When the mourners arrived at the Lincoln Memorial funeral home in eastern Nebraska, federal agents were already guarded outside. Their target was a man named Howard Farley Jr., a fugitive drug trafficking suspect who had been on the run for almost 25 years.
That cold October afternoon in 2009, the investigators were blocked once again. Farley never showed up at his late brother’s memorial service.
The man had been a ghost since 1985, when he was accused of running a transcontinental cocaine chain.
“He did a good job of disappearing,” said Duaine Bullock, the former commander of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Narcotics Unit.
However, 11 years after the failed funeral operation, a different team of investigators broke into a home in Weirsdale, Florida. The target that day was a man suspected of passport fraud. He lived by the name of Timothy Brown.
The attack was a success. Federal agents arrested the man while he tried to board a plane in his private hangar, prosecutors said.
It was only after the arrest that authorities learned that the arrested man was actually Howard Farley Jr., the longtime fugitive who, according to prosecutors, used the identity of a baby who died in the 1950s.
Farley, now 72, faces several charges, including passport fraud. But he managed to do something highly unusual: despite being captured, he managed to escape his original accusations.
The 1985 drug charge was dropped in 2014, adding a curious wrinkle to an already extraordinary case.
“He was Nebraska’s DB Cooper,” said Jerry Soucie, Lincoln’s longtime lawyer, comparing Farley to the man who disappeared after hijacking a plane in the Seattle skies in 1971. “A legend.”
Soucie said he sometimes mentioned Farley’s name to prosecutors in the years after the suspect disappeared. “They once asked my client to come in and say, ‘Where is he?’” Recalled Soucie. “I said, ‘He’s with Howard Farley.’ It really pissed them off. “
The arrest provoked strong reactions and totally different from those linked to the different lives of man.
Some people who met him in his hometown Lincoln think it is a caricature that he is not going to prison on drug charges. This group includes his ex-wife, who noted that the former drug case led to the suicide of two co-defendants who agreed to cooperate against Farley.
“So many sad results have come due to 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 regard and still don’t believe in his supposed past. Some think the government should take it easy on a man now in his 70s who is not charged with any violent crime.
“He’s just a kind soul,” said Michelle Bearden, a journalist who befriended Farley in Florida. “When I heard you were called the drug lord, it was crazy. If you knew Tim – I know him as Tim – you would never think of him that way in a million years. “
The case was front-page news in Lincoln’s main newspaper in 1985. “Supposed drug gang leader still at large,” read the headline in the Lincoln Journal on October 24, 1985.
Farley was arrested on the biggest drug charge in Nebraska history. About 74 people were charged and all but one were arrested in what is known as Operation Southern Line.
Farley disappeared before the prosecution was opened. He was described as the alleged “big boss” of the loosely organized drug chain, which prosecutors said he used a railroad to distribute cocaine in the United States.
While investigators hunted for Farley, the cases against his 73 co-defendants progressed.
Lincoln’s former lawyer, Soucie, said it was clear to him and some of the other defense lawyers that many of the people caught up in the investigation were not serious drug dealers, but simply people who used drugs and occasionally sold them to feed their habits.
“They were forcing everyone to report everyone,” said Soucie of prosecutors. “It got kind of ugly.”
A month after the accusation was revealed, the first of two tragedies happened. A defendant who agreed to cooperate took his own life. Then, a month later, a second defendant who agreed to work with prosecutors died of suicide.
The vast majority of the defendants accepted plea agreements that saved them from prison, but Farley’s own sister and brother-in-law were among those serving time for drugs.
Even after all other cases were closed, the authorities continued to look for Farley.
“The last thing we heard was that he was somewhere in the south,” said Bullock, the former Lincoln narcotics unit commander who was known as “the brain” because he never forgot anything.
The brain information was correct. Farley is now known to have spent much of his time fleeing Florida, living in plain sight.
He was residing with his wife in a custom built home in a gated community called Love’s Landing, where most properties are equipped with aircraft hangars. They bought the land for $ 95,000 in 2018 and completed construction of the $ 350,000 home in June 2019, records show. The couple also own a $ 150,000 plane, prosecutors said in court.
Farley’s wife, Duc Hanh Thi Vu, told investigators that she met him on the Caribbean island of St. Martin in the mid-1980s. The couple married in Broward County, Florida, in 1993.
Vu, who arrived in the United States with his family at age 11 after fleeing political persecution in Vietnam, earned a master’s degree in computer science at Florida Atlantic University and built a successful career in computers.
Florida prosecutors found no evidence that Farley had made any money during the flight, which led them to question how the couple supported their lifestyle around the world.
“Their income as a data analyst does not reflect the lifestyle they have led in the past 30 years: trips to Australia, deep sea diving, deep sea fishing,” prosecutor Michael Felicetta said in court last month.
The couple lived in the cities of Naples and Homosassa before settling in the Love’s Landing community, records show. They offered dinners to friends and spoke openly about their love for travel and outdoor activities, such as diving and fishing.
Farley was reserved about his past, but not in a strange or unusual way, friends said.
“There was no reason to be suspicious at all,” said Bearden, the journalist. “They are a very good couple. He adored her and treated her very well. She is a very intelligent woman. We are all in shock. “
Bearden is among half a dozen family friends who have expressed support for the man they knew as Tim Brown in reference letters sent to the court.
“He is a man who really exudes generosity, both in deeds and, particularly, in spirit,” wrote Bearden and her husband.
“I can’t think of a better or more helpful person than Tim,” wrote another friend, David Shear. “He is a person of good character and I am proud to call him a friend and I will continue to do so.”
Farley has lived by the name of Timothy Brown since he disappeared in the mid-1980s, according to prosecutors. The identity was taken from a baby who died in 1955 at the age of 3 months.
Farley used the boy’s name and Social Security number to obtain a passport and driver’s license, prosecutors said. But when he applied for a passport renewal in February 2020, the passport agency’s fraud prevention team discovered something suspicious: Timothy Brown’s 1955 death record.
The investigators compared the photos of the man’s passport with the image used on his driver’s license. When federal agents broke into his home on December 4, they knew what the suspect looked like, but had no idea who he really was.
A fingerprint comparison confirmed that Timothy Brown was actually Howard Farley Jr., the longtime fugitive.
The news of his arrest sparked a series of phone calls and commemorative Facebook posts among former police officers involved in Farley’s old drug case.
“Hell, a bunch of old anti-drug agents, including me, at least we’re going to sleep with a smile tonight,” wrote a former Lincoln police officer on Facebook. “More than two years of my life have been used with that guy.”
Farley was charged with passport fraud, a crime that could be sentenced to 10 years in prison. But a month later, a Florida grand jury returned a charge accusing Farley of a series of additional crimes, including aggravated identity theft, Social Security fraud and operation as a pilot without a legitimate aviator certificate.
Federal agents who searched your home found a gun and ammunition on your nightstand, leading to an additional charge of illegal possession of a weapon.
His wife was also accused of passport fraud, in addition to making false statements to a federal agency and employing a pilot without a legitimate aviator certificate. She and Farley pleaded not guilty.
Vu’s lawyers argued in court documents that she did not intentionally harbor a fugitive. They pointed to statements made by one of the agents who interviewed her. The agent said in court that she told him that she knew Farley “had drug problems in Nebraska, which is why he changed his name”, but “not necessarily that he was a fugitive or wanted”.
Attorneys Andrew Searle and Fritz Scheller, who are representing Vu and Farley, wrote: “Even the government witness herself at the detention hearing confirmed that Mrs. Vu never knew all the details about the defendant’s alleged background.”
In an interview, Scheller said he understands why the old drug case made a huge splash in Nebraska in the 1980s, but the allegations did not point to the man known as Howard Farley Jr. being a major drug dealer. “He wasn’t exactly Pablo Escobar from Omaha,” said Scheller.
Florida prosecutors said in court that Farley’s Nebraska drug charge was dismissed in 2014 just because the lead prosecutor in the case was retiring and “they needed to make a decision about the evidence – the age of the evidence”.
Farley now faces a maximum of 30 years in prison. In arguing for him to be bailed, Farley’s lawyers described him as an elderly man who suffers from “a number of significant medical conditions”, including two recent heart attacks, kidney failure and spinal surgery.
But US District Judge John Antoon II was unmoved. Antoon last month denied a defense motion to allow Farley to leave prison and await trial for house arrest.
In his decision, the judge said the man had already proven that he had the rare ability to disappear and elude the authorities for decades.
“Farley not only ran away and remained hidden, but instead had the vision, the resources and the determination to start a new life and live outdoors while avoiding capture for decades,” wrote Antoon. “Nothing in the records indicates that Farley is unable to do this again.”