Anti-Castro militant Tony Bryant still chuckles when he recalls the FBI agents who interviewed him after a 14-foot boat, loaded with high explosives and registered in his name, turned up near Havana.

``They said, `You could hurt someone. Don't do it again,'  said Bryant, former member of the Miami-based Comando L paramilitary group. ``I promised not to do it again, and they went away.

Amid reports that Cuban exile leaders
financed bombings in Havana, conspirators, cops and prosecutors agree that anti-Castro plotting in South Florida is not only common but almost tolerated.

In fact, law enforcement's unspoken policy for years has been to spy on anti-Castro militants and disrupt their plots rather than jail them, said several of the region's current and former prosecutors.

``From long ago, there's been a policy . . . to gather intelligence and demobilize these people, to disrupt rather than arrest, said one former senior federal prosecutor.

The policy is designed to preserve informants and avoid prosecutions that seem unlikely to succeed because of juries sympathetic to anti-Castro exiles and because of the weakness of U.S. laws that bar violent acts against foreign governments.

A risky policy

But it's also risky: It allows cops to get too cozy with long-term informants. It focuses too much on ``hard actions such as boat raids and too little on less palpable acts such as the financing of attacks.

Worse still, the dearth of convictions may have promoted a lax law enforcement atmosphere in which exiles came to believe they had a yellow light to plot attacks on President Fidel Castro's regime.

``There is no doubt that it has given comfort to people who should otherwise feel insecure about engaging in illegal activities, said Jeff Feldman, a former U.S. prosecutor who lost a case against Cuban exiles who shipped weapons to Nicaraguan rebels in 1985.

Miami has been a hotbed of anti-Castro plotting since the early 1960s, some with direct or indirect U.S. approval but most, especially since the 1970s, in fairly clear violation of U.S. neutrality laws.

``There's a conspiracy a day here, said Francisco Avila, a former military chief of the militant Alpha 66 group who admitted in 1992 that he was a double agent for the FBI and Castro. ``To stop it, you have to jail 100 percent of all Cubans.

A missile plot

Prosecutions have been few indeed. The last major case that most could recall: the 1994 conviction of Rodolfo Frometa and Fausto Marimon on charges of plotting to export a Stinger anti-aircraft missile and other weapons to Cuba.

Judges or juries have set free some 17 Cubans accused of armed hijackings, shipping a 20mm cannon to Nicaraguan guerrillas or shooting a Cuban naval officer during a boat hijacking. Some 90 Miami-area bombings remain unsolved from as far back as the mid-1960s, according to American Civil Liberties Union reports.

The New York Times has reported that underground Cuban activist Luis Posada Carriles said the late Jorge Mas Canosa and other leaders of the Cuban American National Foundation financed terror attacks on Cuba. Mas family and CANF spokesmen flatly denied the report.

Monitoring the exile plots are a phalanx of law enforcement units: the Special Investigations Section of the City of Miami Police, with its ears closest to the streets of Little Havana; the anti-terrorism squad in the FBI's Miami office; the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and U.S. Customs.

Accusatory finger pointing

Each force claims its own agents are committed to cracking down on anti-Castro plots. And each points a vaguely accusatory finger at others.

Two federal agents say a couple of local Cuban-American cops have leaked sensitive information to militants. Cops complain that some federal agents show little interest in cases that seem unlikely to get national attention. One Comando L veteran, not Bryant, claimed that a Cuban-American FBI agent seized some of his weapons in 1989, but never filed an official report on the incident.

Miami Police Chief Donald Warshaw said he believes one of his Cuban-American officers got too friendly recently with a Cuban-American politician, but stressed he had seen no evidence of sympathy for militant exiles.

``They are not sleeping with the enemy,'' Warshaw told The Herald. ``I have full confidence in their integrity. . . . Their work is not going to stop just because it takes them into certain areas.

A low batting average

Whatever the reason, law enforcers appear to have an abysmal batting average when it comes to stopping anti-Castro plots.

Police and FBI agents ``were always watching us, but they basically left us alone, said a former Comando L member, Cesar Roig. ``You just can't ask for permission to do something.

Said Avila: ``If they really wanted to crack down there would be no Alpha 66, but the Americans are out to protect their own country, not Cuba.

Bryant was never prosecuted for the explosives-laden boat -- it was unmanned but rigged to blow up when it hit something solid -- and claims that authorities intercepted only two of his 14 ``missions against Cuba.

The former Black Panther spent 12 years in Cuban prisons for hijacking a U.S. jetliner and was freed in 1980. He officially joined Comando L operations in 1986 and said he gave up the armed struggle in 1992.

The exiles' sense of comfort apparently increased after Cuban spy Juan Pablo Roque, linked to Havana's downing of two Miami-based airplanes in early 1996 that killed four people, was unmasked as an FBI informant.

A meeting with exiles

Paul Philip, who at the time had just been appointed chief of the FBI's South Florida office, recalls that he and then-U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey met with several exile leaders soon after the incident to patch up relations.

``We explained what the law is, that we would defend their right to exercise their rights under the Constitution. However, there were certain things that would not be tolerated, Philip recalled.

The first half of Philip's message apparently got through better than the second.

``He was taken for a patsy, said one U.S. prosecutor. ``The Cubans saw it as a blinking yellow light -- proceed with caution -- and his agents took it as a sign that neutrality cases were not high on his priority list.

Defending the message

Philip, now a public safety and corruption advisor to Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas, and Coffey, now in private practice, both insist their message was clear and strong.

``If someone says I was soft, you can probably find someone who says I was too hard, said Philip.

Whatever the faults on the policing side, cops, prosecutors and plotters all point to the relative lack of arrests and convictions of exile militants as the major reason for the lax atmosphere.

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Feldman, now in private practice, says it's tough to enforce neutrality laws that date back to the 1800s and require prosecutors to prove knowledge of the law and intent to violate it.

That's especially difficult when Washington doesn't have clearly peaceful relations with the foreign country attacked, Feldman added. The U.S. government sponsored attempts to invade Cuba and assassinate Castro throughout the 1960s, and even now lacks full diplomatic relations with Havana.

Case thrown out

U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch threw out Feldman's 1990 case against six Cuban exiles who shipped a cannon and other weapons to Nicaraguan rebels because the United States, then semi-secretly financing the contras, was not officially ``at peace with the Nicaraguan government.

Feldman said prosecutors' decisions are influenced far more by Washington policy, both toward Cuba and in terms of the priority assigned to certain crimes, than by the biases of cops or the comments of FBI officials.

``The push comes from above, not from below, he said.

Coffey said the main obstacle to effective prosecution, however, is that South Florida juries simply don't perceive exiles who plot attacks against Castro as real criminals worthy of prison.

``Over the years we have stepped up to the plate on a number of cases, but it's very tough to get a jury in South Florida to convict people who are portrayed as freedom fighters, he said.

The result, Coffey added, are selective prosecutions ``which don't undermine the resolve of the government but do define the prosecutorial realities.