Danny Jones Podcast - #113 - Real Life Pirate Explains How to Smuggle Weed into Florida from Colombia | Tim McBride

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

Tim McBride is a former marijuana smuggler/pot hauler living on the edge of the Florida Everglades.  From 1979 to 1989 Tim ran southern waters and the Caribbbean with a band of modern day pirates known by locals as Saltwater Cowboys.  Night after night we offloaded up to 20 tons at a time from any vessel that would make the trip from South America.  Like Mexico does now, Colombia supplied 42 percent of the marijuana consumed in the United States in 1984.  The major percentage of this traffic was controlled by Tim’s crews working with other smaller crews and several large Colombian organizations. https://originalsaltwatercowboy.com  help us make more money: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon  sponsors  https://liquiddeath.com -  Use code KONCRETE at checkout to get a free koozie 2-pack with a 12-pack purchase.   danny  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello world. Tim McBride is a former marijuana smuggler and pot hauler living on the edge of Florida's Everglades. From 1979 to 1989, Tim ran the Southern Waters and the Caribbean with a band of modern day pirates known by locals as saltwater cowboys. Night after night, Tim would offload up to 20 tons at a time from cargo ships that would make the trip from South America. Similar to how Mexico does today,

Columbia supplied 42% of the marijuana consumed in the United States in 1984. The major percentage of this traffic was controlled by Tim's crews, working with smaller crews and several large Colombian organizations. Tim's story is fucking crazy. Highly recommend this podcast. This is one of my all-time favorites. Without further ado, please welcome Tim McBride. When I was preparing to do that Vicerland video,

Yeah. I asked John, the guy I showed you, the superintendent, and we'll show you in a minute. I said, do you like any of your other buddies hanging around, man, that might want to, you know, get involved in this thing? He goes, yeah, he says, I know the two perfect guys, right? And he says, these guys love to talk about themselves. Yeah. That's perfect, man, that's what I'm looking for.

So he says, Ron Curry and Ron Guthrie, Ron and Ron. Right. So fast forward, we're having lunch at a Pinar bread, and just then we're talking about what's coming up, you know, what they're going to do with the, you know, on the video and, you know, for the dock. And this Ron Curry, he looks over at me and goes, you don't remember me, did you? And I said, no, should I?

And he says, well, yeah, I boarded your boat one night. I said, really? And dude, I've only been boarded three times ever, and I remember them perfectly. And I said, you're going to have to give me a little more than that. So he starts telling me the story about I'm coming out of the southwest on the Fort Myers Beach just after sundown and he'd throw the blue lights on me and stuff me. And I said, oh, yeah, that's the night I let you stop me. He goes, what do you mean?

You let me stop you. And I said, dude, I had, you know, 60 mile an hour on you. I could have left you hanging. But what I didn't need was you on the radio and everybody out here running around trying to chase me and find me when 20 minutes after, 25 minutes after you stopped me. I ran north of Pine Island and unloaded 47,000 pounds of the shit. He says, he goes, no, you didn't. And he looks over to his boss, John. He goes, yeah, he did.

So Ron goes on We get to be friends And he's telling me things And you know And he was gonna You know Work together with me On putting our own podcast together

Yeah You know true crime kind of shit With the real guy Right Real guy from CIA And customs And you know Me the guy

They were chasing and shit You know And he said He told me this one bit of information Which is really way I kind of If you I'd rather Want to put it on here or not

He says You know We arrested you Came to your house That night He says There was To MIB

Metropolitan, MBI, Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation. And he was in the picture. He says, when they arrested me and walked me out of the house, and see all they had was a warrant for me to arrest me, not to search the house, not to take any, not to seize anything. All they had to do was clear the house to make sure nobody else was in there and then take my ass out of there and take me to jail. I'm sitting there in my underwear on the couch and, you know,

they're going through the house and shit. And finally they say, okay, let's go. You go to pick me up. And I said, wait a minute. dude i got my you know i'm sitting here in my fucking underwear and uh he said just take me back to that hall you know back the room back there we all tackled me i mean like five of them tackled me and i can feel the gun sticking out of my face and shit like this and i said back there you know the hall closest to the to the wall just open it up grab shorts you grab jeans and a shirt on

and give a shit and um had two closets really actually i said the one close to the wall guy walked back there and he wasn't that 10 seconds he goes holy shit and i yelled back at wrong closet right he opened up the closet and i had six of these probably i don't know they're like three by three safes three by three by three deep and i had six up stacked on top of one another in there and he goes he comes back out throws my clothes at me and he goes what do you got in those safes back there and i said well dude show me the piece of paper that says that you can go through my shit i'll be glad to go open them for you you know and he kind of quieted down that and fuck it you know they took me out of there and they put

a you know supposedly put a seal on the house so here i am 35 something odd years later i'm talking to ron and i'm going through his memorabilia his shit from his career he goes you're going to love this one he says he says he says he shows me this picture he says this is yours he says after we took you out of the house we had those safes opened and we looked inside and we looked inside and of them and we had this picture taken and our boss said you motherfuckers put every single fucking dollar back the same way you found it locked those safes up wipe them down and get the fuck out of this house because had they taken that money we wouldn't be having this conversation we never got busted the case would have been dropped and all this stuff because they didn't have

a warrant to seize that wow but what they did do before they put it all away was they took a picture of themselves with it So he shows me in the picture, he says, you'd be kind enough to block out these MBI agents' faces because they'd really rather not be seen. That's what they found in my closet. Oh, my God. How much money is that?

About 6.7, almost $7 million in cash. Can I show this to the camera? Yeah. $7 million in cash. We've got to send this. What's that? That's fucking crazy. Can you see it?

here that's all right he'll put it he'll put it on the screen it's all right we'll show it later yeah so that's crazy man

don't ever tell anybody we did that I'm okay dude that would have been his ass he's retired now but yeah yeah so that's just one of the fuck

we don't have to we might have to edit that out of the podcast or what we can leave it yeah yeah stick it in there

fire fuck what's it gonna do arrest me I already did they can't do more than eat me now, man. You know, after nailing me, you know, when this was all, you know, when this first started out with this, you know, the first day I was busted, 38 of us went down.

So how much time did you get, what did you get sentenced to? I was originally sentenced with 160 years mandatory to life and $16 million in fines. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by the best bongs in the business. I don't care if you're smoking weed, tobacco, free base for my fellow Floridian. Just kidding, of course. There are two types of cannabis smokers out there, those who suffer from burning, scratchy throats, and those who use the freeze pipe.

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Because what was taking place at that time and history proves this and anybody with any brains can look this up. And, you know, if you're doubting my word on this, that the federal sentencing guidelines didn't change to mandatory minimums until around September 1st, 1987. So if your crime happened before September 1st, 1987, you were considered under the old law, which gave you good time, statutory good time, and parole.

Plus the judges, their magistrates, if you will, had at that time discretion out the ass let's put it that way you know they could take a lot of things under consideration when they're sentencing you like are you a family man or you've ever been in trouble before you know and you know your demeanor and you know are you cooperating are you participating and all that kind of crap well those sentences up until that time weren't having any real great effect on anything really um and you know to a great example of that is is I had just somehow managed to come across an article, and you can find it if you look it up.

If you Google Daniels Brothers Everglades, an old Miami Herald article will come up, front page article, and it reads, the headline reads, The Cocaine Cowboys of Miami have nothing on the Daniels Brothers of Everglades City. So the story goes on, the article's reading through, and the magistrate, these five brothers are still. standing in front of the magistrate being arraigned for their crime, pot-hauling. And four of the brothers had never been arrested, had never been arrested, but Craig, the youngest

brother, who was, you know, my buddy, this would be his second time. So the judge goes, he's, you know, he can hear him rifle him through this shit, and he goes, I have absolutely, you know, I absolutely don't have any knowledge on how to sentence people like you. He says, there are no guidelines for people such as you. He says, I'm at my wits in. I have no idea. You know, he says, and he looks over at Craig, the youngest of the five brothers.

And he says, you do realize this is your second time around, Mr. Daniels. He says, so why don't we do this? He says, your four brothers, first time around, 36 months. And then he looks at Craig. And he looks at Craig. And he says, Mr. Daniels, he says, no, remember, second time around, he says, does five years sound like a long time to you? and he's asking him.

And Greg goes, oh, hell yeah, man. It sounds like a long time to me. I got five years. This is after reading their list of seizures. And the list of seizures read like, I mean, Jesus, around $15 million in holdings in the Netherlands and Tilly's holding company and a number of properties around the Caribbean. Here in the United States, they had timeshares, hotels, motels, houses,

cars, boats, buses, airplanes, and all kind of shit, they seized another $8 million in cash, plus they seized 580,000 pounds of Colombian weed. Now, who's got a half a million plus pounds of weed laying around? Well, we do. So this is what they seized from these guys, and these are the sentences that they gave them, 36 months and five years.

And what year was this again? This was in 1984. 1984. See, they came, they did two operations, or three, actually three operations in the 80s. They did, the first one was in 1983 called Operation Everglades. Over 250 plus federal agents from nine branches of law enforcement across the United States. Every end of the spectrum was there, man. I mean, they were everywhere.

and it wasn't the, it didn't result the way they had intended it to because the intelligence of the first generations, you know, I'm considered a third generation pot hauler. I was the part of what I was with the kids. The second generation is those guys and their fathers and uncles and older cousins and the generation before them was their, like, grandpa's, you know, and so on like that because it was generational. So these guys are, you know, they're standing there. And they're getting these sentences. And, you know, Craig gets five years after having had all this stuff seized, all this money and all this property and all this stuff like this,

the guidelines only provided for that. The judge has no other recourse but to go by what the book told him to do at that time. So skipping forward, here comes 1984. I mean, the first time they came around, they hardly found anybody because two weeks before that, they knew two weeks before they were coming that they were coming because their intelligence was as such that everybody left town oh they're coming leave town so almost a year to the day here they come again 250 plus almost 300 federal agents from DEA custom secret service FBI you name it they were in there and they shut the town down and a little bit of Naples it only took one guy to block off the road into the Everglades because there's only one road in there and It was kind of silly. That's how they blocked the road off. Jesus.

This is a major... Look at this guy. With his hat and a shotgun. Pot hauling operation. And this is their road block. What are you going to do with that shotgun? What do you think you're going to do with that thing, man? Well, fuck, dude.

There's only one road in and one road out. I mean, how many guys do you need to watch the fucking road? Right? Plus you guys are getting around on airboats anyways. You know, so the second time around, I mean, it was kind of comical in most respects because there were more reporters on this 130-acre island. There were more reporters and cops on the island. There were people being arrested. It's kind of funny.

They're trying to block a road when you guys get around on boats. Yeah. I mean, you know, and what's crazy, too, is, you know, we were masters of hide in plain sight. You know, we'll get into this in a little bit about how it's done. the mechanics of it. You know, most people, it just blows most people's mind.

And that's when I start getting it up, yeah, right, dude, you know, this kind of shit. But, dude, you know, I'm not sitting here, you know,

you know, and St. Martin's Press didn't, didn't verify, you know, my story or what it is I'm imparting without some kind of,

you know, sources. Because the publisher of St. Martin's Press, Susan Robbins, she asked me, she says, what about validation?

You know, because all this craziness I'm writing about, you know, hundreds and hundreds and even thousands of tons of pot. And I said, well, validation. Let me see. Who would you like me to introduce you to? The supervisor of customs, DEA, FDLE, which is Florida Law Department of Law Enforcement, Sheriff's, Naples Sheriff's Trident Task Force officer, FBI, CIA. Who do you want to talk to?

I'll introduce them to you. And she said, perfect. That's all the validation I need. Write the book, right? So everything that you read in here, and people have asked me about embellishment. You know, when I'm talking about, you know, unloading a boat with 55 tons on it.

You know, I said, well, embellishment. I said, there's no room for embellishment. To embellish on what was written would have made it, first of all, sound so ridiculous that, you know, it would be comical. Well, that is comical, 55 tons? That is almost so ridiculous. It's unenewan, fathomable.

This is something that, you know, I mean, this is people don't understand. People don't know the story, which is why I'm sitting here with you, you know, and guys like you to try to get them to understand that. You know, if you were smoking weed in the 60s, 70s, and the early 80s, dude, this is how you got it.

You know, there was no growing the shit like they were growing it all over. Some guys were experimenting little bits here and there, you know, with a plant or two and like that. But, dude, if you wanted a weed to smoke, you literally had to go to another country, load a fucking boat full of the shit and bring it back. there's your weed This is how it was done up until the

early 90s There's a reason for that too What is this? Naples man arrested for how much How much weed? I'm not sure who that guy is Captain Tom What's his last name?

Storer Of Collier County Oh it's the sheriff Oh, that Daniel Scroll up to the top Oh really Yeah Huh

Yeah Yeah, see, Dan is our prevalent family in Everglades. They were the first people to get busted. Well, they were, no, actually, the way the chain of events works is their, the original pot holler was, his name was Lauren Totch Brown. Totch was his nickname. Totch was a legend in the Everglades. Really?

Yeah. He was the guy who blazed the trail for pot hauling. out of necessity because these are the days when the United States is expanding their borders at Everglades National Park to try to include our passageways into Everglades City and Chocalesky Island

where we bring our catches, you know, our stone crabs and, you know, group and what have you. What they had tried to do at one point was create a law that says that you can, you're not allowed to bring your catches through the national park. Well, how in hell you're going to get to the fucking fish house if you got to go through the National Park to get there?

Right. And that wasn't going to happen. So it was a big deal going on. And they tried to set us down. Then they start, and they go into rules and regulations. You can only catch so many of a size. The I have Q's.

At a certain time of year. Yeah. Only certain types of nets are to be used on mullet and pompano and that type of thing, you know. They just started crunching down and making life a little bit harder on everybody down there, you know. And then, and then this pot hauling shit. shows up, you know, and Tots gets approached, and he's, you know, he's, you know, okay, well, you know, so he gets his boat together and his crew, he goes to Panama, goes around the corner and up the river to the grass, up the grassland to find the red bud that everybody

was, you know, smoking at that time. And trial and error, I mean, it wasn't an easy thing. I mean, he had his problems, but he finally wound up working it out. So he's bringing these loads from Colombia, of South America, you know, to the guys to the Cubans in Miami and things are getting a bit dicey over there, you know, and he says, look, why don't we just bring this shit over here? You know, he says, look at this. 10,000 islands.

We live here. This is where our kids play, you know. You get the shit in there, it's ours. So why don't we just bring it around there? So if you saw the dock on Weissland, that's exactly how it played out. Miami was the focus. Nothing going on over here in every place. Because of the cocaine, right?

Cocaine Cowboys fucked everything up, man. I mean, everybody wants to be the guy, you know, and in particular in those days was a woman by the name of Griselda Blanco. Oh, yeah. She was the godmother. And if everybody knows this story, and I pretty much know it intimately, you know, without the Hollywood bullshit that goes into it, you know, when you see it on television. She and her husband actually got Pablo and his partner, Carlos L. later brought them out of the gangs of Medelline they were selling weed on the streets and in Medelline showed them how to gather the coca paste and create the cocaine hydrochloride they were setting

him up to use him as a conduit from Columbia to the United States because Zelda had it where she was using models and beautiful women and putting in the bras and this kind of shit you know that was her first gig she was started out in New York got busted with a kilo disappears two years She shows back up in Miami under her real fucking name. Hello. Nobody keeps, nobody picks up on it. This is our, these are the people protecting us. They don't even know that this woman's back,

and she's using her real name in Miami. She winds up being the murderous, torturing, brutal son of a bitch that ever loved if you know the story. Yeah. That's why pop. I've seen Billy Corby's documentaries. Billy Corbyn made that, yes. that's how Escobar became the murdering infamous son of a bit that he was.

He learned it from her. Because that's just how these people were. She was the kind of woman where if you got her shit and you paid her back and she didn't like you, she'd kill you. If you didn't pay her back, she'd kill you. If you took her shit and whatever, you know, she'd kill people like she's ordering pizza. So that's where the focus began over there, the cocaine cowboys. And what we were doing on our end of it was taking these idiots money, their bar money, you know. Just for instance, give me 300 grand.

I'll take it to Columbia and I'll buy you 30,000 pounds of Colombian red buds, 10 bucks a pound, you know. So by the time I get your shit back here to the United States, it's upwards around 5,000. $500 a pound at that time. Buying for 10 in Columbia and selling it in Miami for 500. 500. So this is another, this is another fallacy that I try to disprove, you know, when people think about violence. Dude, you're in Columbia or in South America. I work with Noriega several times.

Never met him. Got a handwritten note from the guy one time, but never met him. Just people like this. People in Columbia and Jamaica, you know, like that. No, I'm not scared. What the fuck? I'm a kid. I grew up in this, you know, doing this with these guys.

How old are you? I'm 20. First time I ever unloaded a boat full of pot. I had just turned 21. And it was 15 tons. And I never did one that small. Jesus Christ. How long does it take?

How many guys do you have unloading 15 tons? Well, there's... And how long does that take? There's three guys on the big boat that go out to meet the mothership. That's us. That's the highest. This is the hierarchy of how it all works. A boat that goes offshore to unload from the mothership.

Right. That crew gets paid the most. Because when you think about it, if we're taking 30,000 pounds of shit and putting it on our boat, three guys are responsible for the whole load for about five hours to get it into shore. So that's big money. Yeah. And while we're doing that, we, you know, there's always safety valves built into the scenario, no matter where you. are and what you're doing um in this case and i think i gave you this we're using this boat oh yeah

the picture of your uh your crabbing boat right that's me on that side that's my buddy mark he's the first mate on this side yeah here pull it up austin you have that right got this boat yeah we got the crab boat that boat has hauled millions of pounds literally millions of pounds of pot has has been on the deck of that boat not only the deck we're feeling it up around the bow we're stacking it up on top here just so the radar turns and then from that level all the way back it's that high this goes down to about eight inches of water line that's how heavy the boat gets and we're plug the scuppers in the back so the boat doesn't see so how many pounds can you fit in one fit in that boat at one time we i think we put about 45 000 pounds on

there at when he went time this is not um This is not hiding it below deck, all the subterfuge bullshit. This shit's, I mean, if you were to fly over this thing when it's loaded, all you'd see was the radar turning in a big ball of pot going through the water. And that's what it looks like. What happened? You can't find the boat? Oh, fuck, that sucks. And then, you know, the reason why, you see, it was our job as the guys on the boat to sample the shit.

So when we get back to the shore, we're like, yeah, take some of the shit, man, it's good, you know, like that. And then everybody would have a stash of it, right? So it was never a problem. Load the boat, kickback. Captain's doing his job. He's watching the radar. You know, we got a 15-mile radius. Anything comes within that.

We keep an eye on it. And it looks like that target's coming toward us. We get off onto that. That's the speed boat. That's my chase boat. It's running right next to that load. You got a picture of that one up there? Yeah, we have that picture too.

Hopefully he can pull that one up. That's me driving the boat and a buddy of mine just out for a cruise. Okay. Like a scary. of or something like a go fast boat Chris Kraft Okay okay Nearly 600 horsepower

And it's a deep V offshore I mean go fast 60 mile an hour For you ass hits a seat So those guys are following you They're behind you I've got this boat If it's not my boat That one right there

It's somebody else's boat That we've hired to run alongside of us We've got this giant fucking ball of weed Going through the water That's maybe doing four knots Right Because it's churning

It's loaded You're chugging And if something on the radar looks like it's coming at us, you know, what the hell are you going to do? Right. Well, you jump on that, son of a bitch, and you go. You get the fuck out of that. You just not leave the weed. Let them have it.

Because the guys running the boat don't own it. The captains, the owners of the vessels will never on them. The guys that own the vehicles and the trucks and all that stuff for transportation, the owners are never involved. There's always somebody else, and there's a reason for that as well. if somebody were to if we were to jump off and get onto that chase boat and you know off into the night they're never going to find us we're on the radio the minute we see we're getting boarded to the guy that owns the boat our captain call it in he calls the cops the local sheriff department and said dude i just looked out and noticed that my slip my boat's gone so he reports it stolen so and the vehicles are the same way if vehicles get stopped These guys get out and haul ass because we have, we're, let me back up a minute here, so it can all make sense for you.

We unload the freighter. We bring that 30,000 pounds in, 20, 25 other little smaller boats, T-crafts, T-crafts or mullet boats at that time. T-craft, this is it without its twin 235s. Okay. Really wide, really shallow bottom. Right. I know if you can see. with twin 235 Evan roots hanging on the back of it with with vertical and horizontal trim.

Right. So as long as that prop will go through the water, that boat will go through the water. So we're running these. We're unloading our big boats onto this, 25 of these. They're running them through the shallows, through the backwaters to the island where we literally taking the furniture out of one of our buddy's houses. And we start stacking and filling this house full. and if there's more to be had

then we just moved to Tommy's house next door and start filling his house this all takes place between sundown and sunup by the time the sun comes up the entire load regardless of how big it is is in somebody's house and waiting to be taken to Miami if by chance and this happened the entire load meaning how many how much

40 tons 30 tons how many trips do you have to go back how many times you have to go back and the boat can only hold 30,000 pounds. Well, then we take three boats. That's fucking nuts, man. We take three of those big boats, like my big boat. Right, right.

We anticipate the size of the load, or they tell us what's coming. Okay. You know, there's 60,000 pounds. We can't get 60,000 pounds on one boat. Right, right. So you take another boat, or you take three boats and make the loads a little bit lighter, move a little bit faster. It all gets unquicker.

Everybody makes the same. amount of money because it just i mean the math tells you how much money there is it's ridiculous so um in this case it's just one boat took the whole load we brought it in they come out like flies on our garbage can these little boats and they take as many trips back and forth to the house till our boat's empty and the house is full close it up and lock it up now if the if the vehicles the vans the cars the trucks you know whatever it may be that it's transporting the material to Miami. Some of them get loaded that night while it's coming off the boat.

And then you drive it into town and park it in the driveway and leave it there. You know, just park it in the driveway. Everybody has a two meter radio. You got like 110 of these things. Because to do one of these jobs, say even just a 30,000 pound, which I never did one that small before, ever after that. They were always bigger than that. It takes about 50 to 60 people, sometimes more.

to make one job work. That's why when the, you know, the article comes out in Life magazine, we'll get to that, and it talks about a town of mostly women and children because the entire male population is going to fucking prison. You know, that's because you can't keep using the same guys

night after night after night. Dude, you're going to bust their asses because I stone crab during the day. And I'm pulling 350 stone crab traps. Which will, that's a job that'll fucking, break you. Oh, dude, it'll make a man out of you. Oh, yeah. Because these traps are... I know a lot of guys that live right down the street here, the stone crab all day, every day during stone crab season. We had 7,000 traps. We pulled 700 a day. I pull 350, the guy on the other side

of the boat. We have twin pullers back and forth. Yeah. While he's pulling his, I'm dropping mine. While I'm clearing my trap, he's picking one up. I empty mine. I dropped one in his place. We were picking up, dropping off, picking up, dropping off all day long like this. And that's bust-ass fucking work. These things are like anywhere from 50 to 60 pounds apiece these traps are.

And if they're not catching, then the captain says, pick them up, boys. We pick every fucking one of them up and stack them, move them somewhere else, drop them out, just like they do on Dehleas Catch.

You've seen this. Yep. And the way it's done is not that far much different than the way they do it. Of course, their operation is far worse than what we've got to go through. Oh, yeah.

Those guys are in Alaska. They're fucking out of their mind. Yeah. Stone Cubs in the Gulf is nowhere near King Crabbs in Alaska. Where we can pull 350 today, it may take them a week to pull 350 traps. So it's a whole different ballgame. But the way it's done is very similar in the way they have that big round thing spinning. Yep.

Yep. Put the rope through it. Yep. And then it goes into a coiler. Yep. Now they're running, you know, 8, 900 feet of rope. And that thing spinning is, called a shiv. And the way it works is it's like two pie pans stuck together like that. And you put the

rope in between them and it cinches it and it starts to pull it. You know, grab it and you know, start pulling on that rope. But halfway through it, it's a little thing sticking out down here called a knife. The rope comes around, but it's not actually a knife, really. It's just what it's called. It kicks the rope back out. So it doesn't continue to spin and wrap around that big thing that's spinning. Right. Falls out on their feet. They put it in a coiler. Our is just coral on the on the deck of the boat because we're at the most 60 feet

you know something like that so in that way it's very similar but dude we're busting our ass all day pulling traps and then we go out and we move you know say 20 tons 40,000 pounds

that's average about anywhere's between 800, 900 pieces we're moving we're handling 900 bails a night sometimes two, sometimes three times a night. So if you're making that much,

you're going to make a ton of money. My first time out, see, these guys, when I came down to Florida, I came right down. I had a gig in Hollywood. I was working with Sammy Davis, Jr. for a few years, but that's a whole other deal there. We'll talk about that some other time.

But I wanted coming back, and a buddy of mine, come back home, I grew up in North Carolina, and my father was 82nd Airborne. went to school, went through my high school years in Wisconsin of all freaking places, freezing my nuts off.

And so I do this gig out in California. Come back to Wisconsin, a buddy of mine that was next, lived next door to me, calls me up and says, dude, I'm moving to floor tomorrow. He says,

my brother-in-law is running a fish house on Chuck Alaskia Island, this little island. I had been two years before for vacation, just visiting. He says, I'm going down to work on a crab boat. He said, want to go? And I was a machine,

you know, I had taken back up a machine, job at that time and I didn't even give a second thought I said shit yeah man I'm in so just like that I packed all my crap and I was you know I was gone the next day we drove all the way down and got to the end of 29 and the dead end 29 dead ends right on Chalusky Island wow and um that's where I that's why I started and uh how did you get for how did you get first introduced to holl and pot well the thing of it is is you know when you when you just show up like that people are You know, it's such a small town that people are sideways glancing you, you know.

Yeah. Who's this guy? You know, they're always eyeballing you in that way in that way. But because of the people that we moved, that I moved down there for, my brother, my friend Mark, his sister and brother-in-law ran Ernest Hamilton Stonecrabbs on Tuckalusky Island. So they were part of the family there. Everybody knew them. So Mark was, his sister was there, and I came down with him, so everybody knew where we came from. So it was cool.

We weren't cops. We weren't infiltrating. We weren't, you know, and all that kind of got around. It's all cool. Well, Mark gets a job on this crabout. And the other guy on the stern with him, there's only three guys on the boat. The other guy on the stern with him is from Michigan. And the captain, Billy, he's really not digging this guy, you know, because there's, you

So they decided, I said, dude, you know, I'm helping build a house for Mark's brother-in-law, you know, at the time just to kill some time, make a little bit of money. And he says, look, we're going to get rid of this guy. We want a job on the boat. I said, yeah, fuck, yeah. So they work this guy to death. I mean, and you can do that, too, dude. I mean, it's a bust-ass work. I mean, we can, you know, tear a motherfucker up real quick.

Fishermen don't fuck around, man. No. The one of the hardest working dudes ever. Fuck, dude. My back is shot because of this shit now. But he quits and they bring me on. Well, you know, they give me the, you know, I already knew the rundown. You know, you get up early three or so in the morning.

It takes you two, three hours to get to the traps near the lines. And the traps are set in lines. We have buoys that are about the size a little bit smaller than a soccer ball, a styrofoam buoy. And with a number on it. And we have, we use what we call catch poles. You have like a one-by-one piece of lab that's maybe six feet long. We fiberglass a shark hook on the end of it and growing the barb off of it so we can, you know, grab that line, pull it in. Whereas the deadliest catch guys, they throw the grappling hook out there between two bags that are floating.

And there's a line between those two bags. They catch that line and pull it in because, I mean, they got a mammy fucking thousand-pound trap to pull it. Ours are only 70. So we grab that buoy and as fast as I can put it through the block around the shiv that's already turning and the trap's coming up like that. So, you know, we start doing this by day and I go out there and, you know, they explained it all to me. So we're headed out that first day and I just happened to wake up. The bunks is in the wheelhouse and I happen to wake up and look out like this and the sun's up. And I'm thinking, no, we should have been started by now.

I mean, the sun's up. Cat, I look over there and Captain Billy, he's got a big grin on his face. He's looking over at me and goes, you know, he says, Timmy, he says, we're not going to go pull traps today. He says, buddy, we're going to go offshore and unload a pop boat from Columbia tonight. And I said, cool. You know, they kind of shang hide me into it, man, because, you know, knowing me, you know, they knew I'd be cool about it. You know, so it was kind of a tongue and cheek sort of a thing. I said, all right, cool, let's go, man.

So that was at 15 tons that night. So we did that. And the very next day, we get on the boat, we get ready, we'll go, you know, we're going to go pull traps again. And here we go again. I wake up. No pulling's going on. He says, okay, tonight it's 22 tons.

Tonight it's 22 tons. I said, okay. Two nights in a row, nearly 80,000 pounds of, you know, 80 tons of fucking weed. But I got paid rookie pay at that time. It was only $5,000 per load. that per night that was rookie pay but now that captain understood he's got a crew that's ready to bust ass and willing to work now my pay changes it goes now it goes according to the size of the load we're hauling in so if the load's 50,000 pounds you know or 75,000 pounds I'm getting paid 50 75,000 bucks a night a night and there was there were times when we're working you know two three times in a week a night's a week sometimes four nights a week. And we're not the only boat.

There's other boats out. You go to this one. You go to this one. I mean, they were stacked out there like a fucking parking lot, man. Ridiculous. In one instance, we go out to unload this boat. It was supposed to be 60,000 pounds of shit on this thing. It was a freighter.

You know, it was like 460-foot freighter or some shit like that. Fuck. So there were three boats, you know, assigned to do the, you know, off a fireman. flowed to meet the mothership so we go offshore we get together and we're diving or swimming we're fucking off all day long you know having a great old time getting stoned and shit and uh at about four in the afternoon or so like this um just out of nowhere this little sessna single engine comes roaring across the over the top of the boat and you can't hear a fucking airplane coming when he's down on the water you don't hear it until it's right on top you know so here comes this plane and it

comes up and it just misses our lower-end antenna. And that's how close this fucking guy was. It turns out to be Daryl. He's the guy that's doing the job. This is his job. He's one of the five brothers that were working us all. Okay. So he's,

he buzzes us like that. And he goes up like this. And he turns and he comes back. And he throws a milk carton out of the fucking plane. So we ease on over there and we fucking, you know, open it up. And there's a note in it. And it says, one of you guys got to flip a coin. I don't give a shit.

One of you guys got to go on low-distance. boat over here because there was shit being unloaded all over the place so um we were going to go with the original load it was so it was up to the other two so they flipped and whatever so it was he goes that boat takes off to go unload that boat we're waiting to unload our 60,000 so the way it works is um the horizon on the water when you're out there if you're familiar with this at all right from florida your horizon is typically eight miles before you do that you're the curve of the earth puts it out of your sight. Depending on how big the vessel is above the water line that can stretch to eight, nine, nine and a half miles sometimes at the most.

So you're out of sight. You're over the curve of the earth out of sight. At eight miles. At eight miles. Okay. So we sit off the horizon until, you know, about eight, nine o'clock, somewhere like that, about two, three hours before sunset. that call signs we all these new all these boats have different call signs that are given to us prior to those going out of the job so this one's filippe filippe filippe zoro filippe filippe zoro he says it twice

the captain says it twice then he hears it back go lipe bilipi pelippe zoro come on so we they know it's us coming so nobody else come to that boat they're not going to be shocked and surprised so here we go we pull up to this fucking freighter and this goddamn thing. It's six, the deck's 16 feet at least above my head. And, you know, we pull up there and there's nowhere to tie off. So Billy, the captain, the two captains have to keep the boats up against the side of the ship. Because there was probably, God, I know, there must have been 80 guys on this boat, man. And they were going down one hatch, single file, going down one hatch,

coming out another hatch on the other side carrying a bail on their shoulder one right after the other throwing them off the edge down to our boat down below landing on the deck 16 feet down bam these fuckers are smashing the deck and you know we're trying our damnedus to not get hit moving them out of the way and all of a sudden we're here's up one of those land on your head we're here oh dude it'd kill you i mean this 70 pounds of compressed fucking weed dude and um the deck starts crunching crunch the fiberglass because these puckers are hitting like bricks crunch and we're thinking oh god there goes our deck but um because we couldn't keep up with the state 80 whatever guys throwing the shit they're they're not throwing on us they're throwing it

on the other boat too you know they're loading us both at the same time right right well the bail start to stack up and they start hitting one another so that solved the crunching of the deck problem. Now all we had to do was you know, organizing them and putting them anywhere we could put them before, you know, fill the hole up, put the deck lids on, fill the deck, you know, around the wheelhouse, on the bow, on top of the boat, wherever we could stick this shit. So we figured you know, Captain Billy, he's in the wheelhouse and he's kind of doing,

we're all kind of doing a rough count. We figured 400 pieces roughly thereabouts would be half the load. They would have the other half. So we're, we're all. so we're getting to where we're thinking we've got about 400 and I'm looking up in the captain he's leaning against the rail like peeling an orange and it's all fucking shit's going on right and I look up and I go how many more and he says to me in his half-assed English he goes 50 more I'm like okay so we're counting 50 60s and Jesus Christ how many fucking more and he goes 50 more I think that's the only number the guy knew because he just knows English, right?

He's just yelling 50 more, right? So they keep throwing these goddamn things. So now we're at the point where, you know what scuppers are on a boat. No, what's the scuppers? Scupper holes are where, you know, when you're working, you're doing, you bring in water and rain and splash on the deck, the water runs out. Oh, okay. Yeah.

The back of the boat. Yep. Those are the scuppers. Well, now we're so loaded as scuppers are starting to go underwater. Oh, shit. And that's going to sink the fucking boat because, I mean, once you get water on the day, It's in the engine hatch. It's in the fucking bill.

It's all over the fucking place. We take a knife and we cut open a couple of life vests. Pull the wadding out of them and stuff the scuffers and plug them so the boat won't sink. While we're doing this, this shit's still coming. And Billy says, he's yelling. I mean, we've got this shit stacked up to where we can't even see inside the wheelhouse hardly. Because we just left a little space for the door to open up. And Billy says, we're getting the buck out of here, man.

he starts the boat up, bwom, big black smoke, you know, and shit bellowing out the back end. And when we start going, these buckers are still throwing bales off. I mean, for as far as we could see these guys up into the horizon and with binoculars, they're still throwing bales off. Are you worried about going, you're still eight miles off short, right? Dude, no. Eight miles is the horizon.

Right. We're probably 30 miles. You're 30 miles. Yeah, we're out in this. Are you not? You guys are not concerned about running out of fuel with that much shit on the boat? No, we're all prepared for that. You know, that's why the chase boat, because when you're coming back loaded like that,

dude, you're not, you're going to be four, five, six hours getting back home. Oh, yeah, easy. So we always usually used to start a big load like that. We'll start loading before sunset, you know. And then once sunset gets going on, now we have all this time to get into shore and then get it into the house. So we know, you know, the biggest thing is, trying to get the mothership to come as close as we can get them to get to the shoreline. You know, the closer the better, obviously, and some of these guys, they want to stay in

international waters. They want to stay out in the, there's a dividing line between the shrimpers out here and the stone crabbers. Shrimpers stay offshore, so many miles offshore, and the stone crabbers have so many miles inshore for their traps to lay because a shrimp boat will take your whole fucking line, man. I mean, they can screw up a trap line and nothing flat. So we had our boundary, you know, and we respected that. So the boats would come in to where the shrimp boats are and hide amongst them.

So they're just a blip on the radar like 70 other shrimp boats out there. So we're going to run out there to them and unload the shit, you know, like that. So we're, you know, and then we have this long truck back in. That's why the chase boat, that's why the radar and all this kind of stuff, you know. So it's, you know, it's, you know, the way I wrote the story, it's a bit jovial. you know but in reality there's a lot of seriousness to it you know i mean we were kids working for the adults we were the humpers we were the we were the we were the machine we were doing the work and adults are going here here go here go there they're not handling this shit we are

so you bring it in we're met by the little boats little boats take it put it in the houses and like i said what doesn't go to the houses goes to you know park front somebody's driveway two meter radios that have five different digits to use as a combination. Virtually unscanable at that time. And we have communication is key. Everybody has to be in communication with everybody else. We've got like 120 of these radios just hanging around. So we got one.

So the next day, when it's time to start sending this shit to Miami, in broad daylight. As soon as the sun comes up the next day, that's when the shit goes to Miami. and vans and shit across alligator alleys cars trucks dump trucks we'd have a guy bring in and dump a load of gravel in somebody's driveway fill it full fucking weed and send it out of town that's a 120 mile trip across florida you know so these drivers don't own the boat don't own the cars they don't own the vans and those just shit like that so there are also at that time you know at that stage of the game another safety valve designed into the workings is we have anywhere between six and eight or ten spotters driving that route back and forth to Miami in staggered form. Like all day?

All day. As long as we're moving this shit to Miami, then what happens is we take it and we take it to a designated spot in somewhere in, you know, West Miami like Coral Gables or Kendall or someplace like that. You're typically a plaza in Kendall and just a little strip mall or some kind like that and our guys will drive in, park, get out, go window shop, and I have one of our guys with the Cubans on the other end who own the shit pointing, that's our car, that's our truck. They put a guy in it, they go unload it and bring it back.

This is a dead drop. This is when the term dead drop first was coined back in those days. So that had the major effect that that had was that the guys that were taking the weed from us in Miami, didn't know where the shit was coming from in Everglades and our guys in Everglades didn't know where the shit was going in Miami because that guy took in and unloaded it. So if either one of them got popped, nobody could tell him where the shit came from.

Right. You know? Plus, if the guy's driving, say, from Everglades to Miami and he gets pulled over, we've got pickup trucks and cars. They all have Reese hitches, trailer hitches. Some have the low slung, you know, like big tall trucks, need the low slung like this. Well, we get those.

pull them out, turn them over. So they go out and up. It's a little ball on top of it up here. Right, right. And if you get stopped, pull over, whatever like this, you first thing you do is get on the radio and say, hey, I'm busted. You wait for whoever stopped you to get between your vehicle and theirs, throw your fucking thing in reverse and mash the shit out of that car. You've got a ton of fucking weed or two tons of weed in this van truck or whatever it is,

and you smash this fucker with that thing that's going right through his, radiator. He ain't going nowhere. But you're not going to outrun his radio. You can get in that thing and haul ass and get out of sight of him and one of those 10 spotters will pick you up because they're already there. You get in the car and go home and the, the call's already been made to the guy that owns the vehicle. So he's immediately, he's, dude, I just looked out in my driveway. I'm like, my shit, my car's gone. My truck's gone. Somebody stole my shit. Well, that immediately relieves him, the vehicle, the boat, whoever, relieves them of any responsibility of what that thing has been through

because it was stolen from them. And they get it back. Wow. What a very thorough operation you guys had going, man. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this is 30 years of shit going on here. You know, these guys had it figured out. Now, going back to the cocaine cowboys story, it seems like, just from the conversations that I've had

and throughout history is, by and large, most of the pot haulers converted to co-cons. collars because there's more money and coke right the more profit easier to move easier to move bulkwise why didn't why didn't you convert none of us wanted to have anything to do with that simply because of the first of all the people involved in it for one thing we're just maniacs you couldn't i mean there's no trust there's no nothing there's no family to it there's nothing you know oriented in that way whatsoever plus the amount of time you get for being caught with cocaine which was significant

Was it? Oh, yeah. It was way more. Way more significant than getting caught with a boatload of buck and weed. You know, plus, you know, mostly it was the gang, the environment, the type of people that, you know, that were working with that. I had an opportunity several times to move coke and would do it so easy to do. But I didn't do it for those two reasons. And I did it for a third.

I didn't for a third reason. The most important one in my opinion is, now the way this works is if you bring, a load of pot in and it gets to Miami, you don't get, okay, here's your money. You don't get paid those millions of dollars right away. That shit has to start selling. You get paid out of the shit that's sold out of that load. So it may be a week and a week and a half before I start seeing money. So that being said, our guarantee for the payment is I take, if I do this arbitrarily, 30,000 pounds of shit for you, okay? And you owe me $5 million for having done the job.

That's what typically a cost to do that. Okay. You paid $300,000 for this load. You're making $9,700,000 profit on something that only took me eight days to get to you. So I'll give you all your fucking shit except for $5 million of it that you owe me. that goes to Fort Myers. You lose your shit in Miami for whatever fucking reason. I'm getting paid. I'm going to sell that shit because I got a buyer right now ready to take it.

My crew didn't risk our lives to move this shit into the country and not get paid. So now when it comes to the cocaine, dude, I'm not keeping $10 million worth of your cocaine and a little payment. You know, fuck that shit, dude. Just do it all, have it all. and then risk getting paid or not getting paid. So it really wasn't worth it, man. I mean, we were set up and geared up for pothalling, you know, simply because in the area in which we lived,

you know, there are times when we start to bring a load in and there's unusual traffic on the island. And that's when it's immediately determined that, okay, the load has to wait and we'll put it out in the woods. Now, in the early days, the guys would build what they call, call a million dollar pad. They would take the bales to find the driest spot out there on one of the islands. I'm talking about literally 10,000 islands you can pick and choose in which we knew them

really well because that's where we fucked around. Find relatively highest spot on the island that you can. Lay down, you know, a bunch of bales and then pyramid stack them on top of those. If the tide comes up and it happens to ruin the ones that it's sitting on, there's a million dollars that's the pad that's the million dollar pad we take all the bales that are dry leave the shit in the woods however many bales that took so that's all that's all figured into the gate that's funny so as the kids took over as those guys wound up going through their you know the process of being arrested and all the kind of crap and shit and left us kids over and we didn't

believe in million dollar pads you know that's a lot that's a lot of cash It's wasteful. It's a lot of pot. It's wasteful. What we wound up doing was a little bit more work, but it was a little bit more ingenuity involved in it. And we had to do this one night because there was too much traffic on the island. We brought, I think it was around 42,000 pounds, just around, just over 21 tons, I think it was.

And we had to stack it in the woods. So what we did was we found a spot about three miles south of Everglades up into, up into the islands, and broke down. dead trees and dead branches and built pads, literally built six different pads to set this stuff on, and bucket brigated them from the boats into the woods and built these pads and put the shit on to keep it dry. And I paid a guy $15,000 to spend the night with it. So he had a radio to spend the night with it. So nobody could show up and come back and, you know, help themselves do it. That's one of the most fascinating things about this whole time, this whole, like, era in history, right? There's like this 10 to 15 year period in South Florida, whether you're,

where there's so many opportunities to make so much fucking money, whether it be weed or coke. And it's just, it's insane the amount of people that I've been able to meet that have made so, people that just, they were just lucky enough to be born at that time in that area of the world. And they made so much, ungodly amount of money. And you're, you're right about, you know, one thing is it's it's it's pretty much being at the right place at the right time it's not something that you can that you just sign up for you drive here and you sign up for it kind of thing you've got to kind of be you know grew up with it and that's what that's what happened to me and and on all us kids we all grew up with it dude i you know when i started taking in in upon myself to do

loads on my own when the first and second generations wound up going to prison um i can tell you that i can i can i can uh lead up into that story well um it wasn't uh it was then when we started amping up the you know the way it was done up until the second and the third generations wound up going to prison it was well boats it was you know it was radios it was um you know um mechanics fixing your boats you know and a lot of visible stuff yeah you know that really didn't need to be that way um but it worked because at that time there weren't people weren't looking for this they were particularly weren't looking for it on the scale in which we were working i mean it was just outrageous i mean it's it's i find it's hard

to even say sometimes because it sounds so ridiculously stupid i mean i did a calculation one time uh and he actually did it in my book where our crew worked 28 nights in a row some of the guys would say it was more than that but i left it at 28 nights in a row and this is 20 tons, 25 tons, 30 tons, every single night. I mean, there was shit going and coming in cars and every, and this is why half the town was involved in it. Right. So we're just, you know, going crazy, you know, crazy stupid.

And then when the first and second generations had their go, had their run, Operation Everglades 1, which was kind of a bit of a failure. Operation Everglades 2 almost came a year to the day. this time all the grownups in the adults and everybody you know that was visible at that time just sat around on the porches at two three in the morning waiting for the show to start because you know it was common there was nothing we're going to do about it

so Operation Everglades 2 came and it was a bit of a success I guess you could call it that but what they weren't expecting was the magnitude of which this was all taking place the sheer volume of stuff that was being moved they had no idea so when they took those guys all to prison, you know, here, you know, us kids are left.

We were the infrastructure. We're the ones doing all the work. The adults are pointing doing this. Go here, go there, you know, pick this shit up. Sometimes we'd have to take stuff out of one house, move it up the river and stash it to where you can load it out and get it out that night because we have full, put more in that house. I mean, it was just that way.

Right. So 28 nights, some thought it was more than that. But I did a rough calculation to the tune of about 1.6 million pounds. and 28 nights went through that little bitty 129-acre island to Miami and during the day because there's only one way in there and one way out you know so when the everglaze seafood festival came around every year boy that was that was a winter man because I mean there were so many cars and there's 30 now a town goes from 500 people to 30 40,000 people man I mean it's time right let's go let's move the shit and there's just

Vans and truckloads of this shit going through town and waiting at people like this. Waving at the cops even, you know. 99 times out of 100 we're waving at the cops as we drive right on by them because that's the only way to get out of there. And I have a funny thing, and I'll just jump ahead real quick. I have to say this when I was being interviewed by two secret service agents when I got arrested. I said, you know, first question out of my mouth to them was, do you know the geography of Everglades City?

Yeah. And I said, well, how many roads in there and how many roads are out of there? And there's one. Yeah, there's one. And I said, well, how many direct routes from Everglades City to Miami are there? There's one. Well, yeah, there's one. And I said, well, how do you think all those millions of fucking pounds got to Miami?

It didn't go by pelicans and porpoises, for Christ's sake. It went down that one goddamn road, the only goddamn road that there was. And nine times out of ten, we're waving at you as we're going by, you know. It was just that ludicrous. I mean... That's hilarious. And, you know, this is a thing that people have a hard time wrapping their mind around. Yeah.

You know, because, I mean, I'm skipping around a lot, you know, but I mean, some things just need to be said in order to, you know, to complete that bit of a story and make it, you know, somewhat believable. Right. You know, um... Did you ever have the thought of like, you know, man, I should just hedge right now. Quit. Quit right. Quit while I'm ahead. I don't want to go to press.

I got millions and millions of dollars in these safes. Man, you know how many times I've been asked that question. But, you know, honestly, it never occurs, never occurred to me to quit, you know, because first of all, I was... Clearly, you weren't doing it for the, you had enough money to last for us your life. Dude, the money, after a while was a pain in the dick. Right. I mean, I'm just, it was, it was more about getting away with it, you know, that was, you know,

getting paid because, Christ, there was a period of time when I'm getting paid, you know, I'm getting bags of money shoved across the kitchen table at me for jobs I don't even remember doing. You know, this job happened like four weeks ago. You know, well, here's another one. This one was that one. This one was that. And then I got a stack of bags of money that I don't remember doing. So what was the motivation then?

Like, what was the best part about it for you? Just the thrill of it. Just not getting caught. The camaraderie of it, you know? I mean, we're all kids, man. Right. And we're running the fucking show. Yeah, you're in your early 20s.

You're not even fully fucking, your brain's not fully developed, as I said. Just babies. I'm sitting here 63 years old and I'm thinking, wow, 20 years old. And I'm thinking, you know, when I think about some of the shit that I did, my ass goes, you could cut a cigar with that fucker, man. Oh, that's hilarious. But this is just how we grew up. This is all we knew as kids. We only knew multi-ton fucking loads.

You know, I dumped more shit out of my fishing boots than any three guys can smoke probably in their lifetime. I mean, that's just how stupid it was. And I say that because, let me give you a little bit of a history here from beginning. In the beginning when we first started hauling bales off of these boats, they were just, I mean, coming apart. They weren't even packed. They weren't compressed. The compressed bales hadn't come along yet. This is in the late 70s, early 80s.

Just loose bags? I mean, dude, they were like taking the shit in heavy mill plastic, stuffing it with their foot seemed like, and then duct tape that shut, stick it in a burlap bag, and stitch that shut, throw it in a pile. They were irregular. They were elongated. They were small.

They were big. They were 30 pounds. 110 pounds one of these fucking things was. It was like a big torpedo. There was no rhyme nor reason to it. It was just pack it and get the shit out of here kind of thing. Well, when we take this shit off the mother ship, you know, we're responsible for that fucking load. You know, that's our, that's our deal.

That's why we get paid the big bucks. I've been paid as much as $125,000 a night just to bring a load in. And I'm only working seven hours, you know. But the thing of it is is once that shit comes ashore and it gets off our boat, we've got to clean that fucking boat, man. and we're taking hours with knives and screwdrivers and little cracks and shit because this sit and I'm Colombian weed in those days it was seedy i mean it was seats coming pouring out of this shit and we're unloading boats where we have to sometimes get down inside the boat and help the crew because these freighters like the holes way up the fuck up here yeah you got to build a pyramid of bales to stand on to get the shit up and it's falling apart and it looks like you know you look like a goddamn uh McDonald's happy meal with your fucking sees on your face and shit.

You know, it's just comical. So, you know, this goes on. And we've finally got to a point where, you know, we take a roll of viscqueen, a roll of plastic and some duct tape. And on our way out, you know, sun's going down. We radio our call sign.

We're headed to the boat. Put this visc queen out and duct tape it all down and make a big bowl out of the back of the boat. There you go, yeah. You know, so when they throw this shit in there, you know, we get back home, unload the shit, unload the shit, unload the shit, go offshore, pull all this plastic into a ball, tie a chain and an anchor to it and throw it off the boat. So smart, man.

Like painters when they put a drop cloth down. Fucking right. You know, because, you know, if anything becomes suspicious during the evening and they're out there running around, looking at boats and they're boarding boats, if they find any seed on your boat, you're fucked, that take your boat. It's as simple as that. So we get together and we're thinking, okay, this is the early 80s

when the advent of the commercial and the household trash compactors started coming on the commercials and into the scene. So a couple of the third and first and second generations get this light bulb goes on and they say, well, why don't we take

about a dozen of these fucking things and a few generators down there and show them how to do this, you know? that's how a bail a pot looks like a bail of pot now. Really? Because of our guys went down to Columbia and said, we can't be responsible for your bullshit anymore. Right.

You either get your shit. It's not their problem. It's your problem. It's us. Right. Because it's our asses. It's on our boat. They're not going to prison for this fucking shit.

That's how the advent of the square grouper came about. When you look at a bail of pot today, it looks that way because our older generation made them look that way. That's insane, man. And that's the God's gospel truth. I mean, you can hate on me all you want. But that's, you know, I'm not sitting here telling lies because I like to. That's great.

That's the way it was because we were responsible. So having said that, now they're more consistent. They're easier to handle. They stack better. So now what happens? The loads get bigger because they're not these god-awful fucking pieces they're shit anymore you know so now they're stackable and our boats designed to haul crab traps are perfectly designed to haul bails a pot so they're stacking in there really nice man and now we got some and

and we were stacking them in there to a point where sometimes the boat would that's it that's what they look like right there yeah sometimes the boat was you know you're pitching and rolling on like legos on see yeah they're pitching and rolling on the seas a little bit and some will fall off and shit like that. Hence Square Gruper. That's how they get the name, Square Gruper. Nobody really knows today who first came up with it, but I know it came out of our,

it came out of our, it came out of because, I mean, we're the fuck else where to come out of. Right. And I don't, you know, I don't go on telling these stories, like, we are the only ones that ever did it. We didn't invent hauling pot. We weren't the only ones that ever hauled a bill of pot. I never said that.

And I would never take anything away from anybody that has ever done it because, man, It takes balls. Yeah. You know, go to another country to people you don't know, load your boat, bring it back, you know, and get away with it. They were pot hollers all over the place. What my story is designed to do is to help you understand the history of it all

and how a small town in southwest Florida can be the hub of the marijuana industry throughout North America and nobody know a fucking thing about it. Yeah. A little 500, 600 person town is responsible for the bulk of the weed coming into this country. That's so funny. It's, it's, um, you know, and I felt the story needed to be told because I, you know, what, what, what prompted me really was, I saw, um, Billy Corbyn's, um, documentary, document, square grouper. Yeah. And it was, uh, you know, I, I, I like his style.

I like the way he does the animations and, you know, and he's really good at, at, uh, at, uh, he's, at, uh, he's, he's a, at, production when it comes to that sort of thing. But the actual telling of the story, in my opinion, he missed the greatest story ever to be told. He talked about the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church out of Jamaica, who set up an operation in a mansion on Star Island in Biscayne Bay in Miami. We hauled millions of shit to that island for them. I mean... Really? Yeah.

And there was another group of guys at that time. And this guy's, he's a funny fucker. His name was Robert Flatthorn. He was, they called him the black tuna gang. Because everybody in the group had a gold pendant made of a tuna, had a tuna. Uh-huh. So if you're part of that click, you had a tuna. Like black tuna, but whatever.

They got into pot hauling when, back when President Carter was making quasi moves toward legalization and, you know, bringing that on. So they figured they're going to blaze the trail. They're going to go to Columbia, figure it out. They even used a high times magazine. I know if you're familiar with high times. Oh, yeah, of course. They used to give you the pop prices in the magazine. They were using that to figure out what their prices would be.

So they set up headquarters in the Fountain Blue Hotel, downtown Miami, in a penthouse suite. South Beach, right? South Beach. Their claim to fame was like a half a million pounds or some shit like that. The Zions, the Coptics, their claim to fame was like, a million pounds of feed you know weed moved in and shit like this um i got a hold uh and i first uh heard george young story by him flying mexican weed into the country and this and that

and his association with a guy named diego in the movie who in real life was carlo slater that was that was who they're portraying um and another guy who i happened to find a phone number on the internet for just out of the blue his name was brian o'day and he wrote a book called hi Life of an International Drug Smuggler. His claim to fame was about a half a million pounds of Asian weed that he brought into the Gulf of Alaska. Processed it on a fishing vessel, put it in boxes and froze it and brought it to the docks in Washington, just like it was the regular catch. And he would have a box of actual frozen fish sitting around with one of his guys every now and then to bump one like,

and they just spill across the deck and be fish everywhere. So, you know, that's fish. Right. It's not weed going into that truck. Well, I'm taking these guys claim to fame, you know, the Zions, the tuna gang, George Young, and Brian O'Day. And I put all their shit in a pile, and I said, fuck, that's not even a year's work for us, man. You want to hear a story. Well, back the fuck up.

Here comes a story, you know. So that's when I started riding this. and what I did at that time was I went back to Everglades and, you know, writing a memoir and writing about the history of, you know, this genre, if you will, I needed to make sure that the stuff that I was writing just didn't come from what I thought took place or I knew the guys, this guy did this, and I went back and talked to the older generations. I sat down with Craig, the youngest brother, and I wrote about what he told,

me, you know, about, you know, how things went for them and how they were arrested and how they were, you know, they were shunned in prison. And when they walked through the prison yard, they would open up like this and they would let through because they're whispering about the Everglades cartel, you know, which was a fucking joke, right? But people gave them the ultimate respect because of just the sheer volume of shit they managed to move, you know. And so I wrote, you know, I wrote there a little bit about their story in the book, you know, and that little bit about them being sentenced in front of the magistrate, these ridiculous sentences, you know,

which brings me back around to the mandatory minimums. Right. You know, and they weren't having the dramatic effect that they expected it to have, you know, the busting and then all this kind of stuff. So they said, okay, mandatory minimums across the board, we're going to take away discretion from the magistrates and the judges across the country. We're going to give you a slide rule, rather,

you know, if you will, here and here. And whatever times it dictates that you get, that's what you're stuck with. There's no more discretion amongst the judges. They can't help you, you know, our hands are tied. The amount that you're busted with equals a certain amount of years is what that means. Well, what happens is if you're over 2,000 kilograms, then you're major. My indictments were, there were four of them. They were a mandatory 10 years to line.

life on each count. I didn't actually catch me with anything. These are conspiracy counts. Right. Conspiracy to possess to import more than 2,000 kilograms. Conspiracy to sell and some other crap. How do they get your name? How do they know who you were?

That was interesting because the way it works is, you know, when I was a kid doing this work, along with all the other kids, you know. We never knew who the boss was. We never knew who was paying us, and we didn't give a shit, you know, who was paying. As long as that paper bag got slid across the kitchen table, we were all happy, man. We didn't care.

So when I started taking, you know, and doing jobs on my own, which only happened because everybody went to prison. And then two guys that I happened to know in Miami, just out of, you know, serendipitously how it happened was I drove the Winnebago full of that 55 tons of shit because they didn't have enough drivers

I made 75 grand the first night hauling it insure and they paid me 35 grand to drive this fucking Winnebago brand new to Miami that had about 11,000 pounds of bales in it and it couldn't go to the dead drops plaza because you got within 40 feet of this fucking thing you could smell it right It had to go right to the house.

So what they needed, what Daryl needed was somebody he could trust to do this. So he said, and I go over there just to see what's going on, and I get shackled into this thing, man. He said, Timmy, come here. He says, I would like you to drive this to Miami if you wouldn't mind. I said, no, fuck, like that. And he's a, you know, it's a $35,000 job, you know. I said, well, I just made $75 grand that night.

I didn't give a fuck about the money. Right. But because of who it was, it was asking me, I felt obligated. Okay, he's the boss. This is, okay, what the fuck? So we put airbags in the springs of this thing. And you inflate the airbags, and it lifts this Winnebago off the ground.

So its ass is not sparking the highway when it's going down the road, right? So I'm driving this behemoth down fucking 41 all the way to Miami to Chrome Avenue and a hangar right, and I go off and I'm driving down back into this orange field, and there's this looking castle. It looks like a castle.

It doesn't belong there. And I pull up to a side door and the guys jump out. They start unloading the shit, taking it into the basement. And the guys were teasing me before I took this ride. They were telling me about, you know, many people have been murdered in this house, man. And these guys are, you know, these guys are insane, fucking Cuban, freaks, you know, like this. And I just was hearing it, you know. It didn't occur to me.

It was that way at all. And it wasn't, really. When I got over there, I had to spend the day that they'd asked me to spend. spend the day because when the loads quit coming for that day, I was to drive a car with money in it back home. Because I drove to the Winnebago, I needed to get home. Right. So I don't know how much money was in this fucking car.

It was jam-packful. And I was there all day, you know, playing cards and, you know, goofing off, getting to know the guys and shit like that. So fast forward now when everybody gets busted and shit and they go to prison, they go to jail and these guys still got work to do, They only knew one face. They never saw any of the other crew. Nobody ever drove to the stash houses.

They were always dead dropped. Nobody knew anybody. That was the way it was kept. You don't know them. They don't know us. I never saw your face. I don't know who the fuck you are or anything like this, but me. I was chosen to drive straight to the fucking house, spend the day with these guys.

So now when everybody gets busted and, you know, it wasn't two, three, maybe two, three months later. I get a knock on my door and open the door and there's this guy Jorge from that fucking house in Miami. Timmy! It took them three weeks to find me. They knew my name was Tim. They knew what I looked like, but they took them three weeks and they found me.

And they said, Timmy, man, we got shit backing up. Can you do this work? And I just, you know, without even thinking about it, yeah, fuck yeah, you know. What did they want you to do? Hall the pot for them. Okay. The grownups weren't there to set the deals and go,

go buy the shit and all that they're in prison they's cubans still had work to do they needed us to continue doing the work well the infrastructure was still there like i said earlier the kids that did all the work i mean we were all there you know because they got the visible guys at that time the older generations they had no idea the kids were doing this fuck there were 20 year old 19 20 year old kids driving boats full of pot through the islands and shit they never never occurred to them so i went back and got everybody was there. The only thing I had to figure out was how much to charge the fuckers, where to go get the shit, you know,

and all this kind of stuff, which I wound up getting from one of the other generations, you know, keyed me in on their connection and how it's done and how to pay. And the price I had come up with, you know, on my own, was pretty close to what they were charging because by that time I had worked almost every position. I was a bail handle.

I was loading cars. I was under, you know, unloading freighters. I was, you know, whenever they needed somebody, I worked it, and then I got paid that pay. Well, the pay scales are different for every job you do. The bail handlers get $5,000 a night. The cars that drive the cars will get $30,000 a trip. They pay their drivers out of that. You know, the guys that have the smaller boats that come out to get the ship from our boat, from the mother's ship,

those little boats making it through the islands, they're about $35,000 a piece. And they pay their guy on board out of that. we're on the big boat with the load i make 75 or 100 grand a night so that's how it all works so i just reverse engineered the math right right and came up with a number about how many people we needed for this and it was pretty close now there's two ways to do it there's pay me 175 dollars a pound i'll go to columbia jamaica central america where the fuck you want to get your shit and put it on your doorstep in miami for 175 a pound or you can pay me a hundred and forty five dollars a pound or you can pay me $145 a pound, you go get the shit, you bring it out here offshore, I'll come and unload you

and bring it and put it on your doorstep in Miami. I'll do it that way. But most of the guys opted for me to just do the whole fucking thing because they didn't want to bother with it. And that's how it worked. Wow, man. And I, you know, I just managed figuring that. So I went from being this guy that was running offshore unloading boats. It's just all of a sudden I'm the guy that's... Now you're making it all happen. Yeah. So, you know, yeah. So I get the first job in. Everybody's paid. Everybody's happy. So we do another one, another one. other one and then um that's when the guy started you know with me about the cocaine you know it's a lot of coke dude oh man it's so fucking easy i'm like no for one reason there's you know

a whole different crowd of people fucking around with that shit and i you know and then i told them about the holding money kind of thing i didn't want to do that either but little did i know that um the two guys that only two guys from miami that i mentioned my book are calito and leo Carlito and Leo, as it turns out, wound up being two soldiers of Garzell de Blancos. Really? Holy shit. I didn't know this until I'm researching my own shit, you know?

Wow. So, and then it finally occurred to me. I'm thinking, yeah, okay, what? So, you know, we're counting money, you know, and the loads are getting bigger, so the cash is getting more. Some of the jobs are going for, you know, $25, $30 million.

And I'm taking my cut out of that. that, well, they get their cut. So I'm counting, you know, at any time, my crew's, you know, 10, 12, 15, 20 million for my crew, and I've got to count it. So we had, at one point, four money machines that the banks use, you know, going constantly. And we had hundreds in one bedroom, 50s in another, 20s in another, 10s in another, and five's in the garage. because, I mean,

$5 bills were ridiculous. Nobody wanted them. Just burn them, right? It's $50,000 and $5 bills is as big as big as this fucking table. You know, but the thing of it was was when I got paid or anybody did, really. You had to take, you couldn't just take hundreds. I had to take multiples of denominations, you know, spread it out a little bit like that. So, you know.

Why was that? Well, it's because, I mean, it's just a fair thing to do. Okay. Somebody's going to wind up with a fucking garage full of five. Yeah. You know, who's going to want that? And, you know, 80% of them, $5 bill. And I got a bundle of them one time, $5 bills.

You're shrunk wrap, you know, probably about a one-by-one square like this. Open it up and they were moldy. It was mildewed because money mildews. Yeah. And they put these goddamn rubber bill. bands around them and the bacteria on the rubber bands starts on the money starts to deteriorate in the rubber bands you know a rubber band gets after a while oh yeah it falls apart and shit like that right well that's because money's nasty you know and i've gotten paid with 20 dollar bills that were

in the mold flying out of them shit shows you know because the money's just being handed like this it's never getting time to spend it at that level right so i get a you know i do i do this job we're over their counting money and and I should be in Columbia or I should be helping my crew with another load but I'm stuck counting goddamn money you know because now our paydays are getting up toward you know 15 20 million it takes a while to count that kind of money man people just don't they don't grasp they see these movies you know of a guy you know carrying around a bag that's got a million dollars in and he's running he's slinging that fucking there's no fucking way slinging that bag around how long to take for one of those money machines or three of those money machines to process 10 million bucks

days days days non-stop non-stop because they're not only doing just hundreds you're doing hundreds 20s 10s five you're doing all these denominations so when the guy with the guys go into the room they shovel in a bunch of money into a fucking laundry basket bring it out to us we're popping rubber bands and stuff in this thing in and we're it's counting and we're ledgering and it's just taken for goddamn ever man so um just out of you know sheer screwing and fucking around in those days with triple beams and the cocaine and that kind of shit you know guys would you know do a line and throw their fucking bill on the on the scale and just fucking around it weighs a gram way it every bill no matter what nomination it is weighs a gram that's crazy look it up on

the internet that's insane they'll actually tell you now on the internet how much money weighs. So if every bill, no matter what denomination weighs a gram, there's 28 of them an ounce, there's 16 of them in a pound. Dude, it's just math from that point on. Right. Right. So now we're taking these baskets, setting the basket on the scale, we have to count the bundles that we throw in there. The first time around, say, hundreds, 20, 10, the first time we're counting the bundles until we got a million dollars worth of, say, $20 dollars bills in this basket. And it weighs X amount. We have to subtract the weight of the rubber bands on the bills.

So if there's two rubber bands on each bound pack of bills, that's two grams. So we had to count the bundles so we could subtract the grams for the rubber bands. and the money comes out exactly on the dollar. That's fucking crazy. 110 pounds in $20 bills weighs is a million dollars. 110 pounds in 20s. In 20s. 22.2 pounds is a million dollars in one hundreds.

I remember reading in the book that Pablo Escobar's brother wrote. I think it was called The Accountant Story, something like that. I remember he wrote because he was the one who was like accounting for every single expense. I remember he said that they were spending around 10 grand a month on rubber bands. You know, it's funny. You should bring that up. It's reminded me, we were taking so much shit. I mean, dude, you have to read the book, Saltwater Cowboy, Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire.

You can find it on Amazon, just about anywhere. We were bringing so much shit out of South America. they were running out of stuff out of bags to put it in first we're getting coffee bags burlap coffee bags because coffee's a big product and they got us you know they got burlap bags coffee burlap bags all over the fucking place well we used all of them that we could use now we're getting uh um in this first time i'd ever seen this and i never knew purina made horse chow and monkey chow and you know cat chow for lions and shit like that for zhs and shit like that for Oh, wow, I didn't know that either.

So now we're getting bags that are got purina monkey chow written on the side of because they're out of burlap bags. When we're using every fucking bag in South America, sugar, sugar, you know, those, then they started going to the nylon woven out of the burlap kind of thing. And we used every kind of fucking, I saw a whole boatload of weed, 20 tons of shit boxed in marlboral containers. Really? That's funny.

They said regular marble cigarettes on it because we were taking so much shit, they were running out of stuff to put it in. What was the first time you actually went down to Columbia yourself? Oh, that was in, I think, late 84. Okay. Somewhere like that. And what spawned that decision? When Jorge showed up at my door that day.

Oh, really? And he knocked on the door and said, said, Timmy, we got shit to do, man. Can you do this? And I said, yeah. So I go back to every glades and find everybody and say, you know, you're going to work. We want to do this. We want to work. And they said, okay, what we need you to do is we need you to go get it. You go pick it out. You weigh it. You go get it. And you go, the first one, you bring a, you take care of all of it, bringing it for us. So Carlito and Leo had a jet that their gang

used. It was a, it was a corporate leer at that time. Okay. And he said, come on with, you know, He says, I took my buddy, Franco, he was a Spanish dude to translate for me. So we hop on this plane. It's only like a five and a half hour flight, depending on the wind speed and all that kind of shit. It's only five hours to South America. Right. So I agreed. I'd go down there.

I'd find the shit. I'd try it. I'd weigh it. I'd try it. I'd wait it. Send a boat for it and, you know, like that. So hop on the plane, me and my buddy and we fly down there and we land. and they pick us up in a fucking bronco.

Really? Yeah. This thing was badass, dude. It looked like, you remember that, romancing the Stone? Do you ever see that movie with Michael Douglas? I don't think so. And he's got this,

Columbia guy's got his little mule. His little mule's a bronchle. Oh, really? Yeah, it was just funny as shit. That's hilarious. We get there, and I meet the guy, and he was just, you know, I didn't meet him the first day.

We flew in, we went to the house, and you could see the house from the plane from the jet before we landed. I mean, this is this huge, beautiful home out in the middle of nowhere. And the landing strip was carved out of the jungle floor. It wasn't paved. It was just very well maintained. And when you're flying out there and all you're seeing is a sea of green

and then out pops this little strip of white out of nowhere. And you were to land a Learjet on it. That's where they're landing this little fucking jet right on this thing. It was designed made perfectly for it. Wow. So we get there and it takes us. to this apartment at the back of the house, and this is, you know, five times bigger than my house at home, you know, the apartment.

So we're hanging out and, um, um, um, the, uh, sounds rather cliche, but we, he had, um, um, uh, VHS. Just come out of the beta max, which were the great big giant bucking ones. Then they went on to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, uh, scarface. We put scarface on them. They held bowls of coke all over the apartment. Really? Yeah.

So we're in there just chilling from the trip, you know, and I got fucking whacked, and I can't eat. Right. Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm doing one of these, you know. So we walked through the guard and we get into this thing, we have dinner and shit, you know, so we're having this party. And there's all these women in the house and there's guys that I met from, you know, that day we were out weighing the shit. And what we were doing was weighing is the boss shows up that afternoon. He comes in the house. He doesn't speak a lick of English.

And he's got this T-shirt on it with a big smiley face. On the front of it says, Have a nice day like this. Oh, really? Yeah. And he walks past me and gets back here. On the back of it, it's the same smiley face with a smoking bullet hole in its head. Like that.

And it says, or else. On the back of it. He's got camo-type fucking army fatigues on with a gun belt on and a holstered pistol and combat boots on. He's got the goofy fucking smiley face t-shirt. the fuck and it said i i couldn't i get to this picture's in my mind of this smiley face and then he walks past me and it's got a

smoking bullet hole and i'm thinking this guy's so bizarre man so he says you know he's talking i was a trip blah blah blah he says you know do you want to see your stuff and i said yeah let's go he says and he's first one out of the door he grabs an ar

and heads for the truck his uh his two boys grab a rs my guy grabs an ar and i'm You know, fuck it. I never handled guns in my life, man. We didn't do guns. Right, you didn't need them. Didn't need them at that level, you know, and I'll get to that too.

So I fucking grabbed one. I go out, we get in the Bronco, and we drive, and we're going to brush and bush and all kind of shit, and we get to truck stops. And as soon as the guy opens the door, smack me in a face with this Colombian weed smell and burlap. That smell I'll never, I'll remember the day I die. It's just a, we said make a clone out of it or something, you know.

But, um, Pull these leathery branches and leaves apart and shit. Like there's this mountain of shit, dude. It looked like an ink and fucking ruin. He's got these bales stacked as high as your ceiling here. What's that about eight, nine feet? And they're probably 20 feet wide in rows of maybe 40, 50 feet long going off into the jungle like this. A bales, already packaged, already ready to go.

And he hands me a bamboo pole about seven foot long with a piece of pipe on the end of it. cut slash like that like a hyperdermic and he's sticking the pieces of bales like this and he's pulling it and we're using his pipe we're testing it we're you know I'm smoking his shit I said well how many of them buckers you got up there and his guy's up there he's kicking them off he's kicking off every one of those you got and I got a spray can in my hand and I'm putting my mark on the on the bales right they're weighing them as I'm going through and picking them and when I picked out you know 20 tons of whatever shit I need. And I got my mark on them and they're all weighed up.

We go to the house to have this party. So that's when we have the Coke and we go and then begin to meet the people in dinner and after dinner party and that's kind of shit. So there's all these people around the house and I'm sitting in a chair. He's sitting in front of me and we're translating back and forth. This guy walks in. I hadn't seen this guy before. Comes up behind the boss.

This is what I call him. I'll never say as a real name. I always called him a boss in the book. and he's like this in his ear. He's up behind it. He's like that. And he gets this real ashen look on his face. And right away, I'm thinking, oh, what the fuck?

And he gets, that's his drink down. He gets up and he's like fast-paced walking out of the room. I put my drink down on fast-paced following his ass out of the room. He goes down the hallway into the kitchen, out the door, out the kitchen door, onto a veranda, down these fucking veranda stares into the backyard. And he bolts off, run. running and I'm on his ass. I mean,

I'm following this fucking guy. What made you want to follow him? Dude, if the guy that owns the fucking place is running out of the house, my ass is going too. Right. So he dives into the bushes. All the floodlights are pointing toward the house. So we get into the jungle behind the lights and you can't see.

I ran about 20 feet past that bucker and like dove like a sprinter off the starting blocks into the bushes and I laid there. And I'm waiting for all hell to break loose, man. And I'm sitting there sweat. and the fucking mosquitoes the size of dragonflies and all of a sudden I I hear this voice out the back door of the house a little Spanish like this then I hear this fucking guy laughing and now I'm thinking what the fuck is going on man I mean you know I'm drenched with sweat I shit all over me and he's yeah I see him now he's in the floodlights he's walking up to the house and he's I'm brushing myself off and by the time I get back to my

chair he's already in his chair with a drink and he's you know wiping the sweat off it I sit down and he looks over at me and he says says to the guy standing next to him and that guy walks over to me and he goes where in the hell did you think you were going to me? Yeah. And that's when I told him what I told you I said you know when the big dog gets up and runs out of the fucking house this is what I told him runs out of the fucking house my ass is going too and he started laughing

he's cracking up fucking laughing right turns out he gets this message that his wife's coming up the mountain oh shit he's got guys all the way up and down he said she left town knowing we were coming she was going to stay with the in-laws well we did business and take the kids and just be out of the way right he's having this fucking party there's horrors everywhere you know and there's all kinds of people in this mansion right out and here he is so he figures if he runs out of there he ain't there he's not responsible for what's going on in the fucking house right Turns out it wasn't even his wife

Oh my god That's what the joke was That's what I was so funny That was my first trip to Columbia was this fucking guy And he just turned out to be He's an okay guy You know, he's just typical Colombian looking hair greased back

You know, lung And you refer to this guy as the boss In your book The boss, he's the boss And is this the same guy you dealt with Every time you went to Columbia Did he ever get popped or did he ever get busted? No, never.

Never. He actually, you know, we, of course, you know, throughout the years, we all lost contact one another. Right. And the shit went down. I didn't want to run into anybody. Right. Even some of the guys that were I grew up with, we kind of, you had to, actually, because when you were in ex-con, you can't hang around with ex-cons. You know, or you finally have some fucking shit.

But, yeah, we, we didn't remain friends, but we were good friends while that was all going on. He actually, if you remember, of course you know the story below. Right. The movie. Well, there's a scene in the movie where George and Diego, Carlos Slater, take their money to Panama and put it in a Panama bank. And he makes the, George makes the comment about, wow, I give you $30 million, and you give me this little book back, you know, and they take off.

So later on, when he wants to get out, Diego starts working on Norman's K in the Bahamas on that island. Right. That island is actually called Norman's K. And it actually does exist. Okay. And it was used exactly for that because Carlos later used it for that. Who Diego was supposed to be in the movie.

Right. So story goes on. George decides get the fuck out of the business and all this kind of shit. He goes back down to Panama to get his money. And the guy says, we should have called. He said, the president of the bank says, you probably should have called because your money has been appropriated by the government of Panama. Two years prior to that, three years prior to that or so, my guy in Columbia told me when I did a job for Norie Egg, I told you this.

I didn't know who it was for. The guy wanted 60,000 pounds, and I'm like, I don't go fuck who. As long as Carlita and Leo bring me the money, I don't meet anybody. Right. I don't need to know anybody but you guys. I give you, you pay me, and this kind of shit. Right, exactly. So they wanted 60,000 pounds.

And at that time, I could do 60,000 pounds, but I had to go to the boat twice because I couldn't get it all in once. I didn't have enough boats to work to go, you know, at that time to get it all in one shot. So I was going to do this very serendipitously with the same boat. So we get 60 pounds. I said, give me a, you know, show me the boat. What's it look like? Give me a schematic.

Let me show you how are you going to load this fucking thing, you know, because if you're going to sit out there all night long, you can't just have the shit laying everywhere, you know, especially if I approach it and leave it. I mean, now you're wide open. So I find,

I find in the drawings of this vessel, in the front of the vessel, the front of the vessel is called the folkshole. And in front of the folks' hole is a maintenance hatch that you get to, and maintenance bilge. Just big enough to put 30,000 pounds of shit in, you know.

But there's a maintenance hatch the maintenance closet you go through to get to the hatch to get down to the bilge room, you know, to check whatever it needs to be checked. And those are all watertight, drawers, doors because they're going to the bills of the boat. Right. Then I said, don't press your bails any bigger than you can get through that hatch. Put 30,000 pounds of it, put half of it down there, shut that hatch. And if you've ever been aboard a boat, a vessel, or any kind of sea-going giant ship,

where they have watertight doors or where they don't have watertight doors, they have a threshold that you have to step over. Right. You step through and into the room. The threshold is usually 14, 16 inches tall. Well, when you close the hatch to the builds down below, it only stuck four inches above the floor. I said, put half the load down there,

shut that hatch. And the maintenance hatch wasn't any bigger than, you know, twice the size of your table here, the room itself. Right. I said, put five inches of concrete in there on that floor and cover that fucking thing up. And they'll never know it's there. and put your brooms and your buckets and your shit and your eggs and throw them all back in there

so when i come the first night you get the first 30,000 pounds in the main is in the main midship hold i'll get that the first night you put that on deck i come and get it when i call you the next night you jackhammer that hole open take that other 30,000 out and get it ready to go and i'll take it then so i get the first 30,000 and we're headed back in we're about two hours into our trip and i get a frantic call from the captain of that boat dude he's talking about send your chase boat back he says the plane looked like the marine patrol or was somebody a coast guard just flew over the boat he said you send you send you a boat back for us and I said you know what fuck you dude I said how do we don't know how do we don't know

they don't know we're out here you know right right that's my getaway I that's you know I paid for that fucker not you right right you know this is the game we play dude is pretty much what I said to him I said you know hey you know this is a game you play right and or not something it would happen, whether it did or it didn't, it's just the way it is. Right. Well, as it turns out, the next day we're unloading, they were sending this shit to Miami, getting ready, you know, keyed up for the next night, turns out that they went out and boarded the vessel. He has the four cents to call back to Panama and saying we're being boarded.

Panamanian registered vessel. So they reported hijacked at sea out of Panama. Okay. When they boarded the vessel, there was residue from the first 30,000 pounds of shit that was in there. Right. From in the main shiphold. Right. So they confiscate the vessel.

They arrest the crew and the captain and shit. And they tow the vessel into here, into the Tampa. Right. They held the boat for four months for evidence. They couldn't keep the vessel because it was a Panamanian registry and it was a stolen. It was a hijacked vessel. Right. Well, because of it.

of all the residue and shit that was in the first hold of the boat. They never knew the other 30,000 pounds was still in there. Under the concrete. Under the concrete. They deported the boat back to Panama, Noriega put another crew on us. No fucking way, man. That's so crazy. Oh man, it was just like, you know, and at that time, it didn't seem like anything to me. It just seemed like, wow,

what a stroke of luck that was? And that's when Jorge George shows back up with this handwritten note from Norris. to me in Spanish and all it said was it says I said holy shit my friend how in the fuck did you do that that's all it said you know and I wish I'd have kept that thing man because it's you know be worth of oh my God could you imagine and ironically enough then when I was busted in 87 or 88 88 it was this was they were just coming to the end of operation um what the How was it? It'll come to me.

But when they got Noriega, they captured Noriega, and they brought him to the United States. They put him in Miami MCC, Metropolitan Correctional. That's where I was. Oh, really? They put him in the same fucking place I was. But we never knew one another, but they put him in the SEG, you know, where you're segregated?

Segregation. Okay. And it's a whole different yard that you can get into. and so like that, but we could see each other through the fences. You knew what he looked like? Oh, yeah. Who didn't know what Noriega looked like, man? It's a pock-marked face and shit.

Just a short fucking guy. It's a piece of shit. You know, really, nobody I ever wanted to deal with. But I didn't have to deal with him directly. Right. I'll take his goddamn money for sure. Oh, for sure, yeah. But, yeah, that was kind of ironic.

We wound up the same place together at that time. But he wound up doing, he finished his time here in America about five years ago, and he was extradited to France. where he'll probably die in prison in France. Oh, he's in prison right now in France. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah. But that's my little run in with that too. Wow. Fucking crazy, crazy shit. How does it make you feel nowadays seeing the shit that's going on, especially in like in our country and in Florida with like the where they're regulating the pop business? And I think there was like some company, I just read the other day that some company, this happened like in March or something, but a company called Troultie.

crew leave bought another company for like two and a half billion dollars. Harvest, a company called Harvest was purchased for $2 billion for Florida dispensaries. Fucking crazy shit. I'm kind of thinking I should get some fucking credit back or some shit, you know. But I didn't do too bad. You know, I mean, you read the book, the book really, really tells, you know, the whole tale from A to Z. And when they change the federal sentencing guidelines to those absurd mandatory minimums, that means that meant none of us were getting out of prison.

Right. I mean, well, you only mean, what did you actually get charged with? You mean time-wise? Yeah, like initially. 160 years mandatory to life. 160. Oh. And 16 million dollars in fines because there's a $1 million fine.

Yeah, look at that. 2.1 billion blockbuster deal with Arizona's biggest marijuana company. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, they bought, I think it was truly, yeah, Florida. So True leave, the largest marijuana company in Florida bought Harvest, the largest marijuana company in Arizona for $2.1 billion. Probably pay it off in the first year. You know, at the prices that they're selling the shit for, dude,

I got a medical card, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to go spend, you know, $60 on it. Oh, it's so over, so over price. it's insane you know it's really insane and it in it in it it it's it's worse for the patients you know because I know what it costs to grow this shit so does anybody else that grows it they know what it costs very little you know up front costs yeah because you're doing hydroponics you're doing lighting you're doing all this all this new type shit yeah you know that's going on it's an expensive to start up and you very rarely within the first five years or so see any red you know It's just that way.

But at the prices that they're selling the shit at, man, you'd think it would be, I mean... It's insane, man. It is. It's just stupid. Well, these are not putting people in jail, though, you know? At least they're not fucking locking people up for 10 years for selling a dime bag. Right.

You know, and that's another thing, too, when I was speaking about the mandatory minimums, when they arrested us in our crew, I was one of the first 38 to go. I don't know if you have that picture or not of that front page, but... Yeah, we have it. What wound up happening is after that first, you know, they said it had 150 tons, over 150 tons. After the first two, three weeks, what they realized was that that almost nearly 400,000 pounds was only about a week's work. That's when they knew it kind of a can of fish they opened up. Then when they started affecting these arrests, the first 38 went and then it so on and so on.

And it happened, by way, and you asked this earlier, by way of a guy that was part of the crew, had been part of the crew for raised and born and raised there, was doing some crazy cocaine shit in Columbia and got himself busted and put in prison. Well, the U.S. government found out that he was in prison down there and who he was, where he lived and all this kind of crap, and he was associated with us.

They went down there and offered him a deal, said, look, we'll get you out of here if you can do this for us. We need, you know, this is what we need. Well, they got him out and brought him back, put him right back into our group. We never knew he was gone. We never knew he was in Columbia, never knew he was, you know, had any problems or anything like that. He just, all of a sudden, you know, he was gone.

Now he's there. Hired him as a chaseboat driver. Oh, no. For a job that I put together with 57,000 pounds because I was splitting the load between two places, Pine Island and Everglades City. And he was the chaseboat driver on the Pine Island side of it. So they knew about it right from the, right from the get-gued. Now, what happens is the bust goes down.

Nobody gets caught. It was in the paper, actually, back then, they called it the Pine Island dump. Because there was weed everywhere, man. Then everybody took off, like flies, gone. So this guy who they caught, I'm not going to say any names. The guy that they caught, you know, starts telling some of the younger crew you know these guys dude it's over they got you man they

get you they know your name they know who you are blah blah blah they've changed everything around now it's a mandatory 40 years brother you're gone at least 40 years no doubt about it and there's no parole none you do 85% of your time and when you tell a 19 20 year old kid that he's going to tell on these fucking grandma. Oh, yeah. You know? Oh, yeah. So it started out with just a couple of them, you know,

a couple of the younger guys that they knew they could roll. And then that's when the shit started to happen. You know, people started becoming visible because names were being said. And it began a domino effect. But along with that domino effect, and this is an interesting part about it. Now, this was given to me information given to me by the supervisor for United States Homeland Security here in South West Florida. and the Supervisors for United States Customs at the time told me that they understood that,

you know, while they're affecting these arrests, that they're only arresting kids. All the adults have already been arrested, man, there's nothing but kids left. So giving a mandatory life sentence and all these ridiculous million-dollar fines to a bunch of kids just didn't really kind of sit good with them, didn't sit with them. So what they did was by design rather than by accident, they incorporated within these plea agreements to the people that they're catching, these kids that they're catching you say, look, you tell us everything you know, everybody you know, everything that you've done,

we'll give you immunity from prosecution from everything that you've done except for one count. We'll hold one count back so we can, you know, we've got to give you something. Yeah. You know, and at that point, depending on their cooperation, how substantial or whatever it may be, would determine whether you get going home, you get in parole, you're getting two years, you're getting a year, what are you going to get?

Now they can sentence you if you cooperate. Guidelines state they can now sentence you below the mandatory minimums. That's the only way you're dodging a life sentence is if you cooperate. So what happened was by the language of that cooperation plea agreement was by giving them immunity,

Jimmy can tell on you, Freddie can tell on you. Your name's already been spoken. You got immunity. You can't be hurt. They get immunity. They get immunity. Everybody's telling and running and saying names,

but they all have immunity so they can't hurt one another. And it was an amazing thing about how they did it. And it didn't matter that at the time that, you know, a lot of the guys are saying a lot of the same names. All that told the government was they're getting all the right people. But putting kids away for life, for hauling pot, when just the year before their fathers and uncles and grandpas and cousins and shit are doing eight, 10, 12 months and getting home and you're going to get a life sentence for it,

didn't really set easy for them. But what it did manage to do was... The government was able to find its conscience. Well, yeah, I mean, it was unprecedented, you know, in the fact that, you know, if it hadn't have been, you know, us kids, You know, if it had to been a bunch of guys toting guns and shooting. That was another thing, too. None of us carried guns.

Right. Fuck, man, we could run around with cutoffs and bare feet. Right. You know, that was the clothing you wore. That was the island garb, man. You know, you worked on the boat. You go out crab fishing. You got on a pair of slickers and a pair of boots, fishing boots.

And under that, you got a pair of cutoffs on. So what they weren't willing to do at that time when they pronounced these significant sentences, these guidelines was put away kids for the rest of their lives. So what they did was they offered them this agreement. And within the agreement was that clause, was that escape valve, which allowed everybody to say, look, dude, they said your name, John. Dude, you're going to prison. But if you cooperate with them, tell them me, tell them my name.

Give them Jimmy's name. Give them Fred's, give him Paul's name. Tell on them. Cooperate with them. And you can't hurt them. They already got immunity. Right. See?

so it worked out great and it comes to a guy like me fuckers they want to know who I'm seeing in Miami all the time who I'm flying where am I flying out of the country to two three times a month and we know we got pictures of the plane

you get on and you get off you know they had everything man and I said well you know what guys I said this is something that you're going to have to figure out on your own I said because why start that shit I'm opening up a can of worms that just can't put the lid back on even though throughout all the years that this was done.

It was, you know, our fathers and uncles and grandpas and people like that and us kids, not a single shot was ever fired. Not a gun was ever seen. I never saw a fucking gun. That's fine. That's crazy, man. And there's a really very simple reason for that. It's because of the sheer volume of money that's being made.

Right. And the amount of money being put forth to make that. It was very insignificant to make, you know. But what made the cocaine? aspect of it in Miami. Why was there so much death? There was like an untold amount of death in Miami. Because it was very easy to bring into the country because of, you know, if you bring a 10,000 pounds of cocaine in the country, you can do it relatively easy. 10,000 pounds of fucking weed and fill this room. Right. You know, that and the fact that there's more money involved in it. A lot more money. Because you can take that pure cocaine and you can chop it down to make, make one kilo into four.

but by the time that kilo gets to the United States it's worth at that time I think kilos were about 30 grand now they're somewhere around 65 grand but you can turn that 65 that 30,000 dollars into you know almost a million if you're a dealer you know so that's the reason for the big deal of the cocaine then the crack came along right you know so now you're making more money off the cocaine by selling the crack rocks right you know and that kind of thing I really don't know how the chemistry works sure how the math works on all of that, but I just know that, you know, it's, it's a, something that we never agreed with, really. I mean, we all had our share of Coke and we do it, you know, until we got sick of doing it,

but wanting to get into doing that now. And people ask me, well. Do you get the nature of the drug, the nature of the cocaine, the people that you're selling the cocaine to? Like, it's, it's that stigma. It's that whole crowd. It's that people you're selling it to. You know, at that time, it was considered, you know, for the rich, the wealthy, the fabulous,

you know, this. Right. Well, then Miami became a wash in it. And now grams are going, when grams were going for $120 bucks, now they're going for $50, you know. Or you get an eight ball for $100 or some shit like that. Right. Now everybody's doing it. Yeah. And everybody's making money and everybody wants to make money.

So everybody wants to be that cocaine cowboy man. Everybody wants to be the man. And you start killing them. You're killing your competition. That's what started the war. In 1979 or 1980, somewhere between there, Time magazine wrote an article about Miami, and they called it Paradise Lost. I remember that.

It was across the front of the magazine, Paradise Lost, and that's because Miami was being run by the cartel, literally. And they called on the United States government to come down and help because they couldn't handle it. Right. Now you got cops running around with 38s, and they're being. being, you know, shot at with automatic weapons, you know, AK-47s, you know, military-style weaponry. Right.

The first hint of this was the Dade Land Massacre. There it is. Yeah, there it is, exactly. Wow, man. The legendary Times cover. Yep. And what led, and what brought that on was that, that fight, what turned it into a fight with the United States government rather than the state government was that, they call it.

at the Dayland Massacre. These guys, these cooking cowboys, Cubans went in there to ABC liquor store to kill two guys. Two guys. They killed everybody in the store. Plus, they shot anybody that was walking around in the parking lot, too.

And then left. That set the pace. That was a whole new ballgame. Now the cops are outgunned. You're going to go up against, you're going to go up against an AK with a 38? I don't fucking think so. So they had to rethink.

their whole strategy. They had to bring the United States government in. That's when the whole shit went down. So that's when they said, look, we got this under control. Now let's see what's going on over here. So that's when they started knocking on our door, you know, although we weren't violent in any stretch of the imagination. We weren't violent. And there's no way that that crap that was taking place in Miami could have ever found its way to Everglade City and that being taken over because it's a little fishing village. It's been there since the early 1800s. Right. It's family-oriented.

It's 10,000 islands. You don't know shit, dude, unless you're raised there. I can lose you in 30 seconds. And you'll be one island away from town and not know it. And you probably die there. You know, it's just the way it is. So you don't come in and take an area over like that. You take advantage and make use of the people in the infrastructure that's already there.

That's why nobody fucked with us. Right. Nobody wanted it because they couldn't. We had the vessels. We had the know-how. We had the ability. We had the, you know, the wherewithal. So that's how it managed to go for as long as it did.

It's incredible. And how you were so close, you were just a hop-a-skipping a jump away from that metropolitan hellhole called Miami. Yeah. And, you know, there was so much going on. It was so much killing and so much of that going on that, you know, it gave law enforcement a bad taste in their mouth, regardless of which product you were messing with. They came in and Everglades City with shut. guns and rifles and you know i mean the guys are you know the captains run around yelling make

sure your rifles are loaded make sure your shotguns have got plenty of ammo you know like what the fuck yeah are you raiding a village in nom or something right oh fuck me man most of the guys that the second time around there's just we're just older guys you know and a lot of them didn't even smoke weed right they just did it because they were supplementing an income that the government tried to fuck them out of. So they sat on the front porch, smoked cigarettes, just wait for the show to start. Nothing they could do about it.

Oh, my. Incredible, man. Fucking fascinating. Yeah, so there was talking about this guy, Ron, my buddy from the CIA, he was involved with, we had done a job one day, or one night actually.

We were pretty ballsy sometimes. and we brought this boat right into town, right into Everglades City, loaded with bales below deck. You can only get so many pounds. You know, it could probably get maybe, depending on the size of the boat, maybe 15,000 pounds of bails, stuff just right under the boat.

We bring it right into town and park it and go away from it till dark and then come back. Well, somehow somebody walked past there, tourists or somebody who's looking at the boats and shit, and they smell the fucking weed, and they call the cops and they bust the boat. here comes the DEA and you know the sheriff's department and everybody in there and my buddy Ron when he's showing me those pictures of my money and the MBA and my MBA guys like this

he's got a picture of himself and and his other buddy Ron in the bilge of our boat the boat was called risky business the crab boat and they got pictures of them down below you know amongst the bales you know you know big deal and they got them lined up perfect name for your boat They got them lined up on the dock. The bales are stacking up. They got pictures of them like this. And so long story short, the boat gets confiscated, obviously, and they tow it out of there. Well, these boats, when they're taken, you know, like this, they go up for government auction.

Anybody can go bid on these boats. So what do our guys do? Go to the government auction and bid on their own boat and buy it back. Wow. They go, I shit you not. That boat should be in the museum. They put it in... Check this out, though.

They get to the auction. They don't care what the costs, you know? Right. Outbid everybody in the fucking, they got money to spare. Right. So they get the boat. They bring it back.

They re-register it. It changed the name to Still Kicking. This is like a big, fuck you. That's awesome. Yeah. That's fucking awesome. So you ended up doing four years. Yeah.

Four years total. Did they get all your cash? That picture? They put it back in the safe. Yeah, no, no, no. That wound up going to... The government took all your money. Well, the lawyer took a lot of it.

Yeah. In cash. The attorney I hired here in town, it was too high profile of a case for him. Right. So he was kind of freaking out a little bit. That's funny. Usually attorneys like the high profile. Yeah, well, this wasn't your typical fucking dime bag salesman.

He says my father-in-law is a pretty high-priced criminal attorney out of Baltimore. He said, let me give him a call. He cost me $750,000. Oh. Just to start off with, you know, but he did wonders. He, you know, he was worth every dime. Wow, man. What it wound up being was, excuse me, the, I'm sitting here at my attorney's office,

and he's, when I sit down, he slides what's called discreet. I'm familiar with this. This is all the evidence that the prosecuting attorney has against you. They can't hold anything back. They have to give you all of it. No surprises. And that fucking thing is this deep with paper. Wow.

Everybody that said my name that knew me as who I was. Wow. Because a lot of people don't know. I mean, there's hundreds of people. I mean, five crews. There was an Everglades City crew. There was a Goodland crew, Marco Island crew, a Naples crew, a Naples crew, and a an island crew.

We're talking anywhere from 7 to 100 guys on each crew. There's no way that maybe just a handful of know who the boss is. Like I told you earlier, nobody gives a shit. Right, right. But ultimately it comes to light that, yeah, you know, I'm the guy that's doing the shit and I'm setting the deals up. Actually, I was set up one day and didn't realize this until after I had gotten busted. I was sitting in a bar in a club down in Naples.

owned by the ex-shareff's son. And I was having a conversation with a guy about unloading his shrimp boat, you know, talking money and deals and when, and then, and we, you know, walked away from that. And nothing really came of it, which usually happens. And I get busted that day. That day I get busted. They got hauled into Fort Myers.

I'm in the federal building. And I'm talking to the guy, and this guy looks over at me and goes, get big white, fuzzy beard and he's got white hair. And he says, hey, Timmy. Remember me? and I'm looking at him like this and he's a little bit older and I just do this at him like this

and I said oh man you're that fucker had a drink what's in the bar that day aren't you he said that's me I was setting up and I was set up by that guy who owned the bar doing a deal for this but they never busted me for that because there was nothing

you know to come of it but ultimately when they did figure out you know who I was that's when they wanted to know who's in Miami and who's in South America and all this like this and I said look you just might just shoot me shoot you and your whole family shoot everybody I know my family and all this kind of shit because you know even though there was no violence involved ever in anything that that we did you pop the cork on one of these

fucking guys and they're going to do exactly what they're very good at and that's shutting you the fuck up so I couldn't tell them anything I couldn't tell them anything about that I'd take my lumps you know but my saving grace came when everybody else was getting this deal I mean we're talking about hundreds of guys. I had, you know, there were kids 19, 20 years old, you know, bail handling and shit. My saving grace came

after, you know, like about seven, eight months of sitting in Fort Myers County Jail. Two United States Treasury officers came to visit me, a man and woman, two identical brown vested suits, and they pulled out their little gold badges, slapped them against the window.

They had me all chained up inside this room with a, you know, Burger King thing, that you're talking to. And I said, you know, right out loud, I said, you know what? I said, if this is about cooperation, I said, you just open that door up and, you know, send me home or send me back to myself because it ain't happening. Susan Daltuva, who was the United States prosecutor, who was prosecuting me at that time, she was in the next room, she heard me say that.

She comes running into the room. She goes, no, to me, she says, you know, cooperation isn't really what we're looking for because we know that's not possible for you. She said, but what we would like to know is how you guys were able to do this for nearly a decade and we couldn't catch you. And I said, well, game over. I can tell you that. I'll tell you how stupid you fuckers are, right?

So that's when I started telling them about driving this shit out of town and waving at you probably half the time we're going out of town. And how do you think we got all that stuff to Miami, man? It was like going on like this and you had no clue, you know. and so I start, you know, then these investigators from U.S. Attorney's Office want to come and talk to me. So almost every other day I'm getting shackled and cupped and I'm taken outside the jail. I'm here downtown Fort Myers and I'm doing the convict shuffle with all these chains and shit on into the next building, right? And I start telling them, you know, how stupid they are, how we do this, how we do that, you know, this is no names, but, you know, you figure it out if you can fucking figure it out. Okay.

I had, one of the guys on the crew was Everglades National Park Ranger. He was one of my best friends. He was on my crew. He introduced me to a guy in Miami who was a counter surveillance technology expert. He worked with the government on their surveillance technology. I was getting the same, if not better, technology that the government was getting. I had handheld radar. At that time, they were perfecting starlight scope, night vision from the Vietnam War.

You know, I had three of those. Yeah, all kind of cool shit, man. Wow. I had a little RF detector. It was about half this size. It was about this big. The size of a deck of cards. A little switch on top, a little red light,

and a telescopic antenna that I can unscrew off and put a wire antenna on it. I could take that wire, put that thing in my pocket, run the wire down my pant leg, and I'm walking to the club. If this thing starts to vibrate, somebody's recording, It's picking or sending a signal

Somebody's picking up a radio frequency RF, it's the radio frequency detector So if I feel this thing Vibrating in my pocket I just walk around the club So I find out who's carrying it Really? Yeah

And when I get home at night Then I unscrew the wire Put the telescopic Antenna back on it Pull it out And sweep my house When I get home That's insane

The coolest shit man You know And when we, this is all part of having ramped up our operation once the grownups and us kids took over. Yeah. Now, we're all using the kind of boat that I showed you, the tea craft that was very popular. Another boat that was very popular, shallow drafting boat was made by a couple of brothers, Morgan brothers, made boats in Naples. Oh, yeah. You know the morgues?

You know the morgans? Yeah. I don't know that, but I'm familiar with the boats. Yeah, excellent boat. So we changed all over to those. You know, we got rid of the mullets. gifts you know what those are yep with the little motor in the middle kind of old fashion kind of shit but they were great at the time because that's all there really was

and um the everybody was really fond at that time of the 235 evan roots you know because they were the most dependable and powerful engines at that time as far as torque um so um there were so many tea crafts at that time during the late 70s early 80s um and through the mid-80s, there's so many tea crafts around southwest Florida, people had to start hiding them, kicking them out of sight because, I mean, it takes like 25 or 30 of these to unload a 40-ton job, you know, to get it into shore. And then everybody takes them home and hides them and shit like this.

Right. We had, and I told you about the logistics of the older generation and the problems they have with their mechanics and keeping boats running and shit like this. Well, I had one mechanic, Sammy, one mechanic for all these boats. and when you called him, if you had a problem with one of your 235s, no matter where you were,

every glazed, Goodland, Marco, Naples, wherever, he doesn't come with a truck and a box of wrenches to wrench on your fucking engine. He brings you a new engine. Because it's always been said that if this fucker left me sitting, it's not going to give,

I'm not going to give it a chance to let me fucking sit again. Get it off my fucking boat. Right. Well, people say, you know, people always ask me about, well, we're not breaking in new engines. I mean, I can't put a brand new engine on there and haul loads like that around. Well, duh, of course not. We must have known at that time between all of us, every private charter captain that there was fishing in those days, you know, six-pack charter captains,

we'd give them a 235 Evan Rood. Just give it to them to use. And then Sammy would make note and keep track of all the engines. He's got into all these people. When they run so many hours on him, he takes them out, swaps them out, gives them a new engine, takes that engine, puts it back in a crate. So when we call him, he brings us an already broken in to 235, hangs on a boat. We're good to go.

That's how you sharpen up the fucking, that's how you shape up an operation, man. That's incredible. Not only that. This is funny, fuck. One of the guys on the crew. was the son of one of the sheriff deputies in Everglades City. There's only three. I mean, there's a sheriff and two deputies.

I mean, God, it's like Barney Fife and, you know. So when his dad was on duty, you know, it was like the back door was open, man. He usually worked the night shift, you know. It was just shit was coming, shit was coming, shit was coming. Man, there was one night. I don't know if it was him or whoever it was in the car. I'm unloading it to the Everglades National. Park Ranger Station. It's right there in the middle of town. Lights on in the parking lot and all

kind of shit like that there. This is in early days. This was way back when. And I'm eliminating all the other people out of the play. I'm eliminating everybody except the mothership and the and the two boats that I hired to bring it in. Typically they bring it in and then the little boats grab it, take it to the house, you know the story, blah, blah, blah like that. Well, I cut everybody out of the picture and brought those two boats right to the docks at the Everglades National Ranger Station and loaded that shit in two tractor trailer trucks that were sitting there in the parking lot. Sheriff's car is sitting there. Lights on in the parking lot and the guys in the front seat like this,

two in the morning, sheriff's sleeping. Trucks getting loaded. And I don't tell that very often because, you know, it's... You can't make this shit up, man. No, and there was... I mean, it just gets better. there's a guy, two Marine Patrol guys in Marathon. And in Marathon, they put up a type of a weather balloon.

They call it Fat Boy. And it mounted below it was a radar device. So they'd crank this thing out there on a cable, I don't know, four, five, six hundred feet, thousand feet in the air. This was a, you know, a good size, looked like a blimp, a good year blimp, but it was downscaled. Well, they could watch through radar, the traffic lanes coming through the, the Yucatan Pass, we call it the gap.

There's the the, um, the, um, there's the, uh, western coast of, uh, Cuba and the eastern coast of the Yucatan. And that's where we had to come through to get to southwest Florida. Well, they have this goddamn rayer up there that's watching.

And they turn it on every night. And they put a VHS tape and have it running through recording. So they don't have to monitor it. Just in case, and they, they file it away. In case anything else comes under, suspect, they can go back and review, you know, whatever. So, being that there's two guys down there in Marathon,

we always went in when we were, when we were, um, lobster fishing, we'd always stop and spend the night at a hotel and a really nice resort called the Buccaneer. So, um, one of the guys was single. The other guy was married, had kids and just like that because we had guys following them. I had a couple of guys that lived in Marathon, watched these guys. Well, the one guy that was single, uh, really liked having dinner at the Buccaneer, you know, because it was a cool place to hang out in a bar and a grill and that kind of thing, and it was on the water and stuff. So it took one of my dumb ass bodies down there.

I mean, this guy was, you know, had about as much education as you can get out of number two pencil that's about this big, you know. So I said, look, what you need to do is go in there and I had a bag of money. I had 100 grand. I said, go in there, sit down next to the guy, put the bag down on the floor next to you and have to strike up a conversation. And it's a real simple, dude he's either going to grab you try to grab you and in that case and you run your fucking ass off grab the bag but run your ass off or he's just going to sit there and listen to you talk so sammy takes the bag and he goes in the guy sitting at the bar and we can see through the window we're in the car and we're watching in there and he's in there 10 minutes 15 minutes I'm thinking

what the fuck is he asking this guy for a date or what and he gets up and he walks out gets in the car and we drive off. Had he, I said, had he tried to grab you, dive in the window and we're down the road, we're in that teacraft of ours, and we're halfway across Florida Bay before he gets his car started. But it turns out he just sat there, kept the money. What we did was, asked him to turn that VCR off.

Don't turn the radar off. Let's turn the VCR off at a certain day, at a certain time, for so many hours as our boat's coming through the Yucatan. because when you're coming through the Yucatan and you change from one shipping lane to another, there's shipping lane that goes to Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa for bigger vessels. If anything strays out of those shipping lanes, they become suspect, and, you know, they may get looked at, they may not get looked at, you know, it depends. So we have him turn it off for so many hours that time so he can get out of the shipping lanes

and into the crabbing lane where all the crabbers are or the shrimp boats are. It's simple as that. But if you think about it, you know, in those days, if you offer a cop or you offer a Marine Patrol or any one of these guys, you know, Park Ranger, 10 times their annual salary just to go over there for two hours and go to sleep. And what the fuck do you think they're going to do? Right. They're going to go take a nap for Christ's sake. Right. Give a fuck what you're doing.

In those days, it was just that easy. That's amazing, man. That's fucking amazing. Well, dude, we just did like two and a half hours. Sweet. I appreciate you. We just got started, man. I know.

We got to do a part two of this, man. Yeah, when I get my tooth vect that the mangroves knocked out the other day. Jesus. Where can people go buy your book? Check it out on Amazon. They're selling an Amazon, Saltwater Cowboy, Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire. I've seen people reselling my book. for as much as $150

bucks on Amazon. Really? Yeah. Can you believe that shit? That's wild. Why? How? I don't know.

Are there limited supply? Well, Amazon buys them. And they're gone. Okay. And what's take, I believe what's happening is they're pushing the, I'm also on Kindle and a Nook. Okay.

I also have an audible version. Oh, good. Did you read it or did someone read it? No, no. I put my hat in the ring. Yeah. During pre-production. Uh-huh.

But it was too late during pre-production because I was having a contract dispute between not so much a dispute, but rather a change in my contract where St. Martin's Press, who I contracted as my publisher, had written Amazon and Audible into their contract. So they would have gained any resulting residual from those, and I would have not seen it. So I scratched that shit out of there. And the minute I did that and turned my contract back in, I get a call, my agent gets a call from Audible saying, we'd like to advance you and roll to you separately. So I got a deal with Audible.

Oh, cool. And I got a deal for the nook and the kindle, you know, the ebook versions of it. But those are my most lucrative deals because there's no, there's literally no work to be done other than push a button and a download where you got to print a book. You got to package it. You got to send it off and all this kind of shit. There's a lot of money. Downloads much cleaner. Downloads much cleaner and more profitable because I can make up for every 5,000 units,

sold of my audible book or my Kindle or Nook books my percentage of profit increases up to

I think 42% of the cost of the book Oh wow Which is I mean That's very lucrative That's amazing But what's the book called? Saltwater Cowboy

Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire And my picture on the front Very cool ladies This is looking I got a picture I like you see it We have it don't we

You sent it Yeah we got it Put it up on there There we go. There she is. Saltwater Cowboy. There I am. Look at you, Tim. You know, there's a very cool review. Only two reviews on the back of the book.

One of them was done by Kirkus. Kirkus is notorious for bashing authors, let alone new authors. But they somehow managed to give me a somewhat glowing review on the back of my book, which I was pretty impressed with. You have an incredible story. And the author of the book Below, who wrote the guy, Bruce Porter, wrote George Young's story actually is a St. Martin's Press author as well. So when he found out about the book, he was freaking, man, and wanted to get an advanced copy

of it to read it. And he left, he said, dude, I got to give this guy a review. He said, let me offer a review for the back of the book. And let me see if I can find it here real quick. Oh, shit. Why don't they just do this? Is it on the back of the book? Yeah. Oh, perfect.

Oh, yeah. The book. Where am I? There she is. Which one am I? You're here. Hold it close to your face so I can see it. There you go.

Just like that. Saltwater Cowboy, Rides, Ball, All right. Okay, now, these are my two reviews. Right here. This is a Kirkus review, and this is Bruce Porter's. Talking to the mic so we can hear you. This is Bruce Porter's review here, and it's, says, a wild and entertaining true story by one of the biggest pot haulers in American history.

Speedboat chases, women, Colombian mansions to McBride's Tale of Excess is a thrill to read. Go buy that book, everybody. Buy it right now. Get thrilled. I'll link it below, too. Link it in the description for everyone to see it. You know, and I brought something else. It's real quick. I want to show you there.

I have a website, too. It's www. www. www.orgital saltwater cowboy.com. and there's a media section in there that has a lot of the media that I've done in there and stuff like that. But this is the Life magazine I alluded to earlier. When Operation Everglades 2 came to Everglades in 1984, one of the reporting crews, I said there was so many reporters down there that there were more reporters and cops than there were people being arrested. Life magazine was one of them.

they offered up a rather awesome centerfold picture. Oh, the infamous. Of the trouble in Everglades. And the subtitle says, a southwest Florida town tarred with drug smuggling and most of its 600 residents say, So what? 18 pages of artical article.

They put in this. magazine which was pretty outstanding and pretty unprecedented it had made national news all over the country it was a big deal at that time and i felt it was necessary to write this book and tell the story about how it actually happened without any embellishment without any bullshit regardless of whatever the haters want to throw at me that's cool man i've had it all um if you're going to understand uh marijuana particularly in this day and age when it's becoming legalized or quasi legalized through medical use and what have you. I think that it's important that people understand the true history

and judge their first use of this medication, as we call it now, cannabis for the first time, not by what they see happening and taking place down the Mexican border, the violence and the mayhem and the death and destruction over cannabis and, you know, all the drugs coming across our border. I don't, particularly the cannabis. I don't want people going into their first experience with cannabis with that in their mind. What they should be thinking about is how it originally took place with my generation and a generation before us. I want you to go into trying cannabis for the first time thinking about that ultra cool rost to do,

standing out in the middle of 200 acres of virgin bud, just, you know, enjoying and digging life, smoking on a stuff. slip or that little Colombian dude and all his white cotton and his white hat just out there picking and having a good time and just enjoying life like that. No guns, no does and know that. That's the version they should hear. The version they should hear that involves no gunplay, no violence whatsoever, just family-oriented, of course, breaking the law. You know, I'm not advocating, you know, breaking the law or smuggling in any way, in shape or form. It's just what I grew up into. You know, It's just my unfortunate or fortunate circumstance, if you will. But people need to understand that it was not violent.

It was never that violent. And the reason being real quickly is because if I can spend $300,000 and buy $15 million where they shit, who's shooting at me? Nobody's shooting at me. They're giving me more money. They can't get, go back. You can't get me going back there fast enough. So that's how it all took place.

So you can find a lot of that on www. www.orgital saltwater cowboy.com. You can look at some of my posts that I post on Instagram at Original Saltwater Cowboy. And I got to follow you. That's it. Awesome. That ain't it.

You got to have me back and we'll talk another three. We're definitely going to do another one. Hell yeah, man. That's great. Yeah, I'm going to follow you right now. There's this some very interesting character. involved in this. And keep in mind that we're not,

we're never violent, dude. I mean, we're kids, man. And I think that has a lot to do with the reason why the United States government chose to do what they did. Yeah. And, you know, in retrospect, now I'm 63. I look back on some of the craziness I did. And like I said, I could have cut a cigar with my ass all over this.

But, you know, knowing that we did it in such a way that I, I'm not ashamed of it, you know. Broke the law. Yeah, I'm a fucking pot-holler, but I never killed anybody. you know yeah um not to say that that didn't happen it didn't it went on for sure i mean there were assholes out there that just didn't give us yet you know i mean bad dudes but i don't want that to to overshadow you know the majority of the shit that was coming to the country and and the people that were bringing it right families you know so let's leave it at that well thank you so much tim it's been uh an invigorating two and a half hours so you got a ton of stories

went by like that dude oh it really did it really did i'm super grateful for you coming on and uh thanks for having me we'll do it again in the future for sure yeah i'm just down the road bro only two hours right yeah well that's somebody doesn't get ass ended on the bridge again as long as you don't get ass in it on the skyway fuck ass ended on the skyway might as well bring a fucking lunch with you all right goodbye everybody goodbye everybody thanks for listening