Whipped Cream Difficulties

Eugenio Martinez has passed away at the age of 98.

His death, at his daughter’s home near Orlando, was announced by Brigade 2506, a veterans group of Mr. Martinez’s fellow anti-Communist Cuban exiles. Their abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to overthrow the government headed by Fidel Castro was covertly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Martinez was the last surviving Watergate burglar.

In January 1973 four of the five burglars — members of the so-called plumbers, an informal White House team assigned to plug information leaks — pleaded guilty so as to avoid revealing details of the bungled operation. They were convicted of conspiracy, theft and wiretapping.
The others, also Cuban-born, were Bernard L. Barker, a former Miami real estate agent and C.I.A. operative, who died in 2009; Virgilio González, a Miami locksmith, who died in 2014; and Frank A. Sturgis, a soldier of fortune, who died in 1993. (In 1971, the four had taken part in the break-in at the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who disclosed the Pentagon papers to the press.)

E. Howard Hunt, who allegedly recruited them, served 31 months in prison.

They were led by James W. McCord Jr., a security coordinator for the Nixon campaign whose confession to the judge just before his sentencing precipitated the revelations of White House crimes and cover-ups that culminated in Nixon’s resignation in 1974. For aiding prosecutors in pursuing senior presidential aides in the scandal, Mr. McCord had his one-to-five-year sentence cut to less than four months.

…

In 1983, after his requests for clemency had been rejected by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Mr. Martinez — who, it turned out, had still been on retainer to the C.I.A. at the time of the Watergate break-in — was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.
The pardon, which was granted because Mr. Martinez had been regarded as the least culpable of the defendants, restored his right to vote. Despite the ordeal, he prided himself on one Watergate keepsake — a golden lucky clover inscribed, in Spanish, with the words “Good luck, Richard Nixon.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021 at 9:05 am and is filed under History, Law, Nixon, Obits, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.