Herald Staff Report

 The last-ditch drive to peacefully solve the Elian Gonzalez custody clash broke down amid family defiance, government exasperation, negotiating blunders and one hard truth: One child, born in Cuba but rescued in America, could not live in two worlds.

 The dash to solve the impasse hit full swing 10 days ago, even as federal agents secretly simulated a raid on the Little Havana house that had been Elian's home since he was rescued clinging to an inner tube Thanksgiving Day.

 Janet Reno, the nation's top law officer, had dreaded using force in her hometown to snatch the 6-year-old boy to unite him with his father. But on Saturday, April 22, as Miami slept, a team of Border Patrol and INS commandos hammered open the door at 2319 NW Second St., threw aside protesters and raced to a waiting van with the terrified child.

 The armed raid everybody feared had come to be.

 How did it happen?

 The last-minute negotiations suffered a setback when the chief Miami mediator says he stepped out of his house for a quick dinner -- just as Reno faxed firm settlement terms at 10:48 p.m. Friday.

 The fax sat in the exercise room of mediator Aaron Podhurst's home until 2:59 a.m. Saturday, when Reno sent her final offer, leaving the Miami side not fully aware of significant new terms until the last minute.

 Prominent civic leaders, trying to avert a damaging raid but wanting to give the Miami family a face-saving compromise, crafted a ''six-point term'' paper that never conceded custody of Elian to his father or his Miami family. When the carefully worded document -- penned by the family's lawyers and vetted by prominent exile leaders -- arrived at the Department of Justice, lawyers involved in three months of negotiations recognized it as a step back from earlier deals.

 ''What the hell is this?'' one Justice source said, describing the reaction to the family's offer. ''This is obviously lawyerly language. We said, What is going on here?''

 Negotiators for Elian's Miami relatives say Reno waited far too long to let them know just how much she disliked their offer, leaving them with false hope.

 On the eve of the raid, Reno warned the Miami side that only a hand-over of Elian would resolve the impasse. But Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian's great-uncle and caretaker, went to bed that night without committing to give Elian back to his father during a ''family reunification.'' Two days before, he had promised an exile group he would never hand the boy over.

 By Friday, Reno was firmly resolved that the only way to get Elian was by a forced raid. Miami civic leaders faxed their terms at 4:52 p.m. At 7:20 p.m., the Department of Justice obtained a warrant to raid the Gonzalez home.

 Once Reno decided to use force, she moved swiftly April 22. She launched the raid 10 hours after securing the warrant, though the document gave her nine more days to act. Under pressure from the White House to resolve the standoff, she had the child removed shortly after talking to the president's chief of staff that morning.

 Representatives for Elian's great-uncles and cousin believed Reno would never come into the heart of the exile community to remove the boy while negotiations were afoot. They badly underestimated her level of frustration over the impasse and Lazaro's refusal to hand custody to the father. As federal agents sat poised to storm the house, the family lawyers asked to call it a night on negotiations.

 The last-minute negotiations were fraught with miscommunications. Reno was the only person speaking to Miami mediator Podhurst and Gregory Craig, lawyer for Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. Neither side saw each other's faxed proposals in the hours before the raid -- only versions offered by Reno. Podhurst relayed information from Miami Lakes to the family lawyers in Little Havana. All agree this contributed to a failed deal.

 Eight days later, some in Miami look back and see the prescription that had been written.

 ''We were headed for a showdown,'' said Armando Codina, a prominent Miami businessman who pushed to patch together a last-minute deal. ''Then you look at the proposals. They said they were close. They were not even close.''

 ''We put all our money behind a horse that could not win,'' said Pedro Freyre, an attorney and advisor to the civic leaders. ''There was no legal way we could win.''

 Others remain stunned that Elian left Little Havana in the arms of a federal agent, hustled into a plain white government van, whisked past exile protestors.

 ''When I started to hear some noise and some commotion, I would have sworn on my life that the crowd was hearing some bad rumor. And I was thinking somebody should go out and tell them everything is fine, and that we're in a process and that a good and fair agreement was going to get done,'' said Kendall Coffey, South Florida's former top federal prosecutor. Part of the Miami relatives' legal team, he ended up at the Little Havana house with a submachine gun pointed at his head.

 ''It wasn't until we were ingesting the gas that I could believe that this attack was happening.''

 TENSIONS MOUNT

 Tensions between the U.S. government and the Gonzalez family had been growing for months before federal agents stormed the house.

 To the government, it was a matter of parental rights: Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian's only surviving parent, was his rightful custodian.

 To Elian's Miami relatives and the city's exile community, it was a matter of compassion: Elian had fled Cuba with his mother for a better life in the United States, and the boy's Miami family would do everything in its power to give it to him.

 The divide was set.

 On March 21, it widened when a federal judge sided with the government's decision to deny the boy a political asylum hearing.

 Lazaro Gonzalez appealed immediately. Behind closed doors, his legal team launched negotiations with government lawyers. Mutual distrust hung over the process. The negotiations went nowhere. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, concluding Lazaro Gonzalez would not surrender the child, cut off negotiations April 6 -- the day Elian's father arrived in the United States.

 From that day forward, the Department of Justice brainstormed ways to pressure the great-uncle to deliver the boy to a neutral site to avoid a potentially violent confrontation with demonstrators keeping vigil outside his home.

 On April 11, U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., and the Cuban American National Foundation tried to broker a next-day meeting between the Miami relatives and Elian's father in Washington, D.C. On the eve of the meeting, Lazaro Gonzalez called it off. Immediately after, Torricelli told Justice officials the family would never give up the boy.

 The next day, Reno flew to Miami to meet with the Gonzalez family at the Miami Beach home of Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, president of Barry University. Reno delivered a personal plea to the Gonzalez family to turn over the boy. She came away empty-handed.

 That same day, the INS ordered Lazaro Gonzalez to surrender the child at the Opa-locka airport a day later -- April 13 -- at 2 p.m. Custody would transfer to the INS and, ultimately, to Elian's father, who waited in Washington.

 Lazaro Gonzalez made his intentions clear just before midnight April 12. The U.S. government, he said, ''will have to take this child from me by force.''

 At 2 p.m. April 13, as the government's deadline passed, Lazaro joined Cuban-American celebrities and thousands of exiles in a show of unity in Little Havana. In songs and in words, they said the boy deserved a day in court before any attempt to whisk him back to Cuba.

 At Justice, the legal battle moved apace. The INS revoked Elian's parole. A state judge dismissed an earlier court order that gave Lazaro temporary custody. The same day, the Gonzalez family was emboldened by a federal court decision that said Elian could not leave the United States until his appeal seeking a political asylum hearing was over. The judges sounded sympathetic to the asylum request and refused to grant a court order forcing the Miami relatives to turn over Elian.

 But in the eyes of the U.S. government, Lazaro was now a law breaker, holding someone else's son in direct violation of a federal order.

 The clock to confrontation was ticking.

 In Washington, Reno was getting heat for her inability to solve a custody fight that had fractured the community. ''A lot of us think she cannot make a decision on this to save her soul,'' a presidential advisor told The New York Times.

 By April 12 or 13, she made a decision. The government would do what was necessary to return Elian to his father.

 Now the question became: How to get the boy?

 FORCE DISCUSSED

 Early the next morning, Friday, April 14, Reno met with U.S. Attorney Tom Scott and 30 other federal officials, all crowded into Scott's Northeast Fourth Street offices. Reno and Scott sat at the head of the room.

 The potential use of force was discussed. Reno initially expressed reluctance. It would be a last resort.

 Then-Miami Police Chief William O'Brien and his assistant, John Brooks, were summoned. Reno asked point-blank: If we have no choice but to physically take the child, would Miami Police be on board, given Mayor Joe Carollo's vehement vow that police would not assist in taking the child?

 City police wouldn't physically take the boy, O'Brien answered, but would provide crowd control and protect lives and property. Most important: O'Brien would make sure Miami Police pull their barricades aside so federal agents could reach the house.

 In the days that followed, federal agents weighed their options. They were convinced they would get just one chance, because word of any operation would later leak, putting demonstrators on mass alert for a future move.

 Early on, the government discussed having female INS agents, wearing civilian clothes, walk to the front door of Lazaro Gonzalez's house. The government decided against it. ''We didn't want to get stuck in the mud with that crowd out there and have people surrounding our van and have to give up that kid,'' said a law enforcement source involved in the planning.

 Another discarded option: grabbing Elian on the street on his way to school or as he visited his cousin Marisleysis in a hospital. The government feared a public relations nightmare.

 ''You start looking to grab the kid on the street, there is tremendous risk involved. And we could have been portrayed as kidnappers,'' said James Goldman, an INS assistant district director in Miami who designed and led the raid.

 A third discarded option: grabbing Elian at the house of Sister O'Laughlin during the April 12 summit between Reno and the Miami Gonzalez family. No, the government decided: Tricks or subterfuge weren't the solution.

 On Friday, April 14, the instructions came: Begin preparing a raid.

 ''It was the ugly option,'' said Carole Florman, Reno's spokeswoman. ''We had the right to do it. We didn't want to do it.''

 Four Border Patrol tactical experts were flown in from Texas. Surveillance teams were dispatched to monitor the crowd outside Lazaro's home. There was aerial surveillance. Undercover agents posed as sightseers and photographers.

 Three white vans, later used to whisk Elian away, were leased and fitted with puncture-proof tires. The government examined traffic patterns, day and night. It prepared diagrams of the interior of Lazaro's house.

 Inside the INS building on Northwest 79th Street, INS agents began trial runs of the raid. They closed off one floor to work out the details. No one found out about it.

 By Tuesday, April 18 or Wednesday the 19th, the go-ahead order came for the Saturday predawn mission. It would come the day after Good Friday and the day before Easter Sunday. The feds wanted to avoid a potential public relations mess: snatching a 6-year-old boy on two sacred Christian holidays.

 Tactical specialists favored 3 a.m., when people would be fast asleep and resistance at its lowest. Justice favored sometime after 4 a.m.

 Agents also decided on a maximum ''show of force'' to overwhelm any opposition and extract Elian without a tug of war. ''Success would be measured by Elian's safety,'' Goldman said.

 Before the raid, Miami Police and INS agents would grab two men with felony records from the house next door. They were detained on immigration charges.

 Willy Lopez, who lives in the house behind the Gonzalez's, said the two men plucked by agents were assigned as lookouts to tip the family to a raid.

 ''I'm not embarrassed to say it: We wanted to protect Elian and warn the family,'' Lopez said.

 RENO'S PHONE RINGS

 On Wednesday, April 19, with the raid drills in full swing and Justice bracing for an invasion days away, Reno's phone rang.

 It was Edward T. Foote II, president of the University of Miami and a friend from Reno's days as a Miami prosecutor. He wanted to talk about solving the custody clash. Foote said he had called Reno a few weeks earlier but was told ''nothing could happen until after the appellate court decision.''

 With Elian's appellate hearing finally set, Foote called again. This time, Reno asked for help: Build support in the Cuban-American community for a deal to turn Elian over to his father, still waiting in D.C.

 Foote turned to businessman Carlos de la Cruz, chairman of the UM Board of Trustees and a friend. The next morning, de la Cruz called his friend, lawyer Podhurst, as Podhurst was in the shower at his Miami Lakes home.

 At 11 a.m. Thursday, April 20, the heavyweight civic leaders huddled in Podhurst's Flagler Street law office. They were joined via telephone by prominent Cuban-American businessman Carlos Saladrigas. Soon, they were chatting with Reno. ''President Foote asked her, 'Would you like Aaron to help?' She said, 'Yes,' '' Podhurst said.

 Podhurst, a skilled aviation attorney, would assume the role of mediator and go-between, trying to bring Washington and Little Havana together.

 From the start, Podhurst said, Reno told him there would be no compromise on one point.

 ''She said there can be no doubt that legal custody must go to the father. The father had to have immediate custody,'' Podhurst said. ''She told me 100 times about the importance of the father's rights.

 ''That was the deal breaker for the attorney general.''

 Even as the civic leaders moved apace, Justice's Florman delivered a statement that Thursday that sounded like a prelude to action: ''There have always been three trains moving simultaneously down the track -- negotiations for a transfer, litigation and law enforcement. We are no longer in the engineer's seat on the negotiation train. We're just passengers. She is looking to our law enforcement officials to determine the best timing and methods.''

 PAINFUL QUESTION

 Later that day and through the night, Miami's Cuban-American leadership came together to weigh a painful question: how to end a custody dispute with no easy solution in sight short of a direct hand-over of Elian to his father.

 Even more difficult: how to persuade Lazaro Gonzalez to bring Elian together with his father -- and possibly closer to a return to Cuba.

 Just a day earlier, Lazaro made his feelings clear to a group of exile leaders.

 ''Lazaro said he could not betray this child. He said he would not put Elian in harm's way. Lazaro said he did not want bloodshed, a catastrophe. But he could not by hook or by crook turn over the boy. It would be a betrayal. He said they would have to come and get him so the cameras can catch it all,'' recalled Emilio Izquierdo, president of Presidio Politico Cubanom.

 Thursday evening, Saladrigas sat in the middle of St. John Bosco Catholic Church in East Little Havana with 11 other leaders, many Cuban American. ''The 12 Apostles,'' they called themselves.

 Lazaro Gonzalez wasn't there, but he was on everyone's mind. ''The primary discussion was how to persuade Lazaro to come to terms with a handoff,'' recalled Pedro Freyre, an attendee. ''We termed it moral suasion.''

 Jose Basulto, Brothers to the Rescue founder, said a deal needed to get done. The federal government's patience had worn thin, he warned.

 ''We knew time was up. We held hands and prayed. We invoked God and asked God to help us and help Elian. And we knew there was a big storm ahead.''

 Once again, Basulto warned: ''I have information that they are ready to move.''

 Saladrigas shook his head in disagreement.

 He said they were negotiating with Reno in good faith. Besides, he said, the negotiators were well-respected, civic-minded and longtime friends of the attorney general. ''It's going to be all right.''

 Also that day, Cuban American National Foundation leader Jorge Mas Santos drove to Lazaro's house for a heart-to-heart. They headed to a Cuban eatery off Bird Road, sat in a booth and sipped Cuban coffee. For an hour, they talked about ways to navigate the tightrope.

 They talked about:

  A meeting between Elian's Miami relatives and his father in a secret Miami-Dade safehouse.

  A compound with no Cuban or U.S. government officials, only mediators.

  No immediate surrender of custody. Both families would share custody until the appellate process had been exhausted.

 ''Lazaro did not want a handoff. Lazaro wanted all the family under one roof,'' said Mas. He said the terms discussed over coffee became the basis of a deal proposed to exile groups.

 By that Friday, April 21, a pitch was coming together.

 Armando Gutierrez, the Miami family's publicist, met with leaders of exile organizations and Spanish-language radio stations.

 ''We needed to sell it to the masses and the radio stations that this was a family reunification, not turning over the kid,'' Gutierrez said. ''Wherever the kid wants to sleep, the kid would sleep. We never agreed to a transfer of custody.''

 Throughout the day, the civic mediators kept busy, too. Podhurst stayed in contact with Reno. He told her there was movement in Miami. He and other civic leaders said Reno seemed open to a plan to bring the families together.

 ''She never said we had a deal,'' Podhurst said. ''She said, 'I like this. Let me see what I can do.' ''

 ''The attorney general did not voice an objection,'' Saladrigas said in a court filing. To the Miami mediators, that was cause for joy.

 By 3 p.m., Reno told Podhurst any proposal had to be in writing -- and to her by 5 p.m.

 UNSIGNED FAX

 At 4:52 p.m., a one-page unsigned fax went to Justice from the office of Gonzalez family lawyers Coffey and Manny Diaz.

 It said the Miami relatives wanted Elian's father to live with them in a temporary residence in Miami-Dade during the boy's federal court appeal for a political asylum petition.

 The relatives wanted no government officials and lawyers in the picture, just U.S. marshals to protect the site. And they wanted ''facilitators'' -- probably a psychologist and a priest -- to help the families ''get together and do what is in the best interest of the child.''

 On the vital issue of custody, the family's proposal to Reno said: ''We understand that you have transferred temporary custody of Elian to his father.''

 Podhurst and other civic leaders say they believed the language met Reno's wishes.

 ''The plan was that the child would go to Juan Miguel, to the father,'' Podhurst said. ''The child would be in the custody of the father and the other family would be there with an opportunity to heal.''

 Civic leaders brimmed with hope.

 ''I remember coming home and telling my wife, 'This was just wonderful. We've been able to be helpful,' '' said Foote. ''How naíve I was. I thought we were close enough on the framework of an agreement.''

 At Justice, an entirely different reaction took hold. Reno's aides were so unimpressed by the offer they didn't share it with Juan Miguel's attorney.

 Twenty-three minutes after the 4:52 p.m. fax, Justice officials were pointing out deal breakers around a table in D.C.

 ''There was no specific commitment in this document that the physical custody would be transferred immediately to Juan Miguel,'' Florman, the Justice spokeswoman, said. ''It has them all living together until the resolution of all pending legal procedures, which sounded to us that they could bring other lawsuits and keep this going forever.''

 The military mission moved ahead.

 Just before 7 p.m. that Friday, INS Senior Special Agent Mary A. Rodriguez appeared before federal magistrate Robert Dube in Miami, requesting a search warrant that would permit agents to seize Elian. She went after court hours, when few workers would be around.

 Rodriguez asked that the warrant authorize a nighttime operation because the number of demonstrators ''dwindles during the nighttime hours.'' At 7:20 p.m., Dube signed. The warrant could be executed anytime between that night and May 1.

 In Miami, the family's lawyers had no inkling.

 At 8:30 p.m., they got the three Gonzalezes -- Lazaro, Marisleysis and Delfin, another of Elian's uncles -- to sign their proposal for a family meeting in Miami-Dade to work out differences over custody with help from a facilitator. They faxed a fresh copy to Washington.

 By then, Reno had already sent a Justice Department settlement proposal to attorney Greg Craig in Washington -- with far different terms than the Miami side proposed. It called for a meeting in suburban Washington and Elian's immediate turnover to his father.

 Craig rejected it. ''The plan was not to have a family reunion, i.e., to sit down, break bread and sing songs with the Miami relatives,'' Craig, a former attorney for President Clinton, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

 He said he never saw the Miami offer. If he had, he said he would have ended negotiations.

 ''That proposal -- which they characterized as a 'joint custody' proposal and which simply did not include clear, unambiguous, unconditional transfer of Elian's custody -- was unthinkable,'' he said.

 ''The only thing left for us to do was to travel to Miami, go to Lazaro's house, knock on the door and ask for his son,'' Craig wrote. ''We had a serious conversation about this idea on Friday night and told DOJ about it. Our safety would be the responsibility ofboth local and federal law enforcement.'' DOJ lawyers discouraged it.

 Gonzalez family lawyer Jose Garcia-Pedrosa said he and others felt betrayed to learn later that Reno had been in such close contact with the father's lawyer. While they thought they were negotiating with the attorney general, they now believe it was actually Craig. ''Reno was answering to Craig, not the other way around,'' Garcia-Pedrosa said.

 Justice officials say that's not so. ''It would be an unfair characterization that she was just doing the bidding of Juan Miguel,'' Florman said. ''But you have to understand our position on custody -- on where the child belonged and on who had legal authority for him -- was that Juan Miguel had the authority.''

 AGENTS GET READY

 At midnight, federal agents began assembling at FBI headquarters in North Miami Beach. They were briefed about the Miami mediation talks and the possibility the raid could be halted at any time. But they were on a tight timetable: Tactical chiefs said they would have to abort sometime after 4:30 a.m.

 At 2:15 a.m. Saturday, Clinton told Reno to continue negotiations only if they held real promise. Otherwise, he told her through his chief of staff, move ahead.

 The president told Reno that ''when a judgment was made that they were no longer moving toward a voluntary transfer of custody of the boy to the father, that they should go and remove and transfer the custody themselves,'' said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart.

 At 2:59 a.m., Reno faxed Podhurst a final offer. It said the family must agree to an immediate custody transfer to the father that morning and a meeting in suburban Washington, not Miami. Reno told Podhurst the family had until 4 a.m. to answer.

 Later, after the raid, the Miami negotiators expressed outrage, accusing Reno of springing a surprise. They said the 2:59 a.m. fax was the first time she made it clear a Florida family reunion was out of the question.

 But those nearly identical terms were in the 10:48 p.m. fax that Podhurst missed.

 On Saturday, Podhurst said he didn't know about the earlier fax until much later. He and his wife had gone to dinner in Hollywood about the time it was coming over, he said. When he returned, he didn't check for incoming faxes. He said Reno didn't make specific mention of the fax, although she did make it clear in conversation during the night that Juan Miguel didn't want to come to Miami.

 Podhurst said he picked up the earlier fax when Reno sent a new one at 2:59 a.m. -- but thought it was a duplicate of the 2:59 a.m. deal. He set it aside.

 ''I thought it was one fax,'' Podhurst said in an interview Saturday. He said he spent Saturday trying to figure out what went wrong after reporters inquired how the legal team could be surprised by Reno's 2:59 a.m. terms in light of its similarity to the earlier fax, copies of which the Justice Department provided.

 Coffey, one of the lawyers for the Miami relatives, on Saturday said he thinks the misplaced fax was an important snafu -- but not a critical one.

 ''There's not a lot of human perfection on any side in the middle of the night at the end of a difficult week,'' Coffey said. ''I think everyone was tired -- including the attorney general and her staff.''

 A DEADLINE

 In any case, Reno's final proposal -- and 4 a.m. deadline -- triggered tension in the Gonzalez home.

 ''We've got a problem,'' Podhurst told the lawyers at the Gonzalez family home. They had sold Miami -- not Washington -- to exile leaders.

 ''They told me at first it was going to be a deal breaker. They didn't have the authority of the Cuban-American leadership,'' Podhurst said after the raid. ''I said, 'You can't say no to the attorney general.' I convinced the negotiating team, it took me 30 minutes, 40 minutes, to recommend Washington. And then I had to convince them to wake up Lazaro.''

 By then, it was 4 a.m., past Reno's deadline.

 Lawyer Manny Diaz didn't want to wake the family. ''You're asking me to go in and wake up a family that's been through a tremendous amount of anxiety?'' he complained. ''They're very tired. . . . This is not the most conducive of circumstances to speak to a client in a coherent fashion.

 ''Why can't we go home, take a shower, shave, change clothes and come back at 9, 10 in the morning?''

 His colleague, former prosecutor Coffey, rustled from deep sleep, also wanted to continue the talks until 10. He now calls the Justice Department negotiations a ''charade.''

 ''It was done to smash the negotiations, to be able to say they couldn't possibly make a deal with these people,'' Coffey said. ''They should own up to the fact that the process of negotiation was used to minimize the crowd outside the house.''

 Deep into the night, Podhurst pressed on. At 4:21, Reno told him he had ''five minutes, not six.''

 Tactical officials say they had delayed the raid for 45 minutes as Reno pressed for a firm agreement. ''I was optimistic until the very end,'' said Goldman, the raid commander. ''We were prepared for the possibility of a red light.''

 In Little Havana, there was more debate. Lazaro, still emerging from his own deep sleep, had not agreed to any changes when federal agents stormed the house at 5:15 a.m.

 Agents jumped the fence of neighbor Lopez's yard to get to the house.

 ''When they came Saturday, I was making my rounds -- you know, like a guard -- and saw them eastbound on Third Street. I ran to the back yard, screaming to Lazaro or anybody back there: 'They're coming!' Then I got gassed. . . . They gassed my dog. They were prepared. They had wire cutters. They knew exactly where everyone was. They stopped me cold, put a gun to me and said, 'Don't move!' They jumped the fence like they were hitting the beaches.

 ''Elian never had a chance. No one had a chance.''

 THE STAFF

 This story was reported by Alfonso Chardy, Manny Garcia, Joseph Tanfani, Jay Weaver, Andres Viglucci, Jay Weaver and Ronnie Greene. Greene wrote the story.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald