Bomb Plot Allegedly Aimed To Win Release Of Cocaine Smuggler

ATLANTA - The bizarre plot allegedly involved a family of Tennessee drug dealers masquerading as Colombian terrorists protesting U.S. foreign policy by blowing up a dam, an airport, a power plant and transmission lines.

Investigators say it all was designed to persuade the federal government to free Jerry Allen LeQuire, a major cocaine smuggler.

But instead, LeQuire, 46, three brothers, his son, his brother-in-law and a Kentucky woman were indicted yesterday in Atlanta on four counts of federal explosive charges. The indictment charges the LeQuires with stealing dynamite and attempting to blow up two electric power transmission-line towers south of Atlanta in 1985.

Their plan, according to the indictment, was to blow up a dam, a power plant, an East Coast airport and other installations. After each event, the LeQuires were to telephone the Miami Herald, purporting to be Colombian terrorists protesting U.S. policy in Central America.

Meanwhile, the indictment says, the family planned to rent a house in Orlando, stock it with food and hire an unknowing Latin American ``dupe'' who was to be told he was house-sitting a shipment of cocaine. Instead, the house was to be filled with cases of dynamite.

LeQuire, serving a 20-year drug-trafficking sentence at the time of the plot, then would offer to help solve the terrorism mystery, using his contacts with drug dealers in South and Central America. As proof of his knowledge and good faith, he would lead agents to the house full of dynamite and to the ``dupe.'

On Dec. 1, 1980, the indictment charges, brother-in-law Michael Carl Jenkins, 40, using dynamite that he and the ringleader's son, Charles Allen LeQuire, 26, had stolen, tried to blow up an electric transmission tower in Clayton County, Ga. On New Year's Day, 1986, Jenkins set off dynamite under another tower in Butts County, Ga., the indictment says.

The explosions did not interrupt service, a Georgia Power Co. spokesman said yesterday, but did $200,000 worth of damage to the towers.

``The whole thing sounds crazy. . . . It might have worked, but his ex-wife turned him in,'' said Detective Randal Graves of the Maryville, Tenn., police.

LeQuire was convicted in 1988 in yet another cocaine-smuggling case along with several alleged co-conspirators in the explosives case. LeQuire, his son, Charles, his brother-in-law, Jenkins, his brother, James Thomas LeQuire, 39, and Bonnie Sue Anders, 42, of Corbin, Ky., are all serving prison terms in the 1988 case.

Brothers William Michael LeQuire, 28, and Gene Edward LeQuire, 42, were arrested yesterday morning near Knoxville, Tenn.

Jerry Allen LeQuire, the oldest of five brothers, has been attracting the wrong kind of attention since he was 15, right after his father died. In 1972, he was charged with cattle rustling in Nashville, and in 1981 he was suspected of placing bombs under the porches of two local politicians. Neither bomb exploded.

LeQuire's ex-wife, Karla Espinal, once testified that he had buried $280 million on the family farm near his hometown of Maryville. The money was never found. A Maryville resident said yesterday that the farm, due to be auctioned off April 7, is expected to bring a much-inflated price because of her story.

Espinal, now in the federal witness-protection program, was a key witness against LeQuire in the 1988 cocaine-smuggling trial. The trial brought testimony of shootouts and the smuggling of more than 30 tons of cocaine.