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Jeffrey Mathews, formerly known as Jeff Ciganek, built a cocaine-trafficking empire around his Fort Myers Beach pizzeria, Andretti’s, and was linked to a pattern of murders, intimidation, witness elimination, and alleged corruption involving two local deputies. After cooperating witness Steven Franken was murdered, investigators intensified their pursuit; following Mathews’s federal indictment in March 1990, a fire inspector’s property was bombed and the DEA office was destroyed by an explosive device, triggering a major FBI-led manhunt that ended with Mathews’s arrest in Orlando on April 9, 1990. He later pleaded guilty to federal charges involving drug trafficking, homicide, and the DEA bombing, receiving life imprisonment, alongside a concurrent 100-year state sentence for two murders and accessory-after-the-fact murder—leaving a case that exposed the deadly reach of organised crime, the vulnerability of witnesses, and the devastating consequences of corruption and violence.
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