How to Get Away With Murder in America

Drug Lords, Dirty Pols, Obsessed Cops, and the Quiet Man Who Became the CIA’s Master Killer

By: Evan Wright

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Ric Prado has a secret. He's one of the CIA's most decorated officers, but the FBI wanted him for murder and racketeering...

How to Get Away with Murder in America is the extraordinary, true account of an FBI murder investigation of a top-ranking CIA officer and the pushback -- from the highest reaches of government -- to stop an investigation that threatened to rock the foundations of America’s national security establishment.

Prado is one of the most storied men to have served in the agency. To friends, he's "Ric," a Cuban immigrant who became an American success story. Prado entered the CIA as a paramilitary, fighting the agency’s secret wars in Latin America, then rising through the ranks to serve presidents and lead some of the most sensitive programs of the War on Terror, from the hunt for bin Laden to the creation of the agency’s “targeted assassination unit.”

Ten years after joining the CIA, Prado was the target of a massive FBI investigation for his alleged role in my than a half dozen murders carried out on behalf of a major Miami cocaine trafficker -- who also happened to be one of Prado’s closest childhood friends.

To the FBI task force investigating him, Prado’s story seemed like a true-life version of The Departed. They believed they’d caught a killer who’d penetrated the highest reaches of US intelligence. Federal agents interviewed Prado at CIA headquarters and believed they'd obtained his cooperation. But when they issued a subpoena for Prado to testify before a grand jury, the CIA had other plans...

The FBI task force was terminated. Agents were re-assigned and told to keep silent for “national security” purposes. Case files detailing Prado’s alleged crimes disappeared. Many assumed they’d been destroyed…until journalist Evan Wright found them.

Wright, a veteran war correspondent who had covered CIA operations in the Middle East, would spend the next four years tracking Prado and building a portrait of his double life, split between the CIA and the criminal underworld. Wright found the original federal investigators, who outraged by what the saw as an obstruction of justice, broke their silence. Wright visited crime scenes and interviewed witnesses, including friends of Prado, his associates, alleged accomplices and victims whose testimony figured prominently in the FBI’s interrogation of Prado.

In How to Get Away with Murder in America Wright builds a complex of Prado, a hero and loyal friend to those whom he worked with at the CIA, a suspect in a series of brutal street crimes to the FBI. Moving from the FBI investigation, to Prado’s past in Miami, to his work at the CIA Wright weaves a narrative that includes street thugs, Mafia capos, crooked politicians, a discredited CNN anchor, CIA chiefs, and Prado’s childhood friend Albert San Pedro, a.k.a. “the Maniac,” the Miami cocaine kingpin whom he served for years as a bodyguard and allegedly, as a contract killer.

Ultimately, Wright lays out a damning indictment of the intelligence community that shielded and promoted Prado, long after the had FBI outed him. In Wright’s carefully researched expose, Prado’s ascent stands on the denial of justice and marks the criminalization of the CIA. How to Get Away with Murder in America will shake your conceptions of government, justice and truth in America today.

All power to the CIA

After listening to this, I believe we need more agents like Prado. Sometimes you need to break a few eggs to accomplish the mission and who cares if people are offended.