The curious case of the fugitive drug 'kingpin' who outran his charges

By the time mourners arrived at the Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home in eastern Nebraska, federal agents were already staked out 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 investigators were stymied yet again. Farley never showed at his late brother’s memorial service. The man had been a ghost since 1985 when he was accused of running a transcontinental cocaine network. “He did a good job of disappearing,” said Duaine Bullock, the former commander of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Narcotics Unit.

But 11 years after the failed funeral home stakeout, a different team of investigators descended on a house in Weirsdale, Florida. The target that day was a man suspected of passport fraud. He had been living under the name Timothy Brown. The raid was a success. The federal agents arrested the man as he attempted to board an airplane in his private hangar, prosecutors said. It was only after the arrest that authorities learned the man taken into custody was in fact Howard Farley Jr., the longtime fugitive who prosecutors say had been using 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 getting captured, he succeeded in outrunning his original charges. The 1985 drug indictment was dropped in 2014, adding a curious wrinkle to an already extraordinary case. “He was the D.B. Cooper of Nebraska,” said Jerry Soucie, a longtime attorney from Lincoln, equating Farley with the man who disappeared after hijacking a plane in the skies over Seattle in 1971. “A legend.”