By the time mourners arrived at the Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home in eastern Nebraska, federal agents were already out of the market. Their target was a man named Howard Farley Jr., a suspected disappearing drug dealer who had been on the run for nearly 25 years.
On that cold afternoon in October 2009, the investigators were stopped again. Farley never showed up at his deceased brother’s memorial service.
The man has been a ghost since 1985 when he was accused of running a transcontinental cocaine network.
“He disappeared well,” said Duaine Bullock, the former commander of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Narcotics Unit.
But 11 years after the failed funeral business, another team of investigators descended on a home in Weirsdale, Florida. The target that day was a man suspected of passport fraud. He lived under the name Timothy Brown.
The raid was a success. Prosecutors said federal agents arrested the man when he tried to board a plane in his private hangar.
It was only after the arrest that authorities learned that the man arrested was in fact Howard Farley Jr. was, the long-time refugee who, according to prosecutors, used the identity of a baby who died in the fifties.
Farley, now 72, is facing several charges, including passport fraud. But he got something extraordinarily right: despite being caught, he manages to surpass his original charges.
The 1985 drug charge was dropped in 2014, which added a curious ripple to an already extraordinary case.
“He was the DB Cooper of Nebraska,” said Jerry Soucie, a longtime Lincoln lawyer, equating Farley with the man who disappeared after hijacking a Seattle plane in 1971. “A legend.”
Soucie said he would sometimes bring Farley’s name to the prosecutors in the years after the suspect went missing. “Once they asked my client to come in and said, ‘Where is he?’ ” Remember Soucie. “I said, ‘He’s with Howard Farley. ‘It really made them angry. ”
The arrest provoked strong and completely different reactions than those related to the man’s different lives.
Some people who knew him in his hometown of Lincoln believe he will not be jailed for the drug charge. This group includes his ex-wife, who noted that the old drug case led to the suicide of two co-accused who agreed to work together against Farley.
“So many sad outcomes have arisen as a result of Howard’s drug sales,” said Christine Schleis, who was briefly married to Farley in the late 1960s.
But many who know him from his second life in Florida hold him in high esteem and are still disbelieving about his alleged past. Some believe the government should not charge a man who is now comfortable in his 70s with violent crimes.
“He’s just this soft soul,” said Michelle Bearden, a journalist who befriended Farley in Florida. ‘When I heard they called him a drug kingpin, it was crazy. If you met Tim – I know him as Tim – you would never think of him like that in a million years. ‘
The case was reported on the front page of Lincoln’s mainstream newspaper in 1985. “Alleged drug ring leader still in general,” read the headline in the Lincoln Journal on October 24, 1985.
Farley was dragged into the biggest drug charge in Nebraska history. About 74 people were charged, and all but one were arrested in the so-called Operation Southern Line.
Farley disappeared before the charge sheet was sealed. He is described as the alleged “kingpin” of the loosely organized drug network, which according to prosecutors used a railway to distribute cocaine through the USA.
While investigators chased Farley, the cases against his 73 co-accused moved forward.
Soucie, the former Lincoln attorney, said it became clear to him and some of the other defense attorneys that many of the people caught in the investigation were not serious traffickers, but simply people who used drugs and occasionally sell to feed their habits.
“They all had the muscle to tackle everyone differently,” Soucie said of the prosecutors. “It just got ugly.”
A month after the charge sheet was not sealed, the first of two tragedies struck. One accused who agreed to cooperate took his own life. Then died a month later a second accused who agreed to work with prosecutors through suicide.
The vast majority of the accused entered into plea agreements that spared them imprisonment, but Farley’s own sister and brother-in-law were among those who served time on drug charges.
Even after all the other cases were closed, law enforcement officers continued to search for Farley.
“The last thing we heard was that he was heading south,” said Bullock, the former commander of Lincoln’s drug unit, known as “The Brain,” because he never forgot something.
The brain’s information appears to be correct. It is now known that Farley spent much of his time on the run in Florida and faced it.
He and his wife built a house specially built in a gated community called Love’s Landing, where most of the properties were equipped with aircraft hangars. They bought the plot in 2018 for $ 95,000 and completed the construction of the $ 350,000 home in June 2019, according to the records. The couple also owned a $ 150,000 plane, prosecutors said in court.
Farley’s wife, Duc Hanh Thi Vu, told investigators she met him in the mid-1980s on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. Martin met. The couple married in 1993 in Broward County, Florida.
Vu, who arrived in the US with her family at the age of 11 after fleeing political persecution in Vietnam, earned a master’s degree in computer science from Florida Atlantic University and built a successful computer career.
Prosecutors in Florida found no evidence that Farley earned any income during the flight, which led them to raise questions about how the couple offers their global lifestyle.
“Her income as a data analyst does not reflect the lifestyle they have led for the past thirty years: trips to Australia, deep sea diving, deep sea fishing,” prosecutor Michael Felicetta told the court last month.
The couple lived in the cities of Naples and Homosassa before settling in the Love’s Landing community. They hosted dinners for friends and talked openly about their love of travel and outdoor activities such as diving and fishing.
Farley was private about his past, but not in a strange or unusual way, friends said.
“There was no reason to be even a little suspicious,” said Bearden, the journalist. “They are a very good couple. He worshiped her and treated her very well. She is really a smart woman. We are all just shocked. ”
Bearden is one of half a dozen family friends who have expressed their support for the man they knew as Tim Brown in referral letters submitted to the court.
“He is a man who truly radiates generosity, both in deed and especially in spirit,” Bearden and her husband wrote.
“I can not think of a nicer or more helpful person than Tim,” wrote another friend, David Shear. “He’s an individual with a good character and I’m proud to call him a friend, and I will continue to do so.”
According to prosecutors, Farley has lived under the name Timothy Brown since his disappearance in the mid-1980s. The identity was derived from a baby who died in 1955 at the age of 3 months.
Prosecutors used Farley’s boy’s name and number to obtain a passport and driver’s license. But when he applied for a passport renewal in February 2020, staff members discovered something suspicious about passport prevention fraud: Timothy Brown’s 1955 death record.
Investigators matched the passport photos of the man with the image used for his driver’s license. When federal agents raided his home on Dec. 4, they knew what the suspect looked like, but they had no idea who he really was.
A fingerprint comparison confirmed that Timothy Brown was in fact Howard Farley Jr., the longtime refugee.
The news of his arrest sparked a series of phone calls and festive Facebook messages among former law enforcement officials involved in Farley’s old drug case.
“Hell, a bunch of old junkies, including myself, are going to sleep with a smile at least tonight,” one former Lincoln police officer wrote on Facebook. “Two years of my life have been spent on that man.”
Farley is charged with passport fraud, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. But a month later, a grand jury in Florida returned Farley’s indictment with a series of additional offenses, including aggravating identity theft, social security fraud and flying as a pilot without a legal airline certificate. tree.
The federal agents who searched his home found a gun and ammunition in his bedside table, which led to an additional charge of illegal possession of weapons.
His wife was also charged with passport fraud, as well as making false statements to a federal agency and using a pilot without a legal license. She and Farley pleaded not guilty.
Advocates of Vu argued in court documents that she did not knowingly house a fugitive. They pointed to statements by one of the agents who interviewed her. The agent told the court she told him she knew Farley ‘got into trouble with drugs in Nebraska, so he changed his name’, but ‘not necessarily that he was or wanted to be a fugitive. not.’
Attorneys Andrew Searle and Fritz Scheller, representing Vu and Farley, wrote: “Even the government’s own witness at the detention hearing confirmed that Ms Vu never knew the full details of the accused’s alleged past.”
In an interview, Scheller said he understands why the old drug case made a big splash in Nebraska in the 1980s, but the allegations do not amount to the man known as Howard Farley Jr. a large trader is not. “He was not exactly the Pablo Escobar of Omaha,” Scheller said.
Prosecutors in Florida told the court that Farley’s drug charge from Nebraska was dismissed in 2014 because the chief prosecutor retired in the case and that they had to make a decision on the evidence – the age of the evidence. ‘
Farley now faces a maximum of 30 years in prison. In the argument that he should get bail, Farley’s lawyers described him as an elderly man suffering from a number of serious medical conditions, including two recent heart attacks, kidney failure and spinal surgery.
But U.S. District Judge John Antoon II was unmoved. Antoon last month denied a motion of defense to allow Farley to go to jail and await trial.
In his ruling, the judge said the man had already proven he had the rare ability to disappear and evade authorities for decades.
“Farley not only fled and remained hidden, but rather had the foresight, resources and determination to start a new life and live in public while capturing for decades,” Antoon wrote. “Nothing in the records indicates that Farley is incapable of doing so again.”