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Minutes before the raid, Coffey said he thought "that a good and fair agreement was going to get done."

But some of the other negotiators were expressing a little less resolve and were either already asleep or yearning to sleep -- as we all have in the course of the past five months -- in the lead-up to the fateful INS mission.

"Let's just sleep on it," they kept saying as the deadline came and went. The terms at 4 a.m. were the same as they were at 2:59 a.m. and in the 10:48 p.m. fax that Podhurst never looked at: The family must turn the boy over that morning to his father. In Washington. Or else. Yawning in Miami. Some were sleeping in their expensive and cozy pads far from Little Havana. They didn't want to bother Lázaro, who was also asleep. Where was the concern over Elián? Why wasn't someone taking No-Doz?

"Why can't we go home," whined negotiator Manny Diaz. "Take a shower, shave, change clothes and come back at 9, 10 in the morning?" Take in a movie, bowl a few frames. Be there just when the crowd was big enough to ensure a catastrophe.

Although duplicity allegedly prevailed, Podhurst, Diaz, Coffey and others met at Lázaro's house around 4 a.m. to tell everyone that there was trouble. And everyone inside the Little Havana home managed to get fully clothed before the 5:15 a.m. raid. As for a display of excessive force, think again.

Two days before, according to one source, Lázaro told cheering exile leaders "they would have to come and get him so the cameras can catch it all." So much for passivity. Also, there were not one, but two men with felony records acting as lookouts next door who would alert the family -- and the TV cameras -- that the gringos were coming. The feds managed to take the ex-cons off the premises just before the raid. Still, another neighbor admitted he was "acting as [a] lookout."

It took the feds less than three minutes to complete the raid, which took place even though Reno had given the negotiators more than an hour past the deadline to come up with something reasonable. Moments later, Podhurst led the outrage against his friend Reno.

And then, oops! As we learned last week, the Justice Department released copies of the second fax and the first fax -- the one that was attracting cobwebs in Podhurst's fax machine, which bore an incredible similarity to the final offer faxed four hours later.

No, this is not fiction. The facts all came from a very long article on what went down before the raid in Sunday's Miami Herald.
salon.com | May 4, 2000

A correction has been made to this story.

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