[NYP] In the late 1960s, Enrique "Ric" Prado was a brawler who ran with local street gang the Miami Crowns. But the Cuban refugee also dearly loved his adopted home of the United States — so when anti-war protestors started burning American flags at Miami-Dade Junior College, Prado recruited his crew to fight the demonstrators. After the Crowns stormed the campus and physically attacked them, the hippies scattered, the ground littered with broken protest signs and bead necklaces. The campus newspaper ran a piece about Cubans defending the American flag, which made Prado proud.
"That was a watershed moment," Prado writes in his memoir, "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior" (St. Martin’s Press), out now. "Defending our country from people who wanted to tear it down? That stirred something in me."
Fidel Castro’s communist revolution had chased Prado’s family from Cuba in 1962. They had once led a comfortable, middle-class life in their home country, but when Castro took power, the communists seized the coffee shop his father owned, as well as his grandfather’s gas station and cigar-rolling store. As the country became dangerous — Prado survived his first firefight at 7 — they decided to flee.