For their planned invasion of Haiti in 1966, the leaders chose a "safe house" in a white Miami neighborhood. The American soldiers of fortune moved in. So did 30 black Haitians and some Cubans. Trucks brought in equipment. In the mornings, Cubans would put on their camouflage commando outfits and walk down to 8th Street for coffee. Neighbors became suspicious. They called police. The leaders wondered who had betrayed them.

In January, when Pedro Martinez and Jose Antonio Prat announced they were recruiting mercenaries for the Angola fighting, journalists flocked to their room at the Imperial Motel on Flagler Street. The recruitment drive proved to be nothing, but it did re-focus attention on the fact that Miami could easily be considered the soldier-of-fortune capital of the United States, "the Casablanca of the Caribbean," as it has often been called.

South Florida has long been the scene of commandos training in the Everglades and politicos plotting invasions. Many conspiracies never got any farther than the barroom door. Others Began, only to end when the boats were caught on sandbars in Biscayne Bay. A few have actually been carried out, though most of these ended in comic-opera chaos or suicidal bravery.

The "CBS invasion" of Haiti started in Miami. So did the firebombing of the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince. A onetime Miami adventurer played a small role in the plot which eventually resulted in the helicopter escape of Joel Kaplan from a Mexican prison in 1971. And, of course, four of the five Watergate burglars were Miamians.

When Angola's civil war broke out, Miami's soldiers of fortune started renewing old "contacts," calling each other to share information, reading published accounts that mercenaries in Angola were making $1,100-$1,300 a month and getting $20,000 life-insurance policies. The romantic guns-for-hire were back in the news.

None in the Miami area, as far as is known, have gone to Africa. Some say they would, if they were certain the offer was legitimate (meaning the money was real). That doesn't mean much. "There is a huge difference between those who talk and those who act," says Ralph Edens, a contributing editor for Soldier of Fortune magazine. "When it comes time for the boat to leave, a lot of guys say they have to do their laundry."

Miami's adventurers are of two disparate types, neither of which resembles the European mercenaries who have been fighting in Africa's civil wars.

One group is Cuban. In the beginning, they were trying to regain their homeland and, in at least two instances, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Artime brigade in Central America, they were organized into a quasi-official army, financed and trained by CIA funds.

Some went to the Congo, motivated by a mixture of money and patriotism (believing they were fighting Che Guevara and Communism). More recently, sources say, many of these U.S.-trained Cubans were willing to go to Angola. They have spent a large portion of their adult lives in combat training: it has become their profession and their enthusiasm. But, because of their backgrounds, they are not soldiers of fortune in the accepted sense of the word.

More true to the image are the Americans who have wandered down to Miami, looking for adventure and money, willing to fight for someone else's cause. Most of their action, such as it was, happened in the '60s. They have wives and children now, regular jobs, most of them, though occasionally there is talk about the Abaco independence movement in the Bahamas.

They are romantics, and they tell fantastic stories of adventure, perhaps half of which are true. The fabricated escapades, the dreams, are as much a part of their milieu as the adventures themselves. "One wonders where fact and fantasy divide," a Washington Star reporter wrote about the life of Watergate burglar Frank Fiorini Sturgis, and the comment holds true for the group as a whole.

The Americans drifted into Miami in the early '60s. Most were in their early 20s: They had just been discharged from the armed forces, and they were bored. Then they heard that the CIA was paying good salaries for soldiers willing to fight against Castro. "There were rumors in bars all over the U.S.," says Ralph Edens. "I don't know how word got to Oshkosh and Seattle, but it did."

Edens was from West Virginia, had been a Navy radio operator for - three years. Miami "seemed like a pretty good place to get some excitement."

Martin F. X. Casey had been in the Marine Corps for three years. He was "kicked out of Mexico -that's a whole other story" - and arrived in Miami with "a peso, 65 centavos in my pocket." He went to the UPI office and asked how he could get in touch with a soldier-of-fortune group. A UPI staffer told him, and he ended up moving into a hotel on NW 2nd Street, in a small room with two other men. He hid his mattress under one of the beds, which he pulled out when it was time to sleep. "Nobody paid any rent," says Casey. "We always said, "Catch you next week."

Both Casey and Edens are considered by journalists and fellow soldiers of fortune to be quite factual in their story telling. Also, many of their adventures are well documented because they kept getting caught.

On April 11, six days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Edens and five other soldiers of fortune "took" a 42-foot boat in Key West. Their plan was to bring it back to Miami, turn it over to exile leader Rolando Masferrer, who would use it to go to Cuba. Using a Masferrer map, the pilot led them right onto a sandbar outside the Key West harbor, where they were arrested.

Edens and the others sat through the Bay of Pigs in a Key West jail. When they went to court, the captain refused to say who the boat's real owner was, and the men were freed. Edens says the boat belonged to the CIA.

That didn't mean the American adventurers worked for the CIA. Outside of several Alabama pilots who flew for the Bay of Pigs and the CIA's regular agents, Americans simply weren't wanted. "Any Miami soldier of fortune who claims he was paid by the CIA is full of it," says one. Cubans were kept on the payroll during the '60s as contract employees, but the CIA was not an equal-opportunity employer: American mercenaries were not the image that the U.S. government wanted to project.

CIA's agents in Miami merely kept an eye on the Americans, following their activities, perhaps clamping down if a plot was not to their liking. At least that was what the soldiers of fortune assumed.

It would certainly be unfair-to call them mercenaries. Though most of their schemes held out the promise of money, they never saw much of it. Perhaps a few free meals or a place to stay were given for short periods by wealthy Cuban exiles promoting la causa, but that was all. "There were a lot of plans made, a lot of broken dreams," says Casey. "But there was never any money."

When the lack of funds became obvious, the less committed dropped out and the hard core began congregating at a boarding house at 1925 SW 4th Street, run by a gray-haired septuagenarian named Nellie Hamilton. Edens and Casey lived there. So did "Little Joe" German, who was six-foot-three and the son of a Kentucky judge; William Dempsey, a Canadian with a withered arm; and Edmund Kolby, a Finnish-born veteran of the Green Berets. All except German were later arrested for bombing the Presidential Palace in Haiti.

In Nellie's side yard, Jerry Patrick Hemming used to drill the commandos, and the men hid weapons in her storage shack. Once, Nellie emerged carrying a hand grenade by the ring. "What's this, boys?" she asked. Edens gingerly took the grenade away from her.

Nellie professed not to know what the "boys" were up to, but a Herald writer once quoted an unnamed CIA agent as calling her "Mother Hubbard and her commandos."

She was tolerant about the commandos not paying their rent on time, and allowed them to make up for it by mowing the lawn, trimming hedges, washing dishes. When she died, more than one soldier of fortune still owed her money.

Edens thinks Nellie may have been lenient because she had another clientele, persons just released from state mental institutions. Their room and board was paid for by the state. "She kept a lot of nuts around there, and some were senile," says Edens. "Your could joke that we were pretty nutty too, with some of the stuff we were doing, but at least we were rational and coherent."

One of Nellie's most regular tenants, living at the boarding house on and off between 1963 and 1969, was a fellow who had minor roles in a number of plots, but was never arrested. He does not want his name used, and he chooses the nom de guerre, as it were, of "Skinny."

Skinny had been in charterboat work, and made several gun-running trips to Cuba.in the '50s. In 1962, during the intermission for a movie, The Great Train Robbery, at the Olympia Theater in downtown Miami, "I heard a voice out of the past. It was Fat Earl, and he talked to me about the 'Cuban thing.' 'Sounds great,' I said. 'Who do I see?'"

Skinny became part of the plots and the never-ending commando training in the Everglades. Today, he looks back at it with unmitigated cynicism. "I was wasting time, like everybody else. A great excuse. You no longer had to work for a living - you could sit there and do nothing, and feel worthwhile. Instead of saying you were unemployed, you said you were a soldier of fortune."

People came and went. Edens wandered north, tried college, returned, went away again in '64 to work in the Goldwater campaign. Others found jobs that took them elsewhere, but most of the hard core eventually returned to Nellie's. There was always a plot floating around somewhere. "It was a very loose grouping," says Edens. "You'd say, 'I'm working with Masferrer,' or with this person or that one. . . Actually, there wasn't much going on."

Occasionally, especially in the very early days of the Castro regime, raids did occur, and people died. In October 1960, Castro executed three Miamians: Bobby Fuller, 25, who had been raised in Cuba; Anthony Zarba, 28, a friend of Fuller's from Miami High days; and Allen Dale Thompson, who was described as a "down-on-his-luck fisherman." A month later, Floyd W. Moody, 25, a buddy of Fuller's said to be "a jobless bakery wagon driver," disappeared on a revenge bombing mission.

Others, too, disappeared or were reported killed in Cuba, including countless Cuban exiles. Each of their raids could be a story unto itself. In the early days of the Castro regime, the "Freedom Fighters" were intense and, for the most part, sincere. It was only as the '60s wore on, as frustration and inaction mounted, that the drama started turning to farce.

One who was on at least the periphery of much of the plotting was Jerry Patrick Hemming. In the early '60s, Hemming looked the way a soldier of fortune is supposed to look: six-foot-five, trim build, `goatee, with a penchant for wearing an Australian bush hat, fatigue shirt and camouflage pants.

Often, he trained commandos, like in the International Penetration Force, which had 30-40 paratroopers. Once, he was supposed to lead a large training camp in Louisiana, but it never opened. Too much publicity, its founders claimed.

Fellow adventurers have a nearly unanimous opinion of Hemming. They find him likable, but they believe only a fraction of what he says.

These days, Hemming has an office in the Jose Marti Building on SW 8th Street. The sign in the lobby directory says merely "Hemming." He arrives for work about 2:30 in the afternoon. He says he works for a trucking company, but he gives a visitor a business card which calls him "operations director" of Parabellum Corp., a group started in October 1971 by Rolando Masferrer and others for the sale of military armaments to domestic and foreign markets. The corporation has been defunct since 1973.

Hemming says that he was in the U.S. Marines, went to Cuba and fought with Castro (as an agent for a U.S. government group), snuck out of Cuba in 1960, became associated with revolutionaries in Nicaragua and, in September 1960, went to California, where he was debriefed by a domestic office of the CIA for four weeks. Then he came to Miami.

Part of this story is verifiable: The U.S. Marines report that Hemming was in service from 1954 to 1958. He was an aviation control tower operator and his last duty station was the Marine barracks at Annapolis, one of the service's plum assignments. He was a sergeant when he received an honorable discharge. "He was a very good Marine," says a corporal in the service's public information office after looking at Hemming's record.

In his Miami tales, Hemming mostly talks about training commandos, and having to move camp when media publicity or CIA pressure became too heavy. Only twice in a long, rambling conversation does he mention escapades. One was in August 1961, when he went to the northern coast of Cuba to "insert" four Cuban operatives for the CIA.

During the early '60s, says Hemming, he stayed at the Congress Inn on LeJeune Road, where various groups made available "free meals, booze and what have you." He put his troops up at Nellie's, he. says, but he never stayed there himself. (Several of Nellie's habitues say that Hemming was a longtime tenant at the boarding house.)

Whatever else Hemming may be, he is well read. He can remember details from a year-old Tropic story and the names he drops are the right ones, like mentioning Jim Noel was the CIA station chief in Havana during the Batista era.

In fact, the group as a whole is amazingly well read, considering that they are not college graduate, intellectual types. (An exception is Robert K. Brown, editor of Soldier of Fortune, who has a master's in political science from the University of. Colorado.) Marty Casey, for one, can identify two paintings used to illustrate Tropic articles five years ago. Ralph Edens, when he talks about the nearly incredible Deputies' Invasion of Haiti, can walk to his bookcase and pull out a copy of Papa Doc, by Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, which describes the incident.

The Deputies' Invasion story is told by many of the Miami adventurers, because it in some small way justifies their own near-farcical attempts to take over the island.

The story goes like this. In July 1958, eight men - three former Haitian army officers, two Dade County sheriff's deputies and three American adventurers - left Key West aboard the 55-foot Molly C. According to a later investigation by the sheriff's office in Miami, several other deputies had participated in planning the invasion, on the idea that each would be paid $2,000. But before the boat took off, the men were having to put up their own money to get the "revolution" underway.

The Molly C. landed in Haiti, and the men sped unmolested to the army barracks near the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince. They captured the barracks easily, but they had two problems. One was that, unknown to them, Papa Doc Duvalier had removed most of the arms and ammunition from the barracks area.

That in itself was not enough to kill their plan. According to Diederich and Burt, Duvalier had assumed that the barracks had been taken by a large force. He began packing his bags for a quick flight into exile.

Then came problem No. 2. One of the invaders, a Haitian who had been living in exile in Miami, had an urge for a local brand of cigarettes called Spleadids. Just before dawn, he sent one of the captured army men out to get him a pack.

The officer told Duvalier aides that only eight rebels were inside the barracks. Papa Doc, so the story goes, unpacked his bags and, after many assurances, talked his men into attacking. All eight were killed..

The moral to the tale, frdm the Miami adventurers' view, was that the plot had almost succeeded. Thus they justified their participation in one of the most ill-founded, mismanaged schemes since. . . Well, afterwards, it was called the Bay of Piglets.

Casey and the others had already gone through one Haitian plot, in 1964, with much Everglades training, before their financing - which, Casey says, was coming into Miami in the form of African francs - evaporated. But that whetted their appetite and; in 1966, Casey, Edens, Dempsey, Skinny and others joined in what was to be known as the "CBS invasion."

The leaders were Rolando Masferrer, former commander of a private army in Cuba and a prominent anti-Castro conspirator, and Father Jean-Baptiste Georges, a onetime Haitian minister of education before turning against Duvalier. Their idea was to invade Haiti with Cuban, Haitian and American volunteers, then quickly launch an attack from there against Castro.

The scheme was doomed from the beginning, if it was ever meant to succeed. Even before police investigated the "safe house" crowded with Haitians and Cubans, the U.S. government knew what was going on, and the plotters knew the government knew. Casey, Skinny and Edens even made a game of it, walking out to the car where U.S. Customs officials sat, asking them for a match or the time of day. The Customs car then disappeared only to be replaced an hour later by another unmarked car.

The leaks were many. One was a CBS cameraman, who reported regularly to the CIA. CBS "was everywhere," says Casey, during the training. The network had agreed to contribute money in return for exclusive coverage. Altogether, it is estimated that CBS put $170,000 into the campaign. Afterwards, Julio Hormilla, who lost one eye and three fingers in a training accident, collected $15,000 from CBS by alleging that he was entitled to workmen's compensation for being, in effect, a bit actor in a CBS drama.

Another problem was Father Georges. Casey remembers the priest often talking about a man named Francisco. " 'Francisco says this.' 'Francisco says that.' I assumed that Francisco was one of the conspirators." Then Casey learned the truth: Francisco was a spirit Father Georges consulted through a Cuban bruja (witch) in Miami.

By that time, it was too late. Perhaps 100 men gathered at a beach house in the Florida Keys near Marathon. Inside were 120,000 rounds of ammunition, three tons of explosives and, thanks to CBS, the finest array of machine guns and rifles that any of the American adventurers had ever been associated with. In the window sat an impressive 50-caliber machine gun.

Four boats were supposed to go to Marathon, to take the men and weapons to Haiti. One was an "old shrimp boat with frozen gears and 13 ribs rotted away," says Casey. It didn't make it. Another sank in the river. A third hit a sandbar. One boat showed up, and the leaders, after some debate, decided it should take Father Georges, Masferrer and the weapons to the Bahamas for safekeeping.

They didn't have a chance. U.S. Customs officials, sided by Monroe County deputies, showed up. Trouble was, they were not expecting to arrest so many. They ordered the commander to line up while they called in buses to haul the men to jail.

Some Cubans were talked into starting a fight among themselves. They did and, in the confusion, Edens, Casey and a dozen others started crawling through the pines. Then, says Casey, a Cuban named Julio Anton Constanzo Palau came running through the woods screaming. Constanzo got away, but Customs officers caught the others.

Edens arranged for another fight. He and Dempsey sneaked into the darkness and, by hitchhiking and Greyhound, made their way back to safety in Miami. They were never arrested. (Casey, who was unable to escape, was later sentenced to nine months for violating the U.S. Neutrality Act, the charge which always loomed for the soldiers of fortune.)

Constanzo made it back to Miami, too, but not without penalty. A veteran Cuban adventurer, Constanzo ran to the Overseas Highway, where he flagged down a car with two teenagers in it. Constanzo, who knew little English, climbed into the car, waved two hand grenades at the occupants and said, "Go Miami." The kids went.

Along the way, Constanzo occasionally uttered "Johnson good." Or: "Castro bad." "Go Miami." When the car entered the city, Constanzo directed the driver to his home. He invited the kids inside, gave them cups of Cuban coffee and $10. Later that morning, he called The Miami News, gave his real name, bragged that he had been part of the invasion plot and had not been captured.

All of that was later documented at the trial, but, says Casey, it was not what caused Constanzo's arrest. That didn't happen until a week later, after Customs announced that it had no place to store the confiscated weapons. Could the owners please come down and claim them? Constanzo sent an aide, who couldn't tell which guns belonged to his boss. Conatanzo, angered, went down himself. He showed the agents which were his guns, and it was then, says Casey, that he was arrested.

In the aftermath of the failed invasion, there were accusations and counter-accusations among the commandos. The Haitian consul in Miami said Masferrer had offered to call off the plot for $200,000. The rotting boats, some adventurers said, had cost far lees than the money budgeted for them. Where had the rest of the money gone? And who had been agents for the government, revealing the plans? The Americans, especially, felt ripped off. They had received no money, had even supplied their own AR-15 rifles, which were confiscated during the raid.

While talk. of the "CBS invasion" was still going on, the Americans at Nellie's came up with another scheme. A friend of theirs, Francisco Avila, was in a Cuban prison, caught after landing on the island with the idea of assassinating Castro. Edens, Casey, Dempsey and two other Americans, along with some Cubans, planned to take a boat, kidnap some Cuban fishermen and offer Castro an exchange: the fishermen for Avila. "Of course," says Skinny, one of the conspirators, "Castro couldn't have been blackmailed. He would have just shot the guy and called our bluff." At the time, though, it seemed like a good idea.

All five Americans tell the same story of what happened, except for minor details. No records, outside of a few snapshots, exist of the escapade because no arrests were made, but it is not the kind of tale people fabricate.

The boat was outfitted by the Cubans, because the Americans feared they were being watched, with money provided by Edens and others who had just returned from ferrying a tugboat to Southeast Asia.

The group left at night, going out the Miami River, all the way to. . . well, to Stiltsville, where they ran aground. When they got the boat off the sandbar, they went on. Somewhere in the Bahamas, the generator gave out. About a half-dozen extra batteries were on board None of them worked. The boat drifted. The men fished. For three or four days.

Once, a sport fisherman approached. Most of the commandos took their weapons and disappeared below deck as the others waved for help. The boat turned and sped away. Dempsey, angered, fired a shot over the fleeing boat. The other men grabbed guns and did the same, shooting above the boat, not at it, venting their frustration.

Later, a fishing vessel manned by Miami Cubans appeared and loaned them a battery. The commandos headed back toward Miami. On the way, running without lights to conserve the battery, they were almost run over by a freighter. Skinny, rushing to signal with a flashlight, grabbed at the cabin top. "The rotten goddam thing came off in my hand." Skinny fell overboard. The commandos circled in the boat until they found him.

Back in Miami, they cooked a large wahoo they had caught and made rice. The rice was soapy, because someone hadn't rinsed the pan. "It was a damn good wahoo," gays Skinny. "And we all said, 'Well, that was fun. What will we do tomorrow?'"

The answer was another Haitian invasion, much of which ended up extremely well documented in court records. The money came from Haitian exiles.

Dempsey, Edens and the others began the old commando camp routine: picking a secluded spot in the Everglades, hollowing out a campsite in a hammock, setting up punji-stake traps, putting pie plates in the trees. They started the Haitians with BB guns. The Haitians had to run through the trees, shooting at the plates, seeing how fast they could go.

To make certain that this plot did not end in another fiasco, says Casey, "the State Department was informed. We figured, 'Look, they're going to find out anyway. Let's tell them right off the bat.'" Casey says he also contacted a Georgia arms dealer. The code word was "Goldflow," but Casey couldn't remember which one of them was supposed to be Goldflow. The two argued for five minutes before agreeing that they knew what was happening.

Things were going well, says Casey, when a young Haitian, Gerald Baker, was killed during a live-ammo training mission in the Everglades. Monroe County deputies and journalists overran the site, and Skinny had to rush around, disarming the more dangerous stake traps so no one would be hurt.

"After that," says Casey, "no one wanted to know our names. Everything went downhill. We couldn't get any money." Skinny left to get married. The others decided to carry out "George," as they called their alternate plan.

In June 1969, Lawrence J. Carlin taxied a Lockheed Constellation down the runway at Miami International Airport. Twice the hydraulic and engine systems balked, and Carlin aborted the takeoff. On the third try, the plane was airborne.

At South Caicos, the adventurers were waiting with weapons. But there was a problem. Confusion. Arguments. Casey and Edens had been expecting 50 or more Haitian exiles, who would launch the revolution while the Constellation dropped fire bombs. Instead, there were only the plane and 50 drums of gasoline with mini-marine flares strapped on the sides for detonation.

The men argued. Most of them had been adventurers for almost nine years, and what did they have to show for it?

"Are we going back to Miami, with our tails between our legs, like we always do?" asked Dempsey. "What the hell, we might as well try something."

The 10 men - seven Americans, two Haitians and the Canadian Dempsey - decided to go ahead. Or, rather, eight of them did. Carlin had recruited two of the crewmen without telling them what was happening. (Casey and Edens still maintain that's true.)

At 10:30 am., June 4, 1969; fide Constellation rounded a hilltop outside Port-au-Prince and swooped down on Papa Doc's palace, dropping the fire bombs from a height of 300-400 feet.

Edens and a Haitian, Charles Smith, lit the fuses and pushed the drums out. Others hurled. "willie peter" -- white phosphorus - bottles.

Davis, in the cockpit, rouse supposed to tell the men by the cargo door when they were over the palace. But the plane's internal communications system was out, says Casey. When Davis was yelling, "No, no, no," the men thought he was saying, "Go, go, go."

Some of the bombs landed in the shacks clustered around the palace walls. Others hit the yards of the luxurious villas on the hillside.

On the first run, no one shot at them. They made a second run. No return fire. They tried a third. "Boy, they opened up on us," says Casey. "Army officers were firing .45s and Thompsons. And they had 20s, 30s, 50mm machine guns."

They knew the Haitians had excellent American-made antiaircraft guns; they had assumed the soldiers were too inept to use them. They were right and wrong. The plane was hit 34 times, according to Edens, and a piece of shrapnel flew into the cockpit, knocking unconscious one of the men. But the plane kept flying.

The men continued with their plan, flying to Cap Haitien, where they hoped to land and start a guerrilla action in the mountains. Eight of the 10 were white. It is not clear how they expected to hide in Haiti, but that was the plan. When they saw the airfield, they changed their minds: the runway was covered with trucks.

The Constellation headed north. They hoped to land at an out-of-the-way island, but, with bad weather and instruments burned out by the anti-aircraft fire, they missed. Finally, as they were running out of fuel, they landed at a U.S. missile-tracking station on the edge of Grand Bahama Island.

"Just out for a spin," Casey told the gawking technicians who looked at the bullet holes in the Constellation, at the weapons in the cargo area, then called the Bahamian police. Nine were deported to the United States Dempsey, the Canadian, was "allowed" to fly back to Canada

News reports from Haiti said four gas drums were dropped and only one exploded. A crew member Who tested for the prosecution said eight were dropped. Elena says that's not true: he counted 28 drums going out the door. A few of those did not explode because Smith was inept in lighting fuses. In Haiti, Duvalier said three persons, including a six-month-old child, died in the burning shacks near the palace. Damage to the palace itself was minimal.

In court, the two crewmen testified for the prosecution. The other seven were convicted of violating the Neutrality Act and, when their appeals were exhausted, sent to Eglin Air Force Base. "We were celebrities up there," boasts one. "We walked in the gales, and everybody was expecting these huge, soldier-of-fortune types. And there we were. Carlin was bald. A couple of us were short and fat" They served 73 days before the judge cut their sentences.

That was the last hurah for most of Miami's soldiers of fortune. Edens is now married, has a son, is an ironworker. Casey has three children and does customer relations for a clothing firm specializing in stylish jeans. Others, like "Little Joe" Garman, had already drifted away.

Dempsey, the Canadian, appeared in at least one other publicized venture, involving the byzantine series of plots undertaken to free Joel David Kaplan, an American in a Mexico City prison, convicted of murder. Several magazine articles referred to Dempsey as "a Canadian," but a book, "The 10-Second Jailbreak, identified him by name."

Dempsey was supposed to assist Kaplan after he escaped by hanging onto the bottom of a truck (an ambulance or laundry truck, it's not clear which) that was going inside the prison. According to the book, the plan failed when the truck driver became drunk, and Dempsey returned $6000 in unused funds to Kaplan's sister (other sources say it was Kaplan's wife). Dempsey, now living in Canada, says he doesn't want to comment. He played no part in the later plan, in which Kaplan escaped by helicopter. What is amazing about, the story, of course, is that a one-time Miami soldier of fortune would return unused money, but Dempsey's Miami friends say that he was a highly honest man.

Why did they keep at it all those years? Why do some of them still have dreams? Almost all, certainly, were -- and are still - fervent anti-Communists, but there are plenty of anti-Communists who do not spend a decade of their lives training in the Everglades.

Certainly, none of the Miami adventurers got rich. The men who bombed the Haitian palace were paid nothing. To the victors belong the spoils, of course, but even if the palace had burned and Duvalier had died, how could they have taken over the country?

The answer has to be adventure. In early February, after the Guatemala earthquake, one soldier of fortune said he had two desires: the first was to fight in Angola, the second was to be a paratroop medic in the earthquake area He ended up in Guatemala, just like he had in Peru after an earlier disaster. Says one journalist familiar with the type: "It gets in their blood. To sneak through jungles, with the question of death hanging over you every second, is, in one way, an easy way to live. It is easier for some than going through the 9-to-5 tedium, the dullness of having a family, of facing problems that aren't so cut and dried."

Says Edens: "I keep telling people: wars are going to be fought: It's a fact of life. And so they might as well be fought by people who want to fight them."

Some look back at their experiences with sarcasm. "Right now," nays Skinny, "if they offered me $10,000 a month, they wouldn't get me out of bed. . . Ninety per cent of this thing is an ego trip. I think they're bigger Walter Mittys than the ones who sit home and watch TV."

Dempsey, now living in Canada, says: "Everything is an experience. There are good experiences and bad experiences, but they're all experiences." Angola, he says, was not for him. "I talked to some people, with no great enthusiasm. I suppose, you get older, wiser, more careful about seeing money laid out."

Edens, looking back at the daring and futile palace bombing, says: "It's easy to say I shouldn't have done that. But I'm a grown man. Some of those guys were so filled with self-pity, I got sick of hearing it." He regrets none of it, not even the Key West boat heist which ended at the edge of the harbor. "Sure, you failed. But you didn't fail by not attempting something. We tried." The worst sin, he believes, was committed by those who did nothing more than sit and brag in Miami bars.

Edens at one point was hoping to get to Angola - but as a journalist for Soldier of Fortune magazine, which is edited by a long-time friend, Robert K. Brown.

Brown, now 43, spent a good portion of the '60s in Miami, as a participant and free-lance journalist. He was a sympathizer of Castro's 26th of July movement in the late '50s, went to Cuba in August 1958, but couldn't link up with the barbuctos in the hills. He went back in 1959, served as a Cuba reporter for the Associated Press and did research on a master's thesis.

Brown fought in Vietnam and is now a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves. After publishing a number of adventurer-guerrilla-mercenary pamphlets and books, he brought out the first issue of Soldier of Fortune last summer, with glossy paper, four-color cover and an initial press run of 8,500. The issue included a photograph of a dead African's face. Flies hovered over a huge bullet hole between the eyes.

The issue received a good deal of publicity; and Brown is now using a reprint of a review in The Village Voice (not known for its militaristic leanings) to promote the magazine. In the article, John Gabree calls it "the magazine for mercenaries, would-be mercenaries and Walter Mittys. Walter Mittys. They mean me and you. They know that every one of us born of this mighty nation fancies he harbors a killer deep inside that he is too smart or scared or sophisticated to let out."

For the second issue, published this spring, Brown found a national distributor, and is hoping to sell 85,000 copies.

Are there that many soldiers of fortune? No, says Brown. "No doubt a large number of readers are Walter Mittys." The magazine is not exclusively war stories: One article talks about a Parachute Medical Rescue Service operation in Peru. The group was organized by Brown and associates, and, earlier this year, it went to earthquake-stricken Guatemala.

The dreaming never stops.

Recently, a story was floating around that someone was claiming to be soliciting for Angola, ordering recruits to sell all possessions, make out wills, leave the money with him in a trust. It was an obvious flim-flam, but some may have grabbed at it.

"It's the mystique that attracts these people," says Edens. "If they knew the reality of this kind of life, they wouldn't join. But when you try to tell them, they don't believe you."

Hans Vockner is one dreamer. He went to the Imperial Motel in January, looking for Prat and Martinez and a ticket to the fighting in Angola. He didn't find it, but he met another adventure seeker there, and Vockner moved into the fellow's room at the Cortez Hotel in downtown Miami. He doesn't want his name used: "Trouble up north," he says.

The Cortez rents rooms by the day, week or month. A sign above the aged elevator says: "TV for rent. Contact room 402." The room where Vockner and NoName live is small. Beside the door is a chewed-up wooden post and a Miller High Life carton stuffed with old clothes. It is the target for their BB practice. During an interview, Vockner keeps pulling the trigger on the empty Daisy pistol as No-Name crawls on the floor, picking up hundreds of copper BBs with a magnet.

Vockner is 26, born in Germany, just finished two years in the U.S. Army. "I don't like the regular military life. Too many rules. As a mercenary, you're free."

No-Name has never been in the military, but he's been an amateur boxer for a year and a half, and he's done a lot of practice with the BB gun and a .45. He has a copy of Soldier of Fortune, and he's especially interested in an article about white mercenaries in Rhodesia. "They train you there, before they send you out in the field. That would be good for me." He says he is 32; he looks considerably younger.

As the visitor leaves, No-Name pleads: "If you hear anything about Angola, let us know, OK? Or even a little weekend action in Cuba. We'll take anything. . ."
 
 

Frank Sturgis: Miami's Number One Adventurer

On a recent morning, Frank Fiorini Sturgis met with a writer in a restaurant on Biscayne Boulevard. He brought along a file containing photographs of the Cuban days (one shows him with Che Guevara), magazine and newspaper clippings, and two books of the proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee.

Sturgis is considered by many to be Miami's premier soldier of fortune. He was in the Sierra Maestra with Castro. He was prominent in the anti-Castro conspiracies of the '60s. He was caught at Watergate.

He is 51 years old; he looks younger. Lately, he has been working in sales for the Miami Book Company.

Sturgis does not consider himself a soldier of fortune. "The things I was involved in," he says, "were for a purpose, not personal gain."

He has always testified under oath, he says, that he has never been a CIA agent. Without being asked, he opens the covers of Books 8 and 9 of the Senate Watergate hearings. On the inside covers he has penciled in page numbers. ,

He flips first to a page which shows that former CIA chief Richard Helms was briefed by the CIA before his Watergate appearance. Then he turns to a dialogue between Helms and Fred Thompson, the committee's minority counsel.

Thompson is asking Helms about CIA links with the Watergate Five, and Helms is appearing to have difficulty remembering their names.

Helms: "Is Sturgis another?"

Thompson: "Yes."

Helms: "I think he at one time had been."

Meaning, apparently, a CIA employee.

Sturgis then flips to an appendix, where there is a memo written by James R. Schlesinger, then secretary of defense: ". . .Shortly thereafter, I discussed these matters with Bill Colby, who indicated that Sturgis has not been on the payroll for a number of years."

The inference, of course, is that Sturgis was on the payroll at one time.

Obviously, this means a great deal to Frank Sturgis. It is also a matter of considerable debate.

It was on June 11, 1975, that a UPI story appeared summarizing the findings of the Rockefeller Commission: "Sturgis was not an employee or agent of the CIA either in 1963 or at any other time. He so tested under oath himself, and a search of CIA records failed to discover any evidence. . . "

Why is this so important? Two reasons. One, of course, is that Sturgis has been employed, at different times, by both Fidel Castro and Nixon's re-election committee. Two, many journalists suspect that Sturgis is not always truthful.

He was born Frank Angelo Fiorini. After military service, he says, he was an unpaid Israeli agent for seven years, in the late '40s and early '5Os. (An Israeli embassy official in Washington says he knows nothing about it.)

Fiorini was a Norfolk, Va., bar bouncer and manager when he came in 1956 to Miami on vacation and met Castro, here trying to raise funds. Once he told a reporter he joined Castro because he was bored with his life. Now, he says he was an agent of former Cuban president Carlos Prio, assigned to spy on Castro.

He ran guns for awhile between the States and the barbudos in Oriente. Shortly after Batiste fled, he was photographed standing atop a mass grave of 75 executed Batistianos. He says he had nothing to do with their deaths; he only wanted to publicize Castro's methods.

It was sometime during his Cuba days that he is supposed to have linked up with the CIA, providing the agency with information about Castro.

Starting in 1959, he became prominent in Miami's exile community. Altogether, including his anti-Batiste and his anti-Castro days, he claims he made 125 "operations" to Cuba by plane, and 60-70 by boat.

If one is willing to listen long enough, Sturgis will talk about the darkest kinds of conspiracies, about warring factions within the U.S. intelligence structure, about the fact that the Watergate Five were "set up" to take a fall, that the problems besetting America over the last 15 years can all be explained if one understands the "secret government."