I was told that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was thrilled with being a naval intelligence officer back in 1964. James Bond-mania was in full swing and Fay was a big fan of the novels and films.

Fay was pleased to learn that his true-life hero, the late President John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, was also a fan of the novels and once dined with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming.

Fay, a thin, baby-faced young man of 28, was stationed in San Diego, California in 1964. His assignment was to coordinate intelligence with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police concerning a Mexican crime lord suspected of smuggling vast amounts of narcotics into the United States via a fleet of merchant ships.

Fay thought this was the stuff of thrillers. He loved traveling down to Tijuana, Mexico in his “civies,” his civilian clothes, for meetings with the FBN and the Federalies. He told friends that after the Friday meetings, he would drink in local bars, admire the senoritas, and dream of his budding naval career. 

According to the Navy’s investigating officer’s report, it was after one of these meetings that Fay stepped out of a Tijuana bar and was abducted.

Witnesses reported that Fay was accosted by two pistoleros as he left the bar. The two gunmen beat Fay into unconsciousness and pushed him into the cab of a truck. A FBN informant later reported that Fay was taken to a ranch outside Tijuana. He was tied and bound to a chair in a dark room and then revived. The two gunmen, identified by the informant only as Pedro and Alfredo, began to beat Fay.

Off to the side of the room stood a heavy, thick-set man with a large, flat face that Fay no doubt recognized from the numerous surveillance photos he had viewed the previous months. The man was Neron Rodrigo, the crime lord targeted by the FBN and the Mexican police. Next to Rodrigo stood the stunningly beautiful Mexican girl that Fay and the FBN agents often lusted over in the photos.

Fay’s beating was severe and he eventually answered all of their questions. With a nod from Rodrigo, the two men picked up Fay and dragged him out of the house and stood him against the fence of a bull pen.

“Do you like the bulls?” the informant reported that Rodrigo asked Fay. “Do you come to Mexico for the girls or the bulls?”

The two gunmen laughed loudly as they bound Fay’s hands tightly behind his back.

“Like most of you gringos, you no doubt call them bull fights, but it is not a fight. It is a “dance” – a dangerous dance with the bull,” Rodrigo explained patiently to the beaten and bleeding naval officer. “And you, my stupid young friend, chose to dance with the wrong bull – me. Now you must dance with this other bull.”

Rodrigo motioned towards the bull pen with his right thumb and the two gunmen lifted Fay and tossed him over the fence.       

With his hands tied behind him, Fay had difficulty getting to his feet, but despite his wounds from the beating, the young officer was up and moving as the powerful black bull charged. The bull slammed and tore into Fay’s back and Fay was spun violently and fell to the ground. He lay in a twisted heap, trying to catch his breath.

His abductors leaned on the fence and cheered the bull. Standing a few feet back from the pen, the girl was expressionless. Fay somehow summoned the strength to get on his feet and move, but the bull charged again and one of the ferocious animal’s horns tore into Fay’s left leg, splitting it open from ankle to knee. Fay let out a chilling scream and collapsed to the ground.

The bull loomed over Fay, pummeling him as he lay helpless and semi-conscious, his wounds bleeding profusely into the sand. With a wave from Rodrigo, the man called Pedro distracted the bull as Alfredo jumped in and dragged Fay out of the pen. Rodrigo cursed the young officer and delivered a severe kick to Fay’s head.

“Toss him in the street as a message,” Rodrigo told his pistoleros. “I want everyone to know that it will take a stronger man to dance with this bull.’  

Fay’s broken, bloody and torn body was thrown into the street from a speeding truck. The Tijuana police recovered the body and upon discovering his Navy dog tags, notified the U.S. Navy in San Diego.

 

In 1970, six years after Fay’s body was discovered, I was an 18-year-old enlisted sailor serving aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. The aircraft carrier was home-ported in San Diego and we were going to sea every Monday through Friday, performing sea trials, damage control drills and air operations in preparation of our upcoming combat cruise to Vietnam. When the carrier returned to port in San Diego for the weekends, many of the Kitty Hawk‘s 5,000 men, myself included, ventured down to neighboring Tijuana for the wild and crazy nightlife.

There were at least a dozen cautionary tales circulating at the time that illustrated how Tijuana was truly a rough town. I recall one often-told, particularly gruesome and seemingly far-fetched story of a Navy officer who was gored to death by a bull and then dumped unceremoniously into the street.

The story was true, I recently discovered. I read the Navy’s investigation report and I heard the details of the decades-old murder directly from the Navy’s investigating officer. The Navy appointed an unusual officer to investigate the grisly murder in Mexico. The Navy sent a frogman.

Admiral Gordon Gray was walking history. Affectionately called “the old frogman,” Gray was a legend in the U.S. Navy. Over the course of a 50-year career, rising from seaman to admiral, Gray saw combat in three major wars and more than a dozen conflicts around the globe.

Gray was a pioneer in naval special operations and unconventional warfare and he was influential in the development of the U.S. Navy SEALs (Sea, Air and Land). He was one of the first Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogmen in WWII and he was one of the first UDT men to be commissioned as a Navy SEAL.

Gray was the founder and first commanding officer of the Navy’s elite SEAL Special Security Team, code-named “Blue Moray.” Serving as a troubleshooter for the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Gray and his Blue Moray team performed a wide variety of special action missions.

I first heard of Gray from my late father, who was a Navy chief and UDT frogman during WWII. My father, who was medically discharged after the war due to combat injuries, often spoke proudly of his former teammate. He told me that he was very pleased when he read my letter describing a brief encounter I had with Gray when he came aboard the Kitty Hawk in 1971 when the carrier was anchored in Da Nang Harbor in South Vietnam.    

I became a writer some years after leaving the Navy. In addition to my crime column, I’m also a contributing editor to National Security, a national monthly magazine. While on assignment for National Security, I interviewed a good number of WWII UDT veterans and active duty Navy SEALS for a piece on the UDT frogmen of WWII and how those first frogmen influenced the modern-day Navy SEALs.   

One of the old UDT veterans told me that he served with both my father and Gray. He said he was still in touch with the retired and reclusive admiral, and although Gray did not grant interviews, he gave me the admiral’s e-mail address so I could contact him and attempt to draw him out.

I e-mailed Gray and requested an interview. I wrote that I felt he owed it to history and his former teammates to speak publicly about his career. I noted that many of the men he served with, like my father, had passed on.

It must have been a good pitch, as Gray called me a short while later. In an hour-long telephone conversation, he said he fondly remembered my late father. He told a couple of stories about serving under my father as UDT 5 hit the Japanese-held beaches of Saipan, Tinian and Leyte Gulf.

“We swam ashore, wearing swim trunks, facemask and coral shoes, and we went up against 40,000 enemy Japanese soldiers, armed only with a satchel of explosives and our K-Bar knives,” Gray said proudly.

He laughed when he also recalled my father getting him out of jail in Hawaii after he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

“My father told me that he knew every police sergeant in Hawaii,” I said.

Gray laughed at the memory of his old chief convincing police sergeants to let the frogmen out of jail so they could go back into combat. Gray also recalled visiting the Kitty Hawk in Vietnam many years later and talking to a number of young sailors, one of whom, I informed him, was me.  

Gray said he did not normally grant interviews, but he checked me out with friends and read some of my columns and my magazine pieces, including the story on UDT and the modern SEALs. So due to my Navy background and with respect for my father, Gray consented to a series of exclusive interviews with me. I looked forward to interviewing Admiral Gray about his amazing life, as I saw him as a modern-day Horatio Hornblower.  

We arranged to meet two weeks later in Washington D.C. where he was scheduled to address a terrorism conference. 

I took the train from Philadelphia to Washington and attended the conference, which was located in the main ballroom of a Washington hotel. I sat in the front row as Gray spoke before a group of military, law enforcement and security professionals. I saw that Gray maintained his military bearing and command presence despite his advanced age and civilian attire. The audience, I could see, were in awe of the legendary admiral. After his speech, Gray shook a few hands, briefly talked to a few old friends and then asked me to follow him.

We took an elevator up to his room. As I set up my tape recorder and laid my notebook and pen on a table, Gray called room service and ordered a pot of coffee. The admiral, a big man with short-cropped iron gray hair and a tanned and deeply lined face, looked fit and healthy for a man in his late 80s. He offered me a cigar in a deep, rich voice that a stage actor or military drill instructor would envy.        

Now I’m a proud Navy veteran, an unabashed patriot and a big supporter of the military, but even after all these years, I still possess my old enlisted man’s distrust of military brass. Yet, there was something genuine and down-to-earth about this old admiral.

Gray picked a box up from the floor and slid it across the table towards me. I opened it and saw that it contained records, files and photographs. The box, one of two dozen I would eventually receive, contained Blue Moray’s declassified official Command History during the years that Gray commanded the team. The box also contained various other declassified documents and reports. Gray said he cleared the records with the Navy and they could now be released to me.

I sat across the table from Gray, both of us smoking his good cigars and drinking good, strong, Navy-style coffee. I looked over a batch of photos that I pulled out of the box, some of which were marked “Mexico, 1964” and showed Gray as a younger, leaner, dark-haired and ruggedly handsome man.

I knew the public legend, but I asked Gray to begin our talks by providing a brief overview of his life and career before we concentrated on a specific time or incident in his life to cover in this initial session.

Admiral Gordon Gray looked uncomfortable talking about himself, but he took a long draw from his cigar and soldiered on to say that like me, he was born in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. His father, a Navy veteran who worked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, instilled in him a love for the Navy and a love of country.

Gray went on to say that he enlisted in the Navy at 17 and was sent to serve on a PT boat in the Philippine Islands prior to the outbreak of WWII. During the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Gray’s PT boat was hit with a shell during an engagement with a Japanese destroyer. Blown clear off the boat and into the night’s choppy, black water, Gray quickly recovered and discovered that he was the sole survivor of the PT boat crew. Gray, an all-round athlete who boxed for the squadron, was an excellent swimmer and he easily swam ashore. With only minor injuries, he sat on the beach and watched the naval battle rage.

Refusing to surrender to the Japanese occupying forces, Gray joined the American and Filipino guerrilla bands that were forming an active resistance. The young seafarer learned new skills such as guerrilla warfare and the art of espionage. The guerrillas harassed and spied on the occupying Japanese forces, providing vital information via the radio to the American forces in Australia.

Gray excelled in performing acts of sabotage as he became proficient with explosives. He earned a reputation as a fearless guerrilla fighter and a skillful intelligence operative. Gray grimaced when he noted that the American and Filipino guerrillas knew him as “Kid Tiger,” his nickname from his pre-war boxing bouts.

In his last act as a guerrilla in the Philippines, Gray dropped silently from a fishing boat, swam ashore and penetrated deep inside an enemy garrison. Once inside the garrison he sought out a particularly vicious Japanese Colonel. Armed only with his K-Bar knife, Gray took the brutal Japanese officer in swift and close combat, killing him soundlessly. He then escaped back into the sea and swam to the fishing boat without alerting the Japanese guards.

The Japanese mounted a massive manhunt for the Colonel’s executioner. Gray hid out, but he was betrayed by a close Filipino friend in the guerrilla band and he was captured by the Japanese. Defiant in the face of torment and constant beatings, Gray was shipped back to Japan as a special prisoner on a Japanese ship.

Only a chance torpedo from an American submarine spared him the fate of being executed in Japan or spending the rest of the war as a prisoner. Once again, Gray found himself in the Pacific Ocean, amid wreckage and debris, alive and treading water.   

Gray was picked up by the American submarine and after he changed into dry clothes, he was examined by a medical corpsman and then given dinner. After dinner he had coffee with a naval intelligence officer that happened to be a passenger aboard the submarine. Considering Gray’s skills and experiences with swimming and explosives, the intelligence officer recommended that Gray volunteer for a new, classified, elite outfit he heard was forming back in Florida.

“That elite outfit was UDT,” Gray said.       

Gray served as a UDT frogman in the Pacific for the rest of WWII. Twenty-four hours before General McArthur waded ashore in triumphant return to the Philippines, Gray, along with my father and other members of UDT 5, swam in and performed night reconnaissance of the shoreline and later planted explosives to clear the way for the forthcoming amphibious landings. Gray had made this swim once before, but this time he was at the spearhead of a mighty invasion force.

Gray remained in UDT after the war and he later fought in the Korean War, where he earned an officer’s commission as an Ensign. In later years he served as an advisor to the Philippine military during the Huk rebellion and served as an advisor to the South Vietnamese early in the Vietnam War.

While serving on the CNO’s staff in the late 1950s, Gray, like a number of other special operations veterans, recommended expanding the mission of the UDT frogmen. When President Kennedy, the Ian Fleming fan, later ordered the Navy to develop a Special Forces outfit akin to the Army’s Green Berets, some of Gray’s ideas were adapted in the formation of the SEALs (Sea, Air and land).

In 1961 the Navy selected a small group of UDT officers and enlisted men and commissioned them as SEALs. The men were formed into SEAL Team One on the West Coast and SEAL Team Two on the EastCoast. Gray and another small group of UDT men were also commissioned as SEALs and they formed the SEAL Special Security Team – Blue Moray – with Gray in command.  

Gray returned to Vietnam with his new team and served several tours-of-duty. Blue Moray would go on to target terrorists, guerrillas, criminals and spies around the world for the next four decades under Gray. All though its current missions are highly classified, I knew that Blue Moray remains active today under another commanding officer.

Despite his often grim and hazardous duty, or perhaps because of it, Gray was typical of the young men in the Navy at the time. He had a reputation as a fun-loving, hell-raising, hard-drinking, and girl-chasing sailor. Gray modified his personal behavior when he married late in his life. He and his wife had a son who was now a serving naval officer.

Although Gray did not mention it, I knew that among his many medals and citations, he was awarded the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and four Bronze Stars.      

Concluding the overview of his career, Gray said that he wanted to begin our interview sessions with a story of an operation in Mexico in 1964. He spoke of being sent to Tijuana, Mexico in response to the murder of a young Navy officer

“Our target was an international criminal with his own private navy.” Gray said.

Gray began to recount a meeting he attended at the Pentagon in 1964. Gray, then a lieutenant commander, was called to the meeting by Captain James Moore, a special assistant to the CNO. Moore, a short, thin, gruff former combat submariner, told Gray that the CNO wanted him to attend a meeting with a FBN official. 

The federal drug agent came to the Pentagon to brief Moore on the vicious murder of Fay in Mexico. The CNO was furious about the murder and wanted action. His order to send for “the frogman” was a clear indication of that.

Fay provided valuable assistance to the FBN by coordinating the tracking of the drug smugglers’ ships at sea by the U.S. Navy’s ships and aircraft, FBN Special Agent Tom Cobb told Moore and Gray.

Cobb, a stocky man with short brown hair and a tight-fitting, rumbled black suit, looked every bit like a hard-nosed, world-weary cop. Cobb began the briefing, occasionally glancing at the folder in front of him.   

“We know that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Neron Rodrigo,” Cobb told the two naval officers sitting across from him. “Rodrigo is an international shipping magnate, but we also believe he is a major drug smuggler and a psychotic killer.”

Cobb went on to say that Rodrigo’s shipping line provided cover for his crime empire. He was well known in the criminal world for his strength, deadly skills and a bull-like physique. Rodrigo made wide use of murder, violence, intimidation, bribery and corruption to protect his growing legitimate and criminal enterprises.   

Rodrigo had criminal partners all over the world and the FBN received information from confidential informants that Rodrigo was in the process of establishing a partnership with Carlos Mendez, a major drug supplier in Mexico and American organized crime in the Western United States. This partnership, if established, Cobb explained, would flood the U.S. with heroin. Heroin addiction, the agent explained to the naval officers, was a growing national crisis.      

Cobb helped himself to a class of water from the pitcher on the table. He took a huge gulp as if to wash down the distasteful story he had to tell the Navy officers. 

“Rodrigo was a Tijuana street urchin with a nasty reputation for targeting American sailors,” Cobb explained. “His mother worked the bars and entertained sailors and when Rodrigo became a teenager he would rob and assault sailors at knife-point, often stabbing them simply for his pleasure.” 

According to the Mexican police, Rodrigo hates Americans in general and American sailors in particular due to one young sailor who refused to be a victim. Although the sailor had been staggering drunk when he left a Tijuana bar, closely followed by Rodrigo, the sailor was able to quickly disarm Rodrigo and knocked him out.

“He dragged Rodrigo back to the bar and dropped him in the doorway like a sack of mail,” Cobb said bluntly.

Rodrigo was deeply humiliated and he soon extracted his revenge by targeting an unfortunate American sailor who was walking tipsily down a back street. Rodrigo, ever-armed with a knife, savagely murdered the sailor. The Mexican police went all out to arrest Rodrigo, but thanks to a rising young drug kingpin – his future Mexican partner, the Mexican police suspect – he was spirited away on a cargo ship heading to South American ports-of-call.    

Rodrigo became a merchant seaman and over the years he became involved with criminal organizations in several countries, acting first as a smuggler and later as a paid contract killer for the various crime syndicates. His reputation steadily grew and he invested his considerable criminal earnings into a small shipping line. His shipping holdings were now so clouded in foreign registries and fronts that investigators did not know exactly what he owned or controlled, but they believed his holdings to be vast.   

Cobb passed out surveillance photos to Moore. Moore glanced at them with a disdainful look and passed them to Gray. Gray saw that Rodrigo was in his early 50s and was a big, thick and heavy man. His powerful arms and torso stretched against his shirt. He had a flattened face, slicked back black hair and pitted-olive skin. He was by no means handsome, but with him in nearly every photo was a stunning, raven-haired beauty. Gray wondered who she was.  

“Her name is Adoncia Prado,” Cobb offered, reading Gray’s mind. “She is Rodrigo’s girlfriend.”

According to their sources, Cobb continued, Rodrigo reacted angrily to the news that American narcotic agents brought in the U.S. Navy to perform naval and air surveillance of his ships. Rodrigo, the sources say, personally supervised the torture and murder of Fay. He bragged about the murder to his chief lieutenants. Although FBN sources were willingly to provide information about the crime, they could not, or would not, testify against Rodrigo in a Mexican or American court.

Cobb said that America had a strong ally in Mexico with Commandante Gregorio Alvero of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. Alvero was an incorruptible police officer who supervised a small, tough squad of drug raiders.

Cobb said that Alvero was a fearless career policeman with a keen sense of humor that infuriated the criminals he pursued, such as Rodrigo.

As Gray listened, he stole another glance at the young woman’s photo. She possessed an angelic face, but Gray also detected an underlying toughness.  

When the briefing ended, Captain Moore was clearly angered. He slapped the wood table and stood up. He chewed on a wet, slim cigar for a moment, as if he were chewing on his next words.

“This man – this murderer,” he said slowly, spitting out bits of cigar leaf that hit the table top. “He is a clear threat to American national security. Why, he’s a damn criminal with his own damn navy!”

Moore ordered Gray to assist the FBN and the Mexican police in the murder investigation and take-down of Rodrigo. Another officer had been assigned to provide naval surveillance support to the federal drug cops, but he would remain safely in San Diego.

Cobb thanked the captain. Cobb handed Gray his business card and asked him to call later in the day. Cobb then gathered up his files and left the conference room. 

Moore handed Gray his signed orders, which read, “You are appointed as an investigating officer and charged with inquiring into all the pertinent facts and circumstances leading to and connected with the murder of Lieutenant Edwin Fay, USN.” 

“He may have gotten away with killing one American sailor when he was a teenage Tijuana street rat,” Moore told Gray. “But he sure as hell will not skate on Fay’s murder. You make sure of that.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

As they left the conference room and walked down the Pentagon passageway, Moore advised Gray to remember the Barbary War.

“The American Navy has fought pirates before,” Moore growled.

End of Part One

 

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