Criminal - On the Run

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

When Tyler Wetherall was a kid, her mother and father packed up the family car and drove through the night. They were on the run from the FBI. And by the time she was 9, Tyler had learned how to communicate in codes, adapt to new countries, and to never reveal who or where her father was. Tyler Wetherall wrote about her time on the run in her book, No Way Home. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. We never talked about being fugitives because at that point we didn't know.

Later on when we started to find out, we still didn't talk about it then either because you've all been raised with this one rule, which is don't tell. And it's very hard, you know, even now to this day, it feels surreal to talk about it so openly. Tyler Weatherall has lived all over the world. She grew up in 13 houses in five countries and no matter where her family went, the rule was always the same.

Don't talk. So when I was nine years old, I remember coming home from school one day with my sister, and we saw these two characters in our front room. They were two strangers. I sort of remember them being these shady-looking figures. And we went to let ourselves in, and mom was there at the back door to greet us and she told us that we should go back to our neighbor's house who was a good friend of ours and wait there for her and we could tell that there was something amiss in the way that she said this so we went back to our neighbor's house and I remember even that night we we ended up staying over because she'd phoned and said that granny was sick and that she would uh see us the next day and that night

sleeping at our friend's house we whispered about it and even then we knew something was wrong um that these people who were in our living room represented something was going to change um and it was maybe a week later and she hadn't woken me up for school one morning and i actually remember i remember it really vividly because i thought that we'd been allocated a day off i thought it was a reward for something uh and i was excited by this day off and i went downstairs and mom was waiting for us and her she She had this amazing bed. We call it the never-ending bed. It's this enormous king-size bed where we spent many mornings and Christmases and birthdays and where I would curl up when we were sick.

And she was sitting up in this bed waiting for me and my sister. We made a round of tea, and we all got in, and she told us that there was something important she was going to have to tell us, that something had happened and things were going to have to tell us. That something had happened and things were going to be quite difficult for some time. And then she told us that Dad was a fugitive. He was wanted by the police and that they were looking for him

and that he had gone. She didn't know where and she didn't know when we'd be able to speak to him again. She told us that in all probability, Scotland Yard had bugged our phone and perhaps our car, perhaps our house, and that we had to be careful about what we said about Dad and about the times we had spent with him because we didn't want to give them any information they might be able to use.

And then we noticed them shortly after that. I remember my sister pointed them out to me one day that they followed the car home from school. And then you're never sure. You don't know if they're following you. You don't know if they're there. But you know they might be. And that kind of creates quite a pervasive sense of anxiety,

a sense of being watched. What did you think your father had done? I had no idea. You know, I was so young. And what do you know at 9 and 10 and 11, 12? You don't know a lot. You don't have a very nuanced understanding about the nature of different crimes. So when you, when you have like, I understood he must

have done something pretty bad because all these people are after him. And I, I couldn't imagine that it was something small, all this trouble. But you think about, could he have robbed a bank? Could he have killed somebody? You know, I never really thought that that was a possibility, but you're running through this, the type of crimes that you're aware of in your head. And I spent a lot of time thinking about what he might have done, but I never came, I never landed on anything firm. Hi, I'm Ben and I'm Tyler's father. And the first time I ever sold pot was, I rolled 100 joints for the Beatles. And I was paid a dollar a joint.

Ben is a pseudonym. He agreed to speak with us on the condition that we didn't use his real name. He grew up on Long Island in the 1950s. He went to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied finance. And then he got a job on Wall Street. He was successful, both in his real job and his side job, selling pot. At first, I was very nervous around pot. I had a Wall Street business. I was doing well. And it made me very nervous to be around pot. I was afraid I was going to lose my license. And slowly over time I became more and more comfortable with larger

amounts of pot. And I had a friend who was bringing up pot from Florida. And at first they were bringing it up in suitcases, and they would actually put the suitcases on airplanes. At that point they weren't checking suitcases for terrorists, and sometimes they'd just put the suitcases on the plane without even a person being on, and someone would pick it up at the other side. So it was definitely more fun than Wall Street,

and the people were a lot nicer. And there was demand in the country for more and more pot. This was the mid-70s then. And then I finally left Wall Street, and I moved to California, and my business grew to the point where other people who were bringing in pot would come to me to sell pot. So at that point, I realized that, well, maybe I should be bringing in the pot since I was selling it for these other smugglers. And what I started to do was take my Wall Street principles, the things that I had learned in Wall Street, and started to apply it to the pot business, such as raising money to finance a trip,

paying people three to one on investments. And then we started to actually develop marketing. They started putting decals on the bags of pot so people could recognize their brand. And the stakes kept getting higher. What is it about risk that's so appealing? I guess it's the reward. And maybe the unknown.

I always like to gamble, not wild gambling, but measured gambling. And that's why the stock market appeals, and it still does. It's a little bit of the unknown that makes it more interesting, not knowing what's going to happen every day. He was also making a ton of money. He collected art, vintage cars. He built a huge yellow house in Northern California with a two-acre lake, an octagonal tennis court so balls couldn't collect in the corners. They had ponies, an elaborate playground for his kids. We were just a normal family living a very idyllic life. And then I would go off and make my payphone calls and have secret meetings. And of course, it was scary, but you don't realize what level of fear you're able to deal with until you're faced with it.

Once they installed a false wall in the back of a truck and then went to Goodwill and filled it with furniture, thinking that if they got stopped, no one would want to unpack all of that. And even if they did, the pot was still hidden behind the false wall. They chartered planes. One time he commissioned a 100-foot three-masted schooner to sail from Thailand to Tacoma, Washington, packed with pot. He was an actual drug kingpin at the top of his game. But then, everything went wrong.

He packed up his wife and kids and started running. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. I had everything at that point. I really should have stopped. And then the person that I was involved smuggling with was doing another venture, and he asked me if I wanted to invest, which I was tempted and clearly shouldn't have.

And I did invest. And I also had some of my friends invest in the venture. And where it was supposed to be a smaller venture, it kept getting larger and larger. What do you mean, what type of venture? Well, the venture was our contact in Thailand. They would isolate a piece of property in Thailand, in the jungle, and they would just grow pot dedicated to our venture.

And there would be entire families and communities that all they did was grow and package the pot. And they would put them in 10-pound vacuum-packed bags with our label. But then things started to fall apart. I was really worried that everybody would get in trouble and everybody's going to lose the money. And it was quite 35,000 pounds of tie. So that was worth about $50 million. Ben says he made sure he never left a paper trail. But six months later, he learned that not everyone had been so careful.

One of the men he'd been working with was raided, and identifying information about Ben was found in One of the men he'd been working with was raided, and identifying information about Ben was found in some of the documents. At that time, I was receiving information about what the FBI was doing on the investigation. How I received it is not important, but it reached a point where I realized that it was going to fall apart for me,

and I had the choice of fighting it, which I knew I would lose based on the way things came apart. Reagan was president, and Nancy Reagan was saying no to drugs, and the sentences were beginning to be draconian, and they were trying to make examples so I could be facing 20 years to life for organized crime. And so I talked about it with my wife, and she was always quite adventurous

as well. She was a very interesting, brilliant lady, but she really didn't want to see me go to the prison. And so we talked about it, and I did a bunch of research on which countries had extradition, which didn't. I had some friends in Europe that were living very nicely in the south of France and in England as fugitives and seemed very happy. So they drove through the night. They packed up the family into the cars. We had one suitcase each in a small bag,

and we drove through the night to the airport to fly first to Rome and then onward from there. And the plan was that we would fly that first leg of the journey in our real names. And we didn't plan to stay in Rome. So at that point we would have created a false trail leading to Rome. And I know that night when mum was pulling out of the driveway, there was definitely a fear that we might be followed. My main reason really was to, I wanted to be with the kids when they were young.

I felt if I had to go to prison later, if they were more formed and had more time with me and the family, those early years I felt was more important than the later years. Did you have enough money to run comfortably? How much money were you leaving with? Absolutely, I had enough money to live comfortably. And I was also somewhat knowledgeable about investing so I could make more money with the money.

I had plenty of money to live with, no problem. Millions and millions of dollars. Oh, millions, yes. I think at that time when I left, I had, I think, like $5 million liquid. How difficult was it to keep what was going on from your children? Did they just think this was a big adventure? Well, they didn't know what was going on. To them, it was, we first went to Portugal, and the kids were young,

so they were too young to really have a sense of what was going on. And we went to a nice community, and they went to pretty good European schools, and we had a lovely family life. Tyler's family was constantly on the move. Rome, Portugal, England, the south of France, back to England. He wanted to resurrect that life that we'd given up, that beautiful life in the yellow house. He wanted to make it better and to fix it. But in doing that, and in that fixation on that goal, he lost himself to that.

And he became, I think, quite distant for mum. His entire life revolved around talking to lawyers on the phone. He was also, his organization by the time he got into trouble had grown into about 20 people. And each of those people who were implicated, he was trying to support. So some of them were also in hiding, some of them were going through the court system back in the states and i you know i think deep down he felt incredibly responsible uh for them and had a a burden of guilt as well that it had all fallen apart like this uh and so those were his days was on the phone trying to contain this disaster that happened and in everybody's lives and i think And I think that put an enormous strain on their marriage and it couldn't sustain that. And I think by that point, it was very difficult for my mum to accept how far this had changed our lives and how much she had to sacrifice

in order for him to be free. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be.

The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know if resentful might be the right word. I think she was rightfully angry that he had put us in this situation

and we were the ones at home with Scotland Yard breathing down our neck. And also a sense of, you know, when was this going to end? Tyler's mother and father separated. He moved to London and they worked together to make sure he saw the kids as much as was safely possible. Most of all, she felt like the FBI had taken away our lives completely, and she didn't want them to win. She supported Dad when Dad was on the run and made sure that he got to see us,

and she, I mean, by supported, I mean she helped him see us, basically, and helped him have a relationship with us. In London, Ben lived in a townhouse and had the attic converted into a playroom for the kids when they visited. Tyler remembers getting to watch The Simpsons and ordering pizza. He was living under his false identity, and he was going and paying taxes under his false identity. He had legitimate businesses. He once got a speeding ticket and actually went to court

for his speeding ticket and they didn't know anything. So it seemed pretty secure, but he also wasn't making the money he used to be making and that money was dwindling. I think he never found he had something like $200,000 of gold buried in someone's back garden, which he never found again. So he started to invest money for another pair of drug smugglers. And he saw this, he didn't see this as risky at the time. For him, it was this sense of getting back to his financial roots. With Scotland Yard showing up at Tyler's mother's house, the family devised an elaborate method of secret communication. So the way it works is he, we would have the numbers of the various payfans, and then we would

set three appointments to speak at three different payfphones with a different time and date for each one. And the reason you do always work three in advance was that if you missed one, there'd be a chance to catch up on the next one. And if you missed that one too, you would know that there was something wrong and there'd be a third final phone call just in case. But you always wanted to make sure that those phone calls were planned

in case one was missed. And that was a warning system as well. So if we didn't hear from him on those occasions, or if he didn't hear from us, he'd know something was wrong. And he always, in the phone calls, and he also wrote us letters, he never specified where he was. And the letters are fascinating because you can see him trying to tell us about what he's doing and trying to connect with us while giving away absolutely nothing in case the letters were intercepted. These secret visits and phone calls and coded letters worked pretty well. Her father kept moving from place to place, managing to evade arrest. To celebrate Tyler's 12th birthday, it was arranged that she and her sister would travel to St. Lucia to be with their father.

The girls made it there safely, but on the actual day of Tyler's birthday, authorities showed up at Tyler's mother's house in England, hoping to find Ben. And they raided the house, searching for evidence of where we were. And they found, I think, we've never known exactly what they found. We think maybe our flight details were maybe one of our jacket pockets or something we'd overlooked, something small. And that's when they came for us in St. Lucia.

Tyler's mother called Ben to warn him. Tyler remembers the phone call. She'd had a wonderful birthday. They'd gone scuba diving and seen a volcano. And we got back and we were going to go and have lobster that evening in Rodney Bay. And I'd never had lobster before, so this was pretty exciting. And we'd gone up to get dressed for the evening. And we came back down, me and my sister.

And we saw him in his office dressed for dinner on the telephone. And we knew at that point. We knew immediately. Ben told the girls to pack their bags and they took a car to the airport. And halfway along the road, he stopped in the middle of this banana field. And he got out and he said that's as far as he was going to go with us. And the driver would get us to the airport safely. And we'd been flying all over the world at this point by ourselves, so we knew what we were doing. And he said goodbye and he was sorry he screwed up my birthday.

And I remember this image of him looking out the back of the car, and he was standing on this road in the early morning, this sport bag sort of thrown over his shoulder, waving goodbye at us. And we didn't know when we would see him again or how long it would be. Seven months later, Tyler and her sister got a letter. I will be content just to know that you are well and together. If you miss me, just think of that wonderful time together and know that it will surely happen again. Life is long and full of surprises. Much, much love, Dad. He was convicted under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Statute, sometimes called the Kingpin Statute. As well as a hundred odd different charges over the years.

Every time he was going on the run or changing identities, each of these things carried charges. And so he had the original charges, then he had later charges from when he was investing the money for the other set of smugglers. He ended up accruing, I think, 143 different charges against him. He was given a month to get his affairs in order before his prison sentence began. I remember we went to Alcatraz, which is, you would think, a strange thing to do when you're about to start a prison sentence. But I guess that counts as sightseeing.

And we made jokes all the way through. But during this time, he also sat us down. And for the first time, he told us what he had done. It was surreal to hear it at last. And also to hear my dad talk about drugs, which by this point I kind of understood what drugs were, but I really didn't know very much. So to hear that he was a pot smuggler was wild. It blew my mind, the things, and not just any pot smuggler, that he had been a major pot smuggler. He was sentenced to 10 years at the Lompoc Federal Correctional Institution.

In the end, he served five years and a few months. I think the kids were angry with me for a long time for doing that last deal while I had kids. At first, I didn't accept responsibility. I always saw myself as a victim because the way things fell apart. But after a time, I did accept that I screwed up and I never should have been involved at all. If you could go back to that time when you were young with a Wall Street job, all above board, would you do anything differently? The only thing that I would do differently is I wouldn't do that last deal. After Ben got out of prison, he moved back to Northern California, and he's gone back to his original career as an investment advisor.

Do you ever do something or say something and, or think something and realize that, oh, I'm just like my father? I think the thing I think about most, I think that I still now, one of the things I still work through is the knee-jerk reaction when things are tough of, oh, I could just jump on a plane and go and that would make everything okay. And that's a complicated one because obviously that didn't make everything okay when we were younger. In all reality, dad should have done his time straight off the bat, and that was the most sensible thing to do. And yet there's this part of me, when things are hard, that wants to get on a plane and disappear. Thank you. Julie and Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

And we're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. If you want to know more about Tyler Weatherall's life and her father, you can read her book. It's called No Way Home. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. And we're excited to tell you about the latest

from Radiotopia's showcase, The Great God of Depression. The Great God of Depression tells the story of a literary genius, a brain scientist, and their shared quest to understand the secrets of creativity. Here I was 10 years ago, sort of at the height of my so-called career. I was, you know, success. I'd made money. I was at critical acclaim. Still, with all of that, I felt like an absolute, loathsome, complete, worthless object who hadn't done anything and whose entire trajectory of my life had gone up

and then was plunged down into absolute zero, pit. Go listen. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Thank you. asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eden syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series FoxCosmetic.com. I'm a AI reporter for The Verge to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.