By Chris Anderson From Herald Tribune

In 2011, Christine Dickinson’s life as a fugitive came to an end after she was on the run for over two decades.

Christine Dickinson walked into the tax collector’s office one day looking to obtain a personal identification card. She took a number, grabbed a seat and waited patiently like everyone else. What happened next was not only one of the most memorable arrests in the history of Manatee County, but yet another shining example of how a brilliant criminal mind often lacks the compartment that contains basic common sense. On Dec. 1, 2011, Dickinson walked up to the counter to get an ID by using her real name and a Bradenton address, but when the clerk checked the system she discovered Dickinson essentially did not exist. She was 61, but she had never possessed a Florida ID or a driver’s license.

This bit of information raised a red flag, so the clerk immediately called a sheriff’s deputy to investigate and soon it was clear as to who she really was.

Dickinson, it turned out, had been a fugitive for 23 years, and in the late 1980s was a ringleader for a $200 million drug smuggling operation in South Florida. Her background was quite remarkable, in a “Miami Vice” sort of way.

At some point in her 20s, she moved to Fort Lauderdale from Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and got a job on a boat as a cook. That’s where she met a man named Michael Gruener, who would become her boyfriend. Eventually they began smuggling drugs, and soon they were bringing massive quantities of cocaine and marijuana into Florida from Colombia and Jamaica.

Dickinson was known as the “director of human resources” because she hired and supervised the boat crews, according to a book written by former Miami attorney Ken Rijock called “The Laundry Man.”

Rijock laundered money for Dickinson and Gruener, and it was not uncommon for him to walk into a bank in the Caribbean island of Anguilla with suitcases full of millions and make deposits in the name of the shell companies he had set up.

Dickinson was able to withdraw money with a rubber stamp — she actually used a stamp of the Disney character Minnie Mouse.

Once the feds caught on to the Anguilla scam and froze the money, Dickinson and her crew bribed an official to unfreeze it and moved it to Switzerland in 1991. They even paid an Italian movie producer to claim it was his.

Soon, the feds were onto that too, and it resulted in the first-ever joint money laundering investigation between the United States and Switzerland.

Eventually, the feds had enough evidence to charge everyone in the ring, including Dickinson, who then went on the run for over 20 years. No one’s exactly sure how she was able to elude the feds, and very few tips ever came in concerning her whereabouts. It is believed she was hiding in Mexico, though officials were searching for her as far away as Australia.

She returned to South Florida after she learned from her attorney that the drug charges against her had been thrown out by a federal judge. At one point she made her way to Bradenton, where her elderly parents lived, and in fact still do.

She took her mother and went to the Manatee County Tax Collector’s Office to get her ID because she had listed her parents address as her own. She thought she was no longer a fugitive in the drug case and she was right. She wasn’t.

But what she didn’t know was she was still a fugitive in Rijock’s money laundering case from 1991, and as soon as the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office found out she was arrested on the spot.

She was convicted of defrauding the U.S. government and of racketeering and was sentenced to two years in prison. She also had to relinquish an expensive art collection.

She was released from federal prison in 2014 and never went near the Manatee County Tax Collector’s Office again.

For more on this story go to: http://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20160126/anderson-how-a-tax-clerk-brought-down-a-fugitive

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