the Princeton fly-in in 1981.

After getting burned undercover, after two years of painstaking investigative work, this finally might be the big break they needed.

They could finally bring Ramirez down.

<<< Read Part 4 Read Part 6 >>> Follow the series

Notes: This article is based on interviews with Boulger, Fisk and Leonhart, as well as Ramirez trial transcripts stored in the National Archives in Chicago, The DEA’s Schmidt investigative report in Judge Edward J. Devitt’s papers in the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections at the University of North Dakota, the archives of the Islander News of Key Biscayne,

“Miami Vice at 40: An Oral History”

by Jane Wollman Rusoff in the Television Academy’s Emmy Magazine, Google Earth,

Aircraft.com

photo archives, copies of Florida and Minnesota newspapers archived by

Newspapers.com

and the Florida Memory project by the State Library and Archives of Florida. Ramirez, Moeckly and Jackson never responded to requests for an interview. Schmidt declined an interview request. Coulombe died in 1994.]]>

The I-Team's exposé unmasked Casey Ramirez, linking him to drug smuggling. The accused man struck back

Jeremy Fugleberg — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 14:25:00 GMT

This is Part 4 of the

Minnesota Vice series.

MINNEAPOLIS — Don Shelby felt like a shell of himself.

By all rights, February 1982 should have been a proud moment for him. Shelby, an investigative reporter for WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, had just aired a bombshell report that exposed Hennepin County district judge R. Crane Winton Jr. for sexual misconduct.

Shelby’s report would earn him and his investigative team, the “I-Team,” national praise, and it would result in Winton’s confession and his removal from the bench later that year.

“I knew how to investigate, I knew how to do all that stuff, but I was doing it all for me, to become recognized,” Shelby said, in his resonant voice now familiar to generations of news-watching Minnesotans, in a recent interview. “It didn’t make me reckless — it made me a little hard.”

Yet Shelby had met his match with the Winton story. He had, the week before it aired, decided to not do it, he said.

But WCCO-TV news director Ron Handberg, who had hired Shelby, nixed that idea.

“He said, ‘This information you've collected doesn't belong to you. It doesn't belong to me, it doesn't belong to CBS — it belongs to the people.’ And my life changed,” Shelby said. “My career changed at that notion that I wasn't important, the facts were important, and the people had the right to the information that I had gathered.”

The Winton report aired, but Shelby, and his admittedly sizable ego, had been shaken. That and the long, exhausting year spent investigating Winton earned Shelby the enmity of a lot of friends in the legal profession.

Many felt like Shelby and WCCO had convicted Winton before the judge got his day in court.

It all had taken an emotional toll. Shelby was spent.

“In fact, I felt like I wanted to quit journalism after that story,” he said. “So I was in a mess.”

He was hoping to take something of a break while other reporters on his I-Team — Al Austin and Larry Schmidt — took the lead on a few stories.

The thing was, their stories were falling through. Shelby had to come up with something.

It would be both personally and professionally embarrassing if the team didn’t have a story in the expected slot in late May 1982.

The I-Team, which Shelby had co-created in 1980, two years after arriving at WCCO in 1978, was committed to producing four investigative reports a year, ones that would guaranteed to raise a stir.

“You gotta have that blood in your mouth,” Shelby told WCCO reporter Caroline Lowe, at the time, showcasing his flair for the dramatic phrase. “Dig and chew and never let go.”

The I-Team’s stories would air during sweeps weeks, the four times a year when TV station audiences are closely measured, so stations broadcast their best programming to attract more viewers.

The I-Team’s work was tailor-made for sweeps weeks, wave-making investigative reporting from a newsroom already well-known for hard-hitting journalism.

Shelby went to his "tickler file" of story ideas. There was one in there that seemed like it was doable in time for the May slot.

It was something WCCO reporter Dave Nimmer and photojournalist Bob Manary had told him about a guy named Casey Ramirez, up in Princeton, Minnesota, spending a lot of money and buying a lot of influence in that small town. Something about police cars and palm trees?

That was it.

Now the I-Team needed to hustle to get the Ramirez story, from nearly scratch, in a few short months.

To Shelby, it felt almost like a fresh start.

“Right before Casey, when I was (covering) Winton, that’s when I became a journalist,” he said. “So I went into the Casey investigation as a journalist. I was a showboat prior to that.”

MARCH 1982 – WCCO newsroom, Minneapolis

The first order of business for the I-Team: Get all the documents on Ramirez.

Reporters today can often glean reams of information from a simple internet search. In 1981 gathering the same took good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, or rather, a lot of airline tickets.

“We have to be in Phoenix, we have to be in Miami, we have to be in Panama City, we have to be in Turks and Caicos. We have to be everywhere,” Shelby said. “We have to pull all these documents, but there's no internet, and you can't be specific because you don't know what you're looking for exactly, right?”

Schmidt got a plane, destination everywhere.

“He stayed on a plane for 17 days, and it cost $600,000 ... just in travel expenses and printing expenses,” Shelby said. (Nearly $2 million in 2025 dollars.)

Then the sorting began. Piece by piece, the I-Team was assembling a picture of Ramirez. In their reporting, they also shook loose some documents from federal investigations, including a Customs report documenting how Ramirez was fined after he reported a false hijacking in 1978 to evade surveillance and likely smuggle people into Florida.

What they were finding all made for quite a story — a small Minnesota town corrupted by a mysterious but flamboyant outsider.

“It was just a delicious story to start with,” Shelby said. “This story was just unbelievable.”

Shelby was no stranger to small town shenanigans. He had grown up in a small town of Royerton, Indiana, just outside of Muncie, Indiana, which had been studied as a typical American Midwest small town. It had also once been known as “Little Chicago” and had a long history of corruption and dirty politics.

In previous jobs at stations in Texas and elsewhere, Shelby had covered the mob and made connections in the world of organized crime.

“So I knew how corruption worked,” he said. “I knew because I saw it firsthand, and how you could manipulate the government to benefit a few as opposed to the many.”

The palm trees. The police cars. Taking folks from the retirement home out to dinner. Expanding the airport. Palling around with the mayor. Bankrolling a youth hockey arena.

It all smelled of corruption.

“He is just corrupting everyone he sees…ingratiating himself into every conceivable nook and cranny of that community, and in doing so, corrupting people,” Shelby said. “But genius work — he was a genius. He had it figured out.”

MID-APRIL 1982 - Princess Hotel, Acapulco, Mexico

Bob Manary watched Casey Ramirez’s window in the Princess Hotel. Behind the window curtain, many people came and went. From his balcony, Manary couldn’t tell who they were.

Interesting. Manary made a note.

Manary, the WCCO photojournalist, had flown to Acapulco — on Mexico's Pacific coast south of Mexico City — to gather more information on Ramirez.

He had told Ramirez he hoped to do another story about him, a feel-good piece about Princeton’s growth.

Apparently he hoped to contribute to Shelby’s ongoing I-Team investigation, even though, according to Shelby, he wasn’t involved in it directly, nor was Shelby aware he was in Mexico (In a recent interview, Manary disagreed on this point).

But Princeton was Manary’s hometown, and he had doggedly stayed on the Ramirez story ever since he first interviewed the man a year prior, in April 1981.

He had stayed in touch with the DEA too, including special agent Michele Leonhart, protecting her identity by marking her name as “M” and "Lady" in his scrawled notes on the case.

Manary carefully made notes of Ramirez’s actions around the hotel. On Friday night, at the hotel's Laguna Bar, he noted: “Casey says he’s been to Colombia in the past month ... 'I got to lay low for about three months,'" he quoted Ramirez as saying.

He noted the “lots” of stamps in Ramirez’s passport, and asked him about his girlfriend, Pam Jackson, whom Ramirez called P.J., wondering if she liked living in Princeton.

“P.J. likes the community. She gets to travel, but it’s like Peyton Place (there). She doesn’t like that,’” Ramirez said, per Manary’s notes, mentioning the 1960s TV drama about a small town with deep secrets.

“My job was to get as many pictures of Casey as I could,” Manary wrote in later written recollections about Princeton and Ramirez. “We went horseback riding in the surf and parasailing the next morning. I got my pictures.”

In one video shot taken by Manary, Ramirez approaches a man and introduces himself in Spanish as “Diego.”

Manary later made sure that videotaped moment got to Shelby, who said he was surprised to find out Manary had also been chasing Shelby’s quarry this whole time.

Shelby wasn't happy. But he did incorporate Manary’s footage into the final cut of the I-Team investigation.

The I-Team's big four-part series was ready to air during the upcoming sweeps week, starting on Monday, May 24.

THE WEEKEND OF MAY 22-23, 1982 - Princeton

The mood in Princeton in late May was tense. The I-Team reporters weren’t the only journalists chasing the Ramirez story and it was causing Princeton some real heartburn.

On Saturday, May 22, 1982, the St. Cloud Times ran a pair of front page stories: “Princeton turns shy in spotlight” and “Who is Princeton’s mysterious benefactor?”

The Times noted that Princeton was “close-mouthed” and “skittish” when it came to discussing Ramirez. Mayor Richard Anderson had checked himself into the hospital with stomach trouble. Police Chief Tom McCarthy had taken the week off work to “tinker in his garage.”

Ramirez seems to have made himself relatively scarce, as well. The Princeton paper had already reported: Ramirez had already stepped down from his seat on the Airport Commission, with a letter from his attorney saying the role was “jeopardizing his personal and family life and his privacy.”

The Times quoted Jerry Davis, the youth hockey booster and one-time manager of the Princeton Co-op Credit Union, who would later be found guilty of several felony counts for not reporting Ramirez’s big cash deposits. He had recently resigned from the job and was now manager of the youth hockey arena bankrolled by Ramirez.

Davis pooh-poohed the talk about Ramirez and his activities.

“It’s all just small-town rumors,” he said. “The first thing when I resigned from the credit union, someone came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I heard you embezzled some money.’ You don’t pay attention to small-town rumors.”

The Minneapolis Star and Tribune published a front-page package on Ramirez the next day. It had some of the details about Ramirez the WCCO team would soon air, but not everything.

Still, there were very interesting nuggets.

Ramirez had first lived in, then purchased Mayor Richard Anderson’s house, the reporting noted. The house's indoor pool was ringed by palm trees, the ones from city hall, but brought in for the winter.

The article also described how Ramirez had once taken residents of the Elim Home, a retirement home in Princeton, out for dinner at The Farm Supper Club. Dolly Fairchild, formerly Princeton’s city clerk, was effusive in her praise of Ramirez as she discussed the event.

“He thanked the old people for coming, for letting him take them to dinner. He said it was a privilege for him because they were the backbone of Princeton, the people who had helped build the town,” she said. “He didn’t talk for long, but nearly everyone was crying when he got through.

“Casey is good for Princeton. He’s exciting. He’s alive. He loves people and he wants to do things to help them.”

WCCO paid for a large newspaper ad promoting the upcoming I-Team report. It prominently featured Princeton’s town sign, and the words: “Princeton, Minnesota’s got it all. Palm trees. An airport. And a millionaire sugar daddy who isn’t as sweet as he seems.”

MAY 24, 1982 – Princeton City Hall

The next day, on Monday, Mayor Richard Anderson called a special meeting of the Princeton City Council to order.

It was noon on May 24, 1982. The subject: Casey Ramirez.

Things were tense in the wood-paneled room. Everyone knew about the WCCO I-Team report that was going to start airing that night.

Joel Stottrup, the Princeton Union-Eagle newspaper reporter, was there too.

The council's first order of business was to ban Stottrup from taking any photos — a request from Casey Ramirez, as a condition for him to attend. He had actually requested the special meeting, to address any questions about the I-Team report.

The no-photos vote was unanimous, demanding the reporter put his camera away. There would be no photos at this public meeting of a body of public officials. Anderson warned Stottrup police would enforce the restriction.

Once present, Ramirez informed the city council the WCCO I-Team report, which was due to air later that evening, was "sensationalism and he was 'really hurt about it,'” Stottrup reported.

All of his giving to the city and its people came with no strings attached, Ramirez insisted.

He seemed wounded.

“You (the city) were running into deficits and I came along,” he said, according to Stottrup's reporting of the meeting.

Some city council members asked Ramirez to put some commitments about the airport in writing, or seek a letter of financial ability.

Ramirez declined both. It was an pair of unusually unfriendly requests.

There was another blow to Ramirez that day. The Princeton Civic Betterment Club had voted 25-5 against Ramirez's request to put palm trees up and down LaGrande Avenue.

While town officials appeared to still be in Ramirez’s corner, the media attention was taking a toll. There seemed to be growing skepticism in Princeton about Ramirez and his plans.

THAT NIGHT – WCCO TV, Channel 4

The WCCO broadcast at 10 p.m. that night exploded across Minnesota. Its biggest boom was felt in Princeton.

The camera slowly zoomed in on Shelby. The monitor next to him showed a freeze frame of a tousled-hair Casey Ramirez, wearing a blue polo shirt, palm trees in the background. It was one of Bob Manary’s shots from Mexico.

“Several years ago, Casey Ramirez arrived in Princeton. He was warmly received by the people there,” Shelby said. “In return, Casey has done a lot for Princeton — he’s spent a lot of money. Casey claims he’s worth $750 million, right up there with the Rockefellers."

Shelby tilted his head slightly.

“Yet no one seems to know much about him, and that’s exactly the way Casey wants it.”

The Ramirez investigation aired one segment a night, which meant Shelby wrapped it up on Thursday.

Shelby revealed that Davis, the credit union manager hadn't simply left his job for health reasons or to work at the Ramirez-bankrolled hockey arena.

In fact, Davis had himself, as credit union manager, signed off on what was essentially a letter of credit for construction the hockey arena without informing the credit union's board of directors

That meant the credit union refused to pay a contractor when the bill came due. Ramirez himself had to fly in bags of cash to pay the $128,360 bill—in $20 bills.

The I-Team also revealed Ramirez was under investigation by federal and state law enforcement. It showed he operated a number of aliases — among them Dr. Ramirez, Casey Jackson, Mike Chambers, Dr. Diego, John Key, George King and Dr. Casey.

None of Ramirez’s claims about where he got his wealth checked out, Shelby said. He wasn’t a major stockholder of Apple Computers. He hadn’t gotten a patent for any invention. He wasn’t a director of Republic Airlines, an owner of airplane companies or an inheritor of large wealth.

In the final broadcast, Shelby described Princeton as a small town caught in a tangled web from “a man who deals in lies.”

“This has not been an ordinary story of corruption. The people of Princeton, caught up in Casey’s ventures are, so far as we can tell, honest, trusting people — nice people.”

Shelby smiled slightly.

“They believe, some still do, that Casey’s gifts were good for the town. But the gifts have come at a cost to Princeton,” he solemnly intoned. “Princeton will emerge from the Casey crisis intact, no doubt, a little wiser than before and a little sadder. And the rest of us are left to wonder how we would act if Casey had come to our town.”

***

Many in Princeton were not impressed with the I-Team's reporting and its conclusions, even if some of them agreed with it. Some flew to the town’s own defense.

“I find it highly distasteful to have the ‘truth’ rammed down my throat by big-city reporters condescending to help the poor, dumb hoe-handles up north get their facts straight,” wrote one resident in a letter to the Princeton Union-Eagle.

The Union-Eagle, for its part, was unsparing in its criticism of Mayor Richard Anderson and the Princeton City Council after the WCCO report. The I-Team's revelations had unearthed damning information.

"It seems to us that the mayor and the council may experience the greatest embarrassment for accepting so much, and being party to so many transactions, even making out receipts to an alias, without really knowing with whom they are dealing,” the unsigned editorial said. “It is one thing for a private citizen to accept favors but quite another for public officials to do so."

Ramirez struck back. He ran a mocking ad in a Minneapolis newspaper featuring a handdrawn image. It showed Shelby ramming his foot into his mouth and a mustachioed photographer, possibly Manary, staring at him in befuddlement.

Manary received a postcard, addressed from the Princeton airport, Ramirez’s home base, reading: “We had a really great time in Acapulco. Hope we can do it again sometime. By the way, once you choose your friends, you’re stuck with them.”

It was signed, simply, “Casey.”

Ramirez also ran a large advertisement in a Princeton shopper publication, a full-page ad with clip art of palm trees in the corner, that read:

“To all the people of the Princeton area ... who have had their daily routine interrupted by outside interests, I offer a special thank you for taking much of the excitement in stride, knowing full well that what makes good copy in a story does not necessarily make it right! Now maybe we can get back to the business of running our own lives again. With warmest regards, Casey.”

Many in Princeton still sprung to his defense, and the city council still seemed willing to work with Ramirez — even accepting gifts from him.

Soon after the I-Team report aired, Ramirez told town officials that going forward, his donations would be made anonymously — although everyone would still know who made them.

Then, coincidentally, the city council happened to be offered two 1982 diesel Oldsmobile Cutlasses for the Princeton Police Department, under a $1 a car two-year annual lease from Odegard Motors, with the costs otherwise covered by an anonymous donor.

The council decided it couldn’t find any harm in accepting the offer.

The donor was anonymous, after all.

***

At the Minneapolis DEA office, the team investigating Ramirez was frustrated by the I-Team report.

They had known it was coming, and talked to Shelby before it aired, telling him it could potentially harm the investigation.

Shelby disagreed.

“Don Shelby told [DEA Minneapolis office chief] Jim Braseth that, ‘You’re going to get more informants and more information once we air this than you’ll ever need,” said John Boulger, on the DEA task force investigating Ramirez, in a recent interview.

“After it aired, my recollection is we got one call from someone in a mental institution. That was it. That was the whole extent of what was promised, or what we got from it,” he said. “It drove everyone underground. It was not at all helpful.”

And for Ramirez?

“I didn’t slow him down a bit.”

Ramirez wasn't done publicly mocking the I-Team's report about him.

At the the town’s annual Rum River Festival parade in June, Casey dressed up like a clown, painted dollar signs on his cheek and drove a manure spreader he labeled “I-Team,” throwing out candy filled paper bags stamped with the words “Casey’s Brown Paper Bag” and a dollar sign.

“And, somehow, that entry in the parade got a first-place award,” wrote Luther Dorr, editor of the Princeton newspaper.

Dorr noted that despite all of the furor, Casey hadn’t done one key thing — deny much of anything (He had rejected a meeting with the newspaper).

Ramirez did give an interview to a newspaper he likely figured was much more sympathetic: the Mille Lacs Messenger, the weekly newspaper in Isle, Minnesota, a small town on Lake Mille Lacs, about 50 miles north of Princeton.

After the WCCO report, the Messenger had printed an unsigned editorial calling the I-Team the “Innuendo Team.”

“Whether Casey is guilty of anything is not WCCO’s business,” the editorial said. “He was tried by a jury of his smears!”

Jay Andersen, editor of the weekly newspaper ostensibly interviewed Ramirez because he was seeking to do in Isle what he had done in Princeton: upgrade the local airport and use it as a base of operations.

In his interview with Andersen published July 8, 1982, Ramirez had a lot to say about the I-Team’s report.

“They made me the Jesse James of Princeton and I haven’t done any harm to anyone. I’m really disappointed that they mentioned drugs or white slavery and that … that’s a cheap shot,” he said. “Some things I don’t deny, if you can ask me a direct question, if I can answer you, I will.”

He then refused to answer direct questions about the source of his money.

A few weeks later, Shelby responded with a broadside of a letter to the editor, essentially answering the Messenger’s editorial. He laid out the I-Team’s approach and what it found on Ramirez, and then closed with a warning.

“When Casey runs, which is predicted, he will leave Princeton holding a very large bag,” he wrote. “We thought it was important to get these facts out to the Princeton people not to increase our ratings but to get the facts to them before they made themselves further victims of Casey. … We couldn’t in conscience remain silent while the city continued to accept Ramirez’s lies and promises absent of the true facts.”

"I will go to my grave

knowing

that we performed a necessary service," Shelby concluded (italics in the original).

SUMMER/FALL/WINTER 1982 - Princeton

In Princeton, despite everything, city leaders still seemed to accept what Ramirez had told them them.

Some even had a bit of fun with it.

In June the city council accepted the gift of a new airport beacon from Ramirez. But the council did require a written application for a fly-in he wanted to host at the airport in September.

In mid-July, with application in hand, the Princeton Airport Commission signed off on Ramirez’s plans for the fly-in.

In the meeting, Commissioner Dick Nelles was paraphrased as saying, “there was a lot of money the state didn't have to spend [on the airport] because of donations from John Key,” wrote Joel Stottrup, the Princeton Union-Eagle reporter.

“Nelles was asked after the meeting who John Key was and he answered he was only making fun of the alias names tacked onto Casey Ramirez during the recent WCCO I-Team report on Ramirez," Stottrup wrote.

Two hundred and sixty aircraft flew into Princeton for the fly-in.

Ramirez continue his public demonstrations of affection. In late September, he took 150 Elim Home residents and 40 people from the Oaks affordable-housing apartments out to dinner at the Sunset Ridge Supper Club.

That year, Anderson decided not to run for mayor, after nine years in office. He later touted the expanded airport as a signature achievement in a profile written by Joel Stottrup, the Princeton Union-Eagle reporter.

Asked about Ramirez and the WCCO report, which questioned why the city council hadn’t questioned Ramirez more before accepting donations, Anderson struck back.

“Anderson’s answer to the inquiry was that Ramirez was judged without sufficient evidence and that he could see no possible gain for Ramirez in any of his donations,” Stottrup wrote.

Instead Casey ran for mayor, as a last-minute write-in candidate. He ran a large print advertisement touting himself as a candidate for “managing mayor” — “Your choice. Your voice,” it read.

He printed 150 posters and 1,500 flyers and distributed them the week prior to the vote. He got 109 votes out of a total of 1,409.

Yet despite his low electoral turnout, and some rumbles of dissent, Princeton’s leadership seemed still in step with Ramirez.

Fresh off his electoral defeat, Ramirez — wearing a cowboy hat — cut the ribbon on the new Princeton Youth Hockey Arena. There was a buffet lunch for the hundreds who attended and Richard Dwyer, a professional skater, gave two performances.

Asked who paid for everything, arena manager Jerry Davis, formerly of the Princeton Co-op Credit Union, demurred, saying he didn’t know.

As 1983 dawned, Ramirez launched a surprise salvo of New Year’s Eve fireworks from the city airport.

At its first meeting of the year, the city council agreed 3-2 to buy advertisements declaring Princeton as “Home of the Northern Palms.”

That had all been Casey’s idea.

His friend, Mayor Richard Anderson, cast the decisive vote.

But no amount of support from Princeton city leaders could shield him from what was about to happen in far-off Florida — and The Bahamas.

<<< Read Part 3 Read Part 4 >>> Follow the seriesNotes: This article is based on interviews for this article with Boulger, Leonhart, Manary, Nimmer and Shelby, as well as Manary’s contemporaneous reporting notes from 1981-1983 and his 1992 recollection column given to Princeton native Kevin Odegard, the Oct. 22, 2009, Minnesota Monthly article

“The Last Don” by Tim Gihring,

clips of WCCO news

collected online by TC Media Now,

microfilmed copies of the Isle, Minnesota, and Princeton, Minnesota newspapers housed in the collections of the

Minnesota History Center

in St. Paul, the personal collection of Kevin Odegard, Princeton Union-Eagle photos and clippings and Ramirez items archived by the

Mille Lacs County Historical Society

in Princeton, and coverage of Ramirez by various Minnesota newspapers archived on

Newspapers.com.

Anderson and Ramirez never responded to multiple interview requests. Davis and Stottrup declined to be interviewed. Deceased are Austin (2018), Dorr (2023), McCarthy (2011), Nelles (2020) and chmidt (1998).]]>