By the time the mourners arrived at the Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home in eastern Nebraska, federal agents were already outside. Their target was a man named Howard Farley Jr., a fugitive drug trafficking suspect who had been on the run for nearly 25 years.
On that chilly afternoon in October 2009, the researchers were again thwarted. Farley never showed up for his dead brother’s memorial service.
The man had been a ghost since 1985 when he was accused of running a transcontinental cocaine network.
“He disappeared well,” said Duaine Bullock, the former commander of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Narcotics Unit.
But eleven years after the funeral home’s failed eviction, another team of investigators descended on a house in Weirsdale, Florida. The target that day was a man suspected of passport fraud. He lived under the name of Timothy Brown.
The raid was a success. Federal agents arrested the man when he tried to board a plane in his private hangar, prosecutors said.
It was only after the arrest that the authorities found out that the man taken into custody was in fact Howard Farley Jr. was, the longtime fugitive who prosecutors say used the identity of a baby who died in the 1950s.
Farley, now 72, is facing several charges, including passport fraud. But he managed to do something highly unusual: despite being captured, he managed to avoid his original charge.
The 1985 drug charge was dropped in 2014, adding a curious wrinkle to an already extraordinary case.
“He was the DB Cooper of Nebraska,” said Jerry Soucie, a longtime attorney from Lincoln, equating Farley with the man who disappeared after hijacking a plane in the sky over Seattle in 1971. “A legend.”
Soucie said that in the years after the suspect went missing, he would sometimes bring up Farley’s name to needle officers. “One time they asked my client to come in and said, ‘Where is he?’” Soucie recalled. ‘I said,’ He’s with Howard Farley. ‘It really pissed them off. “
The arrest has led to strong and very different reactions from those related to the man’s different lives.
Some people who knew him in his hometown of Lincoln think it is a joke that he will not be jailed for the drug charge. This group includes his ex-wife, who noted that the old drug case led to the suicides of two co-defendants who agreed to cooperate against Farley.
“There have been so many sad consequences from Howard’s drug sales,” said Christine Schleis, who was briefly married to Farley in the late 1960s.
But many who know him from his second life in Florida hold him in high esteem and still have disbelief about his alleged past. Some argue that the government should take it easy on a man now in his 70s who is not charged with violent crimes.
“He’s just a gentle soul,” said Michelle Bearden, a journalist who became friends with Farley in Florida. ‘When I heard they called him a drug lord, it was crazy. If you met Tim – I know him as Tim – you’d never think of him that way in a million years. “
The case made headlines in Lincoln’s main newspaper in 1985. “The alleged drug ring leader is still at large,” the Lincoln Journal read on October 24, 1985.
Farley was swept up in the largest drug indictment in Nebraska history. About 74 people were charged and all but one were arrested in what was known as Operation Southern Line.
Farley disappeared before the charges were dropped. He has been described as the alleged “kingpin” of the loosely organized drug network, which prosecutors said used a railroad to distribute cocaine throughout the US.
While investigators hunted Farley, cases continued against his 73 co-defendants.
Soucie, Lincoln’s former attorney, said it became clear to him and some other defense attorneys that many of the people entangled in the investigation were not serious dealers, but simply people who used drugs and occasionally sold them to feed their habits.
“They were mocking everyone to betray everyone,” Soucie said of the prosecutors. “It just got a little ugly.”
A month after the charges were dropped, the first of two tragedies struck. A defendant who agreed to cooperate took his own life. A month later, a second defendant who agreed to cooperate with prosecutors died by suicide.
The vast majority of defendants entered into plea deals that saved them from jail time, but Farley’s own sister and brother-in-law were among those serving time for drugs.
Even after all other cases were closed, the police continued to search for Farley.
“The last we heard is that he was somewhere south,” said Bullock, the former commander of Lincoln’s narcotics unit, known as “the brain” because he never forgot anything.
The information from the brain turned out to be correct. Farley is now known to have spent much of his time on the run in Florida, in plain sight.
He lived with his wife in a custom-built home in a gated community called Love’s Landing, where most properties are equipped with airplane hangars. They purchased the lot for $ 95,000 in 2018 and completed construction on the $ 350,000 home in June 2019, records show. The couple also own a plane worth $ 150,000, prosecutors said in court.
Farley’s wife, Duc Hanh Thi Vu, told investigators she had met him on the Caribbean island of St. Martin in the mid-1980s. The couple married in Broward County, Florida in 1993.
Vu, who arrived in the US with her family at the age of 11 after fleeing political persecution in Vietnam, earned a master’s degree in computer science from Florida Atlantic University and built a successful career in computers.
Florida prosecutors have found no evidence that Farley earned any income while on the run, raising questions about how the couple could afford their globetrotting lifestyle.
“Her income as a data analyst does not reflect the lifestyle she has led for the past 30 years: travel to Australia, scuba diving, deep sea fishing,” prosecutor Michael Felicetta said in court last month.
The couple lived in the cities of Naples and Homosassa before settling in the Love’s Landing community, reports show. They organized dinner parties for friends and spoke openly about their love of travel and outdoor activities such as diving and fishing.
Farley was private about his past, but not in a strange or unusual way, friends said.
“There was no reason to be even a little suspicious,” said Bearden, the journalist. ‘They are a very good couple. He adored her and treated her very well. She is a really smart woman. We are all just in shock. “
Bearden is one of six family friends who expressed support for the man they knew as Tim Brown in letters of reference submitted to the court.
“He is a man who truly exudes generosity, both in deed and especially in spirit,” wrote Bearden and her husband.
“I can’t think of a nicer or more helpful person than Tim,” wrote another friend, David Shear. “He is a person of good character and I am proud to call him a friend and I will continue to do so.”
According to prosecutors, Farley has lived under the name of Timothy Brown since he disappeared in the mid-1980s. The identity is taken from a baby who died in 1955 at the age of 3 months.
Farley had used the boy’s name and Social Security number to obtain a passport and driver’s license, prosecutors said. But when he applied for a passport renewal in February 2020, anti-fraud personnel at passport agencies discovered something suspicious: Timothy Brown’s 1955 death register.
Investigators have compared the man’s passport photos with the image used for his driver’s license. When federal agents raided his home on December 4, they knew what the suspect looked like but had no idea who he really was.
A fingerprint comparison confirmed that Timothy Brown was in fact Howard Farley Jr. was, the long-term fugitive.
The news of his arrest sparked a series of phone calls and festive Facebook posts among the former law enforcement officers involved in Farley’s old drug case.
“Hell, a bunch of old narcissists, including myself, are at least going to sleep with a smile tonight,” a former Lincoln police officer wrote on Facebook. “More than two years of my life were used up for that man.”
Farley was charged with passport fraud, a crime carrying a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. But a month later, a Florida Grand Jury answered a lawsuit accusing Farley of a series of additional offenses, including aggravated identity theft, Social Security fraud, and operating as a pilot without a legitimate pilot’s license.
Federal agents who searched his home found a gun and ammunition in his nightstand, leading to an additional charge of illegal possession of weapons.
His wife was also charged with passport fraud, making false statements to a federal agency, and employing a pilot without a legitimate pilot’s license. She and Farley have pleaded not guilty.
Vu’s lawyers argued in court documents that she was not knowingly sheltering a fugitive. They pointed to statements from one of the officers who interviewed her. The officer said in court that she had told him she knew Farley had “got into trouble with drugs in Nebraska, so he changed his name,” but “not necessarily that he was a fugitive or wanted.”
Lawyers Andrew Searle and Fritz Scheller, representing Vu and Farley, wrote, “Even the government’s own witness at the detention hearing confirmed that Ms. Vu never knew full details of the defendant’s alleged past.”
In an interview, Scheller said he understands why the old Nebraska drug case took off in the 1980s, but the allegations did not amount to the man known as Howard Farley Jr. was a major human trafficker. “He wasn’t exactly the Pablo Escobar of Omaha,” said Scheller.
Florida prosecutors said in court that Farley’s charge against Nebraska drugs in 2014 was dismissed only because the chief prosecutor in the case retired and “they had to make a decision about the evidence – the age of the evidence.”
Farley is now facing up to 30 years in prison. In their plea for bail, Farley’s attorneys described him as an elderly man suffering from “a variety of serious medical conditions,” including two recent heart attacks, kidney failure and spinal surgery.
But US District Judge John Antoon II was unmoved. Antoon last month denied a motion of defense to allow Farley to leave prison and await his trial for home detention.
In his decision, the judge said the man had already proven that for decades he had the rare ability to disappear and escape the authorities.
Farley not only fled and remained hidden, but instead had the foresight, the resources and the determination to start a new life and live out in the open while dodging for decades, “wrote Antoon. “Nothing in the records indicates that Farley can no longer do this.”