The Raid In Replay

MARK FOLEY--AP
STILL ANGRY: Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Hispanic lawmakers challenge tactics used by the armed feds to seize the six-year-old

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Reno spent most of Friday and early Saturday morning on the telephone with mediator Aaron Podhurst, a Miami Lakes lawyer. Podhurst was connected by phone to the Gonzalez home 30 miles away; he later said his finger hurt from hitting the Hold button over and over. Around the Gonzalez dining-room table were family lawyers Manny Diaz and Kendall Coffey. All night long, the three parties went back and forth trying to reconcile Podhurst's plan to have the families join at a retreat near Miami with Reno's demand that Elian be handed over that night and the families repair to a site near Washington the next morning.

It was Reno who set the deadlines for a deal--first 2 a.m., then 3 a.m. and finally an hour later--and it was Reno who kept letting them slip. At 4 a.m. Reno told Podhurst, "We're out of time." But when he came back 20 minutes later begging for time, she gave him five more minutes to work something out. When the five-minute deadline came and went, Reno told Podhurst his time was up, but she remained on the phone, not talking but on hold while Podhurst tried to get the family lawyers to wake up Lazaro and change his mind. Reno later explained that even at this late hour she wanted to go the extra mile. "She's always looking for consensus," observed a longtime Reno watcher a few days before the raid. "She wants Lazaro to be happy, Juan Miguel to be happy, the Justice Department to be happy. She wants everybody to be happy, and you can't have that."

Was the Miami family negotiating in good faith? The members insist they were. At 5 p.m. on Friday, they faxed Reno a proposal they say Podhurst told them Reno wanted--in particular, a commitment to join Juan Miguel at a neutral site for a transition period during the appeals process. But the terms of custody were left vague, and the process soon bogged down and stayed that way.

Reno can legitimately claim that Lazaro's family never gave any sign that it was prepared to meet either of her chief demands: to turn over Elian immediately, as her legal order required; and to travel to Washington for a transition period. The closest the family came to averting the raid was with the Friday-night fax, which said, "We understand that you have transferred temporary custody of Elian to his father." But lawyers close to the family acknowledge that this was a concession in theory only; the family intended to share custody during the transition period and perhaps beyond--hence the word temporary. The same fax indicated that other conditions would be forthcoming. And after the fax was sent, as the lawyers were retiring to a Little Havana restaurant that evening, confident that they had backed Reno down again, Marisleysis told them to make sure she would have some measure of "joint custody" during the appeals process.

Government lawyers believe the family got the outcome it wanted, other than the boy himself: a televised martyrdom that would allow them to hold their heads up forever in Little Havana. How else to explain, they ask, the family's curious refusal to travel to Washington for the week-long cooling-off period? All night long, the family said it didn't want to fly; it preferred to drive. When Podhurst told Reno, at 4 a.m. on Saturday, that he couldn't get the family to make up its mind about leaving town, Reno called it a "deal breaker." As it turned out, what it took to get the family on a plane to Washington was Elian's going there first.