Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311200169
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: DETROIT LENGTH: Long
The dealers - actually two undercover federal agents - were skeptical and worried because Riggs was high-profile. Her face had been all over television and newspapers after her soldier husband's 1991 slaying in Detroit, days after he returned from the Persian Gulf War. How could she stay in the shadows?
During the Feb. 23 meeting, Toni Riggs told them how. She had a passport and could be a "swallower" for them, hiding dope-filled balloons in her stomach while she flew back to the United States from cocaine-rich South America.
Riggs needed the job because she needed the cash. Earlier, she had claimed she was being blackmailed by someone threatening to turn her in to police.
And perhaps to prove she had enough guts to peddle drugs, Riggs told the agents a crime story to which police have worked to connect her for more than two years.
In March 1991, she had paid two men - one her younger brother - to kill her husband, Anthony Riggs, for $150,000 in life insurance money, she said.
Bingo. The agents, one of whom detailed the above account in a federal court affidavit, had recorded evidence that could finally connect her to her husband's death.
On Thursday, Riggs, 24, was arraigned in U.S. District Court on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and interstate travel for illegal purposes. She was arrested Wednesday outside the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit as she awaited the two agents, who had invited her out to dinner.
The bigger story, police and prosecutors said, is that this week she will be charged with murder.
"Was I surprised? I don't know whether surprise is the word. Grateful," said Lessie Riggs, the dead soldier's mother, who unsuccessfully fought Toni Riggs in court for life insurance payments.
The slaying of Anthony Riggs on a dark morning outside the Cato family's northeast Detroit home attracted international attention as a brutal example of random crime in urban America. Detroit was portrayed as a place so violent that a soldier could survive the Persian Gulf, but not the city's brutal streets.
Detectives believed a robber had shot the Patriot-missile operator as he was loading a car with belongings for a move. At a funeral for the slain soldier, attended by Aretha Franklin and Jesse Jackson, Toni Riggs sobbed uncontrollably.
But within days, police suspected a plot between his wife and her brother and charged them with first-degree murder. Michael Cato confessed that his sister had persuaded him to kill her husband so they could split $150,000 in insurance money.
Michael Cato was convicted, but a judge said his confession could not be used against his sister. The decision is being appealed, but police had to let Riggs go free.
She later collected the insurance money. A U.S. District Court judge ordered her to pay her defense lawyers with the money, but federal agents said Thursday they believed some was left over.
But by April 1992, she needed more cash, agents said, and unwittingly placed herself smack in the middle of a large-scale drug investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. That operation, which has resulted in the arrests of dozens of people since its beginning 18 months ago, extended from Detroit to Texas to the country of Colombia.
Riggs had not been a target in that investigation, and agents ran into her only after she had made contacts with two people who were trying to move 10 kilos of cocaine from Texas to Detroit, according to the court affidavit.
Rosita De La Paz and Reginald Gilbert-Bey allegedly were caught outside Tyler, Texas, on April 28 with the 22 pounds of cocaine in their car's trunk. After her arrest, De La Paz told agents that Toni Riggs had been the one hired to deliver the coke to Detroit. But the shipment had been delayed, and Riggs left early, claiming she had to take a final school examination in Detroit.
Riggs would have earned $1,000, money she needed to pay off a third individual - apparently unknown to homicide detectives - whom she had hired to help kill her husband, the agents were told. The man had been threatening to "tell the true story to the cops" about Anthony Riggs' death, the affidavit said.
Law-enforcement authorities were close-mouthed last week about the previously unreported third suspect. Michael Cato had mentioned no one else in his confession to the crime.
Detroit police were following leads to the third suspect - and possibly others - that Riggs provided on the videotape.
In federal court before Judge Paul Komives on Thursday, Riggs sat quietly reading the charges against her. She was still dressed for the dinner that never happened the night before, wearing a skirt, a long, black leather coat and her hair pulled back in a fluorescent orange tie.
Outside, the Rev. Levern Hightower, a friend of Riggs' family, expressed dismay over her arrest.
"I'm shocked, hurt and surprised," he said. "Now it's in God's hands."
by CNB