Sartori, by contrast, made no secret of his skepticism. “You’re really going to go down there in this huge wilderness, and you’re going to target these areas, but you don’t know what’s there? It just seems like such a crazy shot in the dark.” The absurd poshness of the resort, so unlike the usual penurious academic field expedition, added to his misgivings.
The expedition team also included a film crew, a still photographer, and Tom Weinberg, the film’s other coproducer and the expedition’s official chronicler. Weinberg was a man with an infectious laugh and a sweet, gentle personality, seventy-two years old, with a fringe of unruly gray hair and a beard. He had been working with Elkins since 1994 on the White City project. In his long career in film and television, he had earned several Emmy Awards and had become a legend in the Chicago film world. He cofounded the TVTV video collective in 1972, which produced “guerilla video” documentaries on progressive subjects in American culture and politics; later, he created the Media Burn Independent Archive, which, long before the Internet, stored thousands of hours of important documentary footage that might have been lost otherwise, including most of Studs Terkel’s interviews.
The most unforgettable member of the group was Bruce Heinicke, Elkins’s longtime fixer par excellence. I had been curious to meet him for years, after hearing Steve’s vivid descriptions of him and his adventures. I found him under the palapa bar before dinner, a morbidly obese man wearing a Panama hat, unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt displaying gold chains, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. He had a terrific scowl on his face. He told me he had returned from the airport, “where I just handed out a fucking Kansas City roll” to get the expedition’s equipment through Roatán’s customs office—computers, video and film cameras, sound gear, tripods, and all the rest. Even with the blessing of the president, people needed to be taken care of. “They wanted a ‘deposit’ of a hundred eighty thousand dollars,” he said, his jowls trembling at the outrage of it. “Said they would give it back when the equipment left the country. I told them, ‘No, no, that’s not fucking gonna happen.’ But a lot of grease went to a lot of different people.” When I started taking notes, he said, “You can’t print a fucking word I tell you unless I say so specifically.” He had a trove of tales, but at the end of almost every story, he turned his watery eyes on me, jabbed his finger, and said: “You can’t write that down. It’s off the record.”
Finally, in frustration, I asked him: “Isn’t there a way I can tell at least some of these stories?”
“Oh sure,” he said, “absolutely. No problem. After I’m fucking dead!”* He snorted with laughter and almost choked on an eruption of phlegm.
I asked Bruce about his relationship with Steve Elkins and how their partnership worked.
“Lemme tell you a story. I was in a restaurant and some guys were mouthing off. I could see trouble coming. So I put a gun at this guy’s head and said, ‘Get the fuck out of here or you’ll see all your fucking brains all over the fucking wall behind you.’ That’s the way I get things done. You gotta be that way down here. Don’t fuck with that gringo, he will fucking kill you. When you’re dealing with people like that, they got no respect for anybody, human life’s not important, so you have to treat them that way or you will get walked all over. Steve thinks everybody is his friend. He wants to be their friend. And he doesn’t understand that some people, they’re just looking for a chance to rob you and maybe kill you. Steve trusts everybody and down here you just can’t.”
Heinicke had a bum knee from a gunshot wound, which he was happy to explain. Back before he met his wife, he’d dated a Colombian woman and become close to her father, who ran one of the major drug cartels in Colombia. Heinicke did some business for the father, transporting drugs and collecting money. He was caught by the DEA, who demanded he work for them as an undercover informant, to avoid prison. But he said he continued to work for the cartel boss and kept the DEA satisfied by giving up some low-and mid-level people from the cartel. “I was smuggling coke out of fucking Colombia,” making a cocaine delivery from Colombia to Nicaragua for his boss, he said. He went to Cartagena to pick up the “product” in a small duffel bag, to carry to the contact, who was supposed to pay $75,000 for it. He went to a shuttered restaurant, where he was surprised to see not one man, but two. One man had a bag full of money. “I told him to show me the money. He started to walk over and I told him to stop and just open the bag and slide it over,” which he did. As the man stepped back, both men pulled guns and started shooting at Heinicke. “They were only ten feet from me when I pulled my .45 and shot one in the right shoulder, the other in the face, and before the one I shot in the shoulder hit the ground I split his head like a watermelon. The whole gunfight took two to three seconds. I caught a round in the right knee.” He collected all the guns, money, and drugs. He was in terrible pain, so he snorted some lines and packed cocaine powder into the bullet wound, which made him feel better.
“I had seventy-five thousand dollars cash in a fucking backpack, five kilos of cocaine, and two pistols,” he said. “This friend in La Ceiba flew down. I said, ‘Get me out of here, I got a bullet in me.’ Later, X [I have removed here the name of a well-known American writer and ex-soldier] set me up with the US Embassy out of Honduras—they sent me to Nicaragua to take pictures of Sandinista encampments and get GPS locations.”
After dinner, Elkins led the team in a planning meeting. The first item on the agenda was getting our cover story straight for the locals. Only a few people in the Honduran government knew what we were doing. There was to be no loose talk of Ciudad Blanca or the Lost City of the Monkey God. We were, Elkins explained, merely a bunch of nerdy scientists doing an aerial survey of Mosquitia using a new technology, to study the ecology, rainforest, flora, and fauna. The legend had grown to the point where many Hondurans were convinced the White City hid an immense treasure in gold; it would not be safe if our actual activities became known.