Danny Jones Podcast - #98 - The Highest Paid Drug Pilot in History | Roger Reaves

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Roger Reaves is a former pilot and drug smuggler who employed Barry Seal & ended up in prison for 33 years in 26 different prisons, in 7 different countries spanning 4 continents.  His friends and associates spanned the globe. From Medellin Cartel kingpins Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar; to "Mr Nice" Howard Marks and the infamous Barry Seal who was Rogers close friend and employee. In his early 30’s he was making over $1 million a day flying back and forth to Colombia and he eventually hired Barry Seal, and Roger gives vivid details to their relationship up to the very end of Barry’s life.  Roger escaped from prison on five separate occasions; was shot down in both Mexico and Colombia; and tortured almost to death in a Mexican prison. Get Roger's book here: https://amzn.to/35SXgga Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, world. Today my guest is Roger Reeves. Roger is a former pilot and international drug smuggler who ended up in prison for 33 years in 26 different prisons in seven different countries spanning four continents. His friends and associates spanned the globe from the Medellin Cartel Kingpins, Georgia Choa and Pablo Escobar to Mr. Nice, Howard Marks, and the infamous Barry Seal, who was Roger's close friend and employee. In his early 30s, Roger was making over a million dollars a day

flying back and forth from Columbia, and he eventually hired Barry Seal, and on the podcast, Roger gives vivid details to their relationship up to the very end of Barry's life. Roger escaped from prison on five separate occasions, was shot down in both Mexico and Colombia, and tortured almost to death in a Mexican prison. It is with great honor I introduced to you,

The Gripping Tale of Roger Reeves. All right, good morning, Roger. And good morning to you, Danny. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you traveling all the way from the West Coast. It's my pleasure. So, to open this up, you served 33 years in prison, 26 different countries? No, 26 different prisons.

Oh, okay. Seven countries on four continents. 33 years, 26 prisons, seven countries on four continents. That's right. Wow. How did all of this happen? How did you end up here?

Why don't you give people who aren't familiar with who you are? Give people sort of a brief summary of your story and who you are. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord. paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch, solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. All right, I was born down to St. Augustine, Florida,

in 1943 during the war. My folks went to... down there in the war to work and I was born there and then after the war moved back to Georgia on a three-moo farm tobacco and cotton hard work and I stayed on that farm for 25 years my daddy died when I was young he was an alcoholic and seven little brothers and sisters just like doorsteps and I went to work at 14 years old in the grocery store paying the lunch money. It started all $3 a day and the lunch money was $3 a day and I got her raised the next year and it was $4 a day. So I never did have a quarter left over. So I think it kind of made me appreciate some money. So I got out of school and finished school and went up to Canada.

I'd work in tobacco. Since we had a tobacco farm around Ontario, Canada, they had a lot of tobacco and the Belgians are growing it. And I went up there and I was working tobacco for $20 a day and I went to a carnival and I rasseled a bear in a carnival for a $500 reward that I didn't get and the bear beat me up. So I went to the beach the next day and there's a pretty girl on the towel and I talked to her and that's Mari. It's been 60 years ago. And that's your wife now. That's my wife. Yes. How old were you in your matter? 18. 18 years old, wow, that's incredible.

So we got married a couple of years later. And so we have three children. And I got a job on the real road. And I started making whiskey and I borrowed money. And finally she and I wound up with 36,000 chickens laying eggs. And the price of the feed kept going up and eggs kept going down until I had to do something. So I started making moonshine whiskey. And I made a thousand guys.

a week and I had four big vats, 1,800 gallons each and those things blew up. I thought the Reverend Dures had us and anyhow I had quite a quite a run with them shooting at me into bloodhounds and getting away from that and we decided we might ought to leave. We're kind of ashamed to go to church and people pointed to fingers at us and the great but the Grand Jury didn't indict me they voted 1212 so we moved out to California where I went to work in construction and I was painting and working in concrete and framing and any other thing that had hard work to it and then I got on the fire department in Redondo Beach and I drove the back of a hundred and eight foot hoot and ladder

truck and for several years and then we went up to Alaska we went fishing had a salmon trawler up there and then we came back and went back to work on the fire department I just took a year's leave of absence and I was hauling antiques. I met a fellow, and I was buying antiques around Los Angeles, like one of the first pickers. I had my truck, I'd go and get them

and take them to antique grow and sell them. Every day I'd make me $100, $200, and so this fellow says, why don't you go to Missouri? There's more antiques there than you can see. I said, why is that? He said, well, back in the settlers, in the 1800s, they would come on the train

to the Mississippi. River and they take the ferry boat across and take all their pianas and the big sideboards and the tables and they couldn't get them in those studebaker wagons I didn't realize it the covered wagons was mostly studebakers scootabakers scooted this thing up a little bit closer to you all right so we loaded up hauling started hauling the antiques out of Missouri back to California and putting them in auction and I was reading a National Geographic book he's talking about mercury and uh makes

was worth it was worth 13 times more in the United States. And I said, I should go get me a load of that stuff. Mercury. Mercury. Just an article in National Geographic, just something to talk about. We bumped along 45 miles an hour with a load of antiques. So he says, oh, that stuff is so heavy. It knocked a hole in the bottom of your airplane.

I had a little Cessna 1-82 by that time. Oh, you already had an airplane? I had an airplane, yes. At what point did you just, at what point did you decide? you wanted to learn how to fly me a pilot oh when i was young i read the book jungle pilot and he's a man nate saint started missionary aviation fellowship and i read that book in my heart burned oh i would just love to do that and he started missionary aviation fellowship and so it spread all over the world these men flying missionaries in and out sick people in and out of the jungle

they fly medicine and he would he would just drop it with a cord in a bucket to them until they could cut up a little script for him and I thought boy that would like to do that I'm not made to be a preacher but I could do something good like that yeah so that was my idea to learn to fly so I learned to fly at Douglas Georgia really yes how long did it take you to learn to get your license and everything oh I flew a long time before I got my license I'm not one of them stickers for it but it took about eight hours before the instructor stepped out I bought a Cessna 152 and I flew that thing all the way to normal Alaska before I got my license wow and And I had an air experience up there chasing wolves.

Chasing what? Wolves. Really? I was taking a little instomatic camera, taking pictures of wolves, and I just got right down real slow and low, and that thing stalled on me, right above the wolves, and just almost turned upside down, right across the tundra. I think that's just one of my lives got used up. Oh, my God. So anyway, that's why I learned to fly, and that's when I went to flying, and so I just kept getting a little bit bigger planes until. I got a Cessna 1.82.

Did you ever think that you could make money being like a private pilot or anything? No, I just did it. I was working on the fire department. I had a little extra money. I had a painting crew and buying and still in antiques. And so I was into chips. I bought me a little airplane. And I think paid $7,500 for 182.

Those things are 300,000 now. I'm thinking you want to buy. How much did you pay? I paid $7,500 for a Cessna. $182. Cessna 182. Yes. And now they're over 300,000 if you want to buy new.

And, of course, mine was used at that price, but they still weren't much. So he says, I want you hold marijuana. That's the hottest thing. I don't know anything about it. I've heard the kid smoking it. I said, what would he pay? And he said, I think they would pay $10,000 for a trip down there. I said, I'm all for it.

I said, what would they do if he catch? He said, nothing. Probation. He said, that thing's almost legal out here in California. So he introduced me to a fellow, said, you got an airplane, you'd fly down there. I said, yeah, I'm going down there fishing all the time anyway. They don't ever bother me. Where were you going fishing?

In Mexico. Were you really? Yeah, I'd fly down there on some of my days off, Murray and I take the children down there, the baby. And so we just had a nice, nice life there. We went far from Mexico and went southern California. Right. So I went down in Dillode. Man, I come back, and give me $10,000 on a...

paper bag, that was two years pay on the fire department, take home. And I shook it on the bed, and Mari put her hand up over her mouth. It's, oh my, I don't believe it. And the baby grabbed $100 bills and crawling around, and we just laughed. We didn't owe any money. We didn't do nothing. So we went out to dinner and then put it in a lockbox. So what was that like the first time you actually flew down to Mexico to pick up marijuana?

I mean, it was just picturesque. It really was. I mean, what kind of people did you meet with? And was it what you expected? Was it shady at all? Not at all. I went to a place called Halapa Veracruz. It's the capital of the state of Veracruz.

It's up in the mountains. And it was like Bible times. The people had like stone basins in the street. And they were scrubbing the clothes of women were. And I went to church, a Catholic church, and I walked around. And there was the stations of the cross. I'd never seen those carved all the stations of the cross in a Catholic church. I understand now that they have to protect them because they're such valuable art pieces.

And I was impressed with that. And then I went out early in the morning to the airport to load the marijuana. And I had my fireman's badge in my wallet. And so the old guard on duty, he was kind of suspicious of it. And I showed him my fireman's badge, and he was all helpful. Really? So then I taxed down to the end of the runway, and they met me with the van and put the stuff. in and I was coming back across and didn't have enough fuel. I knew I wouldn't. I'd have to

land somewhere. So I landed a little, a little abandoned strip with a little stone house at the end of it. And the man that owned the marijuana got in with me. So I put him out there and there was a little boy herding goats and his name was Lazarus. So we put the marijuana in the stone house and I flew into, I forgot, one of the cities of Mexico and refueled and came back out and sat there and had lunch with the little boy. Then paid it back in there. Flew on home. Were you worried? Were you nervous at all?

Not a bit. And you were flying and you flew down there alone? Yes, uh-huh. But the man that on the marijuana flew back with me. Okay. So we just, we didn't have any trouble a bit. And then at what point did he pay you when you landed back in the U.S.? Yes, they came the next day and paid.

And then the next load, they cheated me out of it. That was all they had. So the second load, they didn't have to pay me. Really? Yeah. So I took it. I, I, I, I, I, I, I found him and I sent a detective after him.

We found him in New York. And I went up there and stuck a gun in his ribs and took him down to the wharf. What? And he was so nervous. He couldn't even light a cigarette. He thought they're going to kill him. Of course, I won't hurt him at all,

but I was going to scare him into pay him in my money. So I took his dog. Wow. And his dog was named Leslie, a beautiful, long-haired setter. And he was so upset about taking his dog. He said, take my wife. Take my wife. I said, no, that's illegal.

I'll take your dog. So I dog napped and I kept the dog And the children put bows in their hair Because this guy didn't pay you for the second trip Right So anyhow he never did pay me So he caused so much heat till I was a friend out there He said give him his dog back, Roger

You're going to bring us all down So how did you find that you hired a private investigator To like hunt him down or something? He went up to a cabin where Bill This guy's name was Bill And where he lived in the Fireplace with some burnt papers and he looked at it

and there was where the dog was shipped to Vancouver Canada and from their transship back to New York. So he copied the numbers and all down before he touched it and it's disintegrated and he found out where the address where Bill was. Wow. He wasn't really a private detector but he was better than private detector. He was the guy that first introduced me to these

people. Oh, he was the guy who introduced you. Okay, wow. We went riding across country. Right. So then what happened? Did you have an it? to keep doing this stuff? Oh, yeah. Well, this is just easy. I went to see a lot.

And you had absolutely zero fear of being caught or getting in any kind of trouble. No. Well, of course, I was, well, just at the treetop level, sagebrush would sometime be in my wheelwells, and I was afraid of hitting a power line at night or something more so than I was getting caught.

What was the reason for flying so low? Keep off a radar. They had radar on the hills around there, And so they were trying to catch people. They'd catch pilots every once in a while. Okay. What year was this? 1973.

73. Wow. So I went to the lawyer and I said, lawyer, what will happen if I get caught with a load of marijuana bringing in? He says, you work on the fire department? Yeah. And he said, you ever been in committee? I said, never had a traffic ticket in my life.

No, no, never a moving violation. He said, you'll get probation. At the most, you get a year and serve four months. raking leaves on a military base. Oh, I kind of liked that story. So I went and bought me a bigger airplane of Cessna 207. That thing would carry 1100 pounds and I could make $40,000 in a day. How much was that plane?

$35,000. $3,000. $2,07. Right. Wow. It's a stretch 206, but it's the same engine. It's nice. 150 mile an hour.

Cures 1100 pounds and go 1,000 miles. So, great big old tires. So I started hauling, so I bought me a new Cadillac. I didn't know about all this, about making people look at you. And I had my mother and my baby sister come out from Georgia, and I took them to Disneyland in my new Cadillac. And mother said, what are you doing, boy? I said, I'm hauling pot, ma.

He says, how much you're making? I said, I'm making $40,000 any day I want to go down there. He said, what do they do if they catch you? So I told her what the lawyer said about four months at the most. I said, what do you think, Ma? She said, do you need a co-pilot son? Wow. My mother was this boy.

That's amazing. So did you ever bring a co-pilot with you? No, always flew a bone, yeah. Okay. And at this point, you're how old? 30. 30 years old, flying down to Mexico every day, making $40,000. Yeah, we got where to do about once a week, and then you had six months or something.

There was no pot. Okay. So you had to work while it was going. Are you still dealing with a guy who you had to hunt down and steal his dog? I just got in touch with him a few weeks ago. He got in touch with me on Facebook. I mean, at this point when you're routinely flying to Mexico and back, are you still dealing with the same guy?

No, I, we separated a little bit ways. Okay. Yeah, but no hard feelings. I think that he just didn't want to get very involved in it. So you found somebody else you could do business with me? No, I didn't even, I didn't have anybody. it myself. So what did you do? You just flew down to the same location and said, hey, who's got pot? Oh, he had it. This guy walking. There's a little river come there, just north of Mazatman

in the state of Santa Lu. And it came through a cliff in the rivers and had like a waterfall. And then there was a poor, poor village called Pichilengi. Starving donkeys, look like starving people. And on the bend of the river in the sand was a 900 foot runway. If you could call it. at a runway, it ruddied. Yeah. That's real short, but the Tesla 2.07 would make it. So, but it wouldn't take off of the load. So this young son...

Because the runway was too short, the plane's too heavy, you need longer. You're right. So I would take enough fuel down with me, and Mari and I would go to the grocery store and get little goodies and apples and toys for the children. And I'd pass out the boxes of those, and they just loved them. So every day, more and more children would show up at runway. They had heard of the American Santa Claus that was coming. the American Santa Claus

so I haul many loads out of there and one time I did it at I did it 13 days in a row I'd haul a load every day and so on day 13 I had that little thing in my stomach I have a warning we all do like watch out watch out don't do it so I asked this guy walking

he had a hair-lipped guy just an ugly man I said walking are you sure this place Yes, I'm paying the Federals off. No problem, no problem. I mean, this is the same routine you're taking every day. You're used to it 13 times on the final day. Yeah, well, no final.

I was on a roll. They had marijuana stacked up by tons. Okay. So I'm just hauling all I can haul out of there. Right. But this guy, Pedro would get into plane with me, and Mokin would tell him where he was going to block the highway. Sometimes it would be 20, 30, 40 miles away.

And I would, Pedro get in the plane with me. was light and we'd take off and go over and there would be a two-ton truck black in the highway with a rifles or machine gun on it and about a mile down the road would be another one blocking the highway so i was on a major freeway well why now why did they block the highway that was my runway holy shit so no so no cars could come and so i'd land they'd put 1100 pounds in that plane and all it'd like a bucket brigade off the truck i'd shake hands with all the Mexicans with their sombreros and I'd get back in the plane take off over the next flight without a whole oh my Oh my God.

Every day we did it in a different place on different highways. So on day 13, I had the bad feeling all night long. It was just like, ooh, I have that. I just have a gift of it. It was just like, oh, my. And the next morning I went down and brushed my teeth just at daylight. And 10 or 12 men walked down with me. And I got an airplane, Pedro got in, and I fired it up.

And it went, pow! I thought a tire busted. I looked over leisurely. Did I have a busted tire? And Pedro was yelling, Policea! Policea! And I'm not at the end of the strip. I'm up part way, about halfway,

so only got about four or five hundred feet in front of me. I usually just go there and taxi back down and turn around. So I just put the power to the firewall, cold engine and all, and just went tearing off down the end of that strip. And when I got to the end of it, I was doing about 40, 50 miles an hour, and I rotated. And when I did, there was four of them, two on each side,

and they just shredded that airplane with machine guns. There was 80 bullet holes in there, and they shot me down. And all the windows was shot out. I was shot across the top of my head, my knee, and my toe was shot off, nail off. What were they shooting you from? From both sides of the runway from the ground. From the ground. You see, I just run between them.

Right as I went to lift off. They were spraying. They just riddled it. It looked like one of them Bonnie and Clyde cars. So I went into shock, I reckon, because the world just turned yellow. And time slowed down. And the gasoline was just pouring in on me where the bullets had gone up into the tanks above my head. And windshield was out.

And a bullet had hit the strut right in front of me. And pieces of splinters of it was all in my face and my chest. And I just... I just saw ahead of me in the river. The cliff was coming quick. And it looked like in the river, or it was on your knee deep or less, with stones and it was big as this table.

It looked like great turtles just at daylight was in there. And I thought I'll crash on top of those and maybe I can live in the water. So I just pulled the power and I didn't have no control over the yoke whatsoever over the elevators. And it went straight in and when it did on the first hit, the wings came off and the sun. second hit, the nose came and went underneath the airplane.

And I'm sitting there, I guess I was knocked unconscious from the jolt, and Pedro was shaking my, come on, Roger, come on, Roger, come on, Roger, and I just stepped out over the nose of the plane right on into the water of the river, and those federally was coming, they were still shooting it. So a couple of them hit the plane, and there was a pistol in there. Later on, I used to carry a pistol to start with, and I found it was more trouble than it was worth. But anyhow, that morning I had one, and a nine-millimeter browning, and I just reached

and pulled it out of its holster because now the radio where it was taped to is upside down, so it's just right there. And I popped a few caps at those guys, and they ran in the rocks. And so we took off, and then I saw that Pedro's foot was nearly shot off. It was just, and it wasn't bleeding all that bad. It was just like white. And so I took my t-shirt off and tied it. We went on up the mountain, and there was an old donkey.

It looked like she was 30 years old way back, and he knew her, Charlottie, Charlottie, red and we jumped on that donkey without a bridle or saddle and we rode i understand now it was seven miles and we came to a little house in a clearing and there was a small man and he was plowing and he had a little horse hooked to a little cow and the two of them with a wooden yoke across their back was pulling a little plow and some munk some stumps and he was trying to make a living out of a burn place like the natives do that sometimes and we went in his house and his wife and his daughter put some cloth on my wounds and poured diesel all over it to keep the flies off. Diesel fuel?

Diesel fuel, yes. Wow. And so he took off and he was gone all day and late that afternoon. A bunch of horses and you was come trotting up into the yard and there was a doctor there, Dr. Benjamin Sosu, a red, red cross doctor. And he gives a shot of morphine and tetanist shots and he tried to find the bullet. I still have one in my foot. And he looked for it and he said we had to get to.

hospital and Pedro would die if he didn't get to hospital. They had killed one person on the ground there that tried to run away that morning. So they took us to a road we rode a long way on them mules and we got to a truck. It was a two-ton ten wheeler loaded with corn in the ear. So they dug holes on one side for me and holds on the other side for him and buried us down in that corn and covered us up and they kept a little place for my face but that was a real rough road and every time that truck would roll one side the other, the corner rolled in on me in there, it laughed, and take it back off my face. And we went through three roadblocks, and they said they had a platoon of soldiers

and over a hundred of them looking for an American shot down, believed dead. And so we got to the highway after some miles and went into a house and had a white pan, and they just kept changing order. I think I changed it 20 times before I got the blood and all the crud off of me from that episode. and they got a taxi, and they got a new taxi to take me to go out of Lahara because they said the road's old north was blocked. So the man was a little dwarf of a man, and I love this story. I was high on them morphine pills and the shot that I had,

and I laid back on a big blanket, and that little fellow talked all night long. I said, signor, do you have a family? Oh, yes, I have a beautiful wife, Dore, and three sons. Let me tell you how I got my beautiful wife, Dora. He says, I live with my mother, my widowed mother, and you can see no girl would look at me, but I had my eye on Dora across the way. And so one day she's playing the flute in the back of a band that's coming by,

and I open the gate and pull her into the yard, and my mother helped me get her in the house. And she sits in a chair, and she sits there stiff all night. And I tell her, I love her, I want to marry her, but she won't even look at me. And so, Signore, the next morning, we have to let her go. What could I do? So she went home, and just at daylight, and she knocked on her door.

And her hard-hearted father says, get away from here, you prostitute, you spend the night with some man. You're not my daughter anymore. Go away. So she hung her head down and walked away, and that's when I went up and told her, Dora, let's talk to the Padre. and, Signor, that's how I got my beautiful wife, Dora. And said, you won't believe it. But one year later, we had a beautiful boy.

And I was driving a Ford taxi as new. So we named him Ford. And, Signore, the next year we had another boy. And that year, I'm driving a Dodge. So we called him Dodge. And, Signore, I know you won't believe this. But the third year, we have another beautiful boy. And at that time, I'm driving chivalry.

And the priest will not christen him chivalry. So I had to teach that son of a gun to drive before he would christen him chivalet. And sign you, that's how I got my three boys, forward dodge and chivalet. That's incredible. Wow. Yes, stories, one after the other. My book I have, I believe, 41 chapters in many. Any of them are just like two pages or ten pages long.

So on that last story you told where you got shot down by the Federales, and you got shot in the toe. And the knee and in the top of the foot and across the top of the head. And the top of the head. After you went and got all fixed up and you were getting transported with the corn, and where did you eventually end up after all that? I went to grow up a l'ar and got on an airplane and flew back to los Angeles. Okay.

And Murray took me to Wilmington where I got medical care in the hospital there. Okay. How old were you at that point? And then was that your first time actually being shot at? No, the revenues had shot at me back in Georgia before. The who? The federal revenues back in Georgia when I was making whiskey. They shot at me.

Eight of them shot, emptied their bullets at their pistols at me. In your plane? No, I was on the ground running. Oh. From a whiskey liquor steel. Holy shit. Yeah, they mean to kill you. They don't care.

If they got a badge and a gun and you, you don't do what they say, they'll just kill you. Right. It's like, all right, we got a license to kill him. But it was your first time actually in the trans, when you got into the transporting business, flying drugs back and forth, it was the first time that you encountered any kind of resistance. Yes.

And so after you get back home to L.A. And you're with Mar, you get fixed up at the hospital. and I'm sure your wife's trying to convince you to stop doing this, right? Not particularly. I was pretty cool about it. We went to Hawaii, and I had to put my foot up on a crutch, so I had to keep it higher in my head for a month to do. That thing throbbed.

And so the children would bring me pinocallados at the hotel in Hawaii. And then we went to... How bad did your foot get messed up in that shot? Not bad. It just took the toenail off of the top of the big toe. And one slug got into the foot and went right back at the joint, a part of a bullet. Okay.

So I wouldn't hurt bad. I mean, to be Nick, to be, she could have been killed. And one scraped right across the top of your head. Yeah, I got scarred right across where it went across the top of my head. Wow. And so, so then we went to Dubrovna at Yugoslavia and we rented a little Volkswagen thing. My foot was stuck out the window so it was above my head and in a military boot all tied up. And I had my chevis wriggle between me on ice and I'm already driving.

and she's going fast in that little Volkswagen convertible, and he's almost on two wheels going down towards Albania, and the Russian troops come out, or the Eastern Bloc troops halt. So they explained that we passed a certain path up the way 10 kilometers, and we got here too fast, so you're speeding, and it's going to cost you 500 dinars. And Marr's laughing trying to take that pictures, and I said, 500 dinars, you have to take her to jail.

Well, she straightened up right quick over there. And so then I paid it was $5, $100 to 1. Oh, okay. So that's what we did. And then I came back and I bought a twin engine, a twin beach that belonged to the beach boys. It was a famous plane. A twin engine what? A twin engine beach craft.

Okay. They called Twin Beachers or Beach 18s. Okay. And I bought 12 of those in my life. Is that one of those sea planes that lands in the water? No. Okay. Just a big, it's like a, oh, it's a big, it's a big twin engine plane with radial engines,

great, big round engines on front of with the, like motorcycle air-cooled engines. So they were wonderful planes. Is that the biggest plane that you had owned so far? Yeah, oh, yeah, I felt like I was really, really into big times. Morrie was in Atlanta, and I bought it in, I bought the plane in Wisconsin. So I flew down to Atlanta to pick her up, and they were saying, I remember the day, November 7, 9-7 Juliet Fox truck. Keep your speed up 180, 747 over to your ride on runway, such and such it.

Wow. Boy, I'm in here. And I landed in taxi away and came up. You're flying with the big dogs. I'm how bad now? I just kind of had a smile on my face. So I taxed a long way and went up to Hangar 1, and they rolled out the red carpet, and Mari walked out there, and it was come out with a surrey and got in the plane, and we flew away.

So that was a step up like I should have been flying a 747 from a. Wow. Oh, that's incredible. So what happens next? Well, I flew that thing every, every, I just keep, I tear them up, one bog down, another one, I hit the end of a ditch in the night landing, not to run away. So you immediately start taking that new big plane to make, to keep doing more shipments? Now I'm making, what was I making about $80,000 a trip.

Okay, going to the same spot? No, we do different places. Okay. I even went to Columbia and Panama and Jamaica. I like the one in Jamaica. I had the fireman down there would load me. Oh, really? Yeah, and I'd get it at night after midnight or something.

And I would taxi the taxi was almost two miles long there at Kingston. And I'd go to the end of it, and I'd say Kingston Tower, whatever my number was. I have a cabin fire lights up. And boy, all of a sudden, the fire trucks would come out of the station and come down. They'd throw a ton of pot right in the fireman wood. Wow. We got it fixed now. Thank you, Kingston Tower.

And I'd take off. Wow, that's awful creative. I think they was all in on it. But it covered everybody. So you weren't always landing on highways, stripped of highway? No, no. That was the only time I did it to that spot. Okay.

Yeah, sometime I landed at military bases, all kind of stuff. Right. So you continue doing this day in, day out, making $8,000 a day, no problems, no... Oh, I'll probably, during the season, I'd probably get over two weeks. Because I'd wait on my money and it wasn't just automatic. Right, right. Yeah. So how long does this last before...

Ten years. This lasts for ten years. Yeah. With no hiccups. Oh, I had lots of hiccups. I wrote a whole book of them. I mean, how long does this last before? Before the police gun on to me.

Before something else have. Not necessarily before you're arrested. But like the story of, I remember there's a story where you're flying and you have to make a landing and your your tires get stuck in the mud. And then you end up getting stranded out in the jungle. That's one of my favorite stories. Let me tell that story. How did that happen? This episode of the podcast is brought to you by.

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25 different points. 25 different points. from planes. Yes, that I can remember. And out of these, out of the 25 planes, like, what happened to most of the planes? Were they crashed? Were they shot at? Most of them, I'd sell and buy something different. Okay.

So just moving around. But I guess, I must have tore up, I think, four, that I tore completely up. Four. Yeah, and one of the pilots had tore up another one for me, so it's five, I can think about. When you say tore up, what do you mean by that? Just crashed them? Just crashed them. Yeah. Oh, one of them was bogged down in the sand,

in the runway, and here comes to helicopters. You run off and leave it, so you just abandon the plane. After you ain't nothing else to do. Jesus. Okay, so we were talking about the story where you're playing. You tried to land it. I had bought a beautiful, beautiful DC3. I mean museum piece.

I believe Union Oil had owned it, and it was lovely. The pieces where you in front of the seat let down with exotic wood, carved in different colors for the countries. I hated to take that interior. out but I did and I went down to Columbia and I had to wait wait on a strip for time to go because I was over in the guerrilla country and while I was waiting I went over and I went to sleep under under a tree there was four of us I had a co-pilot and the man that was who came me up to it and he had some other fellow supposed to be

nowhere to go and I was in a hammock asleep after lunch and I was under a tree and I just heard a terrible roar and I I woke up, rolled out of that hammock, and I looked up into the ass end of two military jets going straight up with afterburners going. And then they turned around just like the wood on an air show, and they come up the airstrip and just tore it up with 50 caliber bullets. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And I jumped out of that, and I ran for the airplane. And I just give the guy $80,000, and he took off in the truck the other way. I should have went with him. But anyhow, I was thinking about getting out of that. So I got in a plane, and I, I took off and the co-pilot got in with me. And the two fellas, and we had about 10 or 12 barrels of gasoline in the,

back in the baggage area, where the seats used to be in the cabin. And there's 55-gallon drums of aviation fuel. So I took off, and the two jets got right beside me, and the pilots were so close, almost like the U. and I just, and they kept telling me to go to Via Vincencia, military base. How were they telling you on the radio? No, they was pointing towards it. You could see them that close.

Oh, yeah, we were just, they had their wingtips over my wingtips. They wanted me to go to the military base. They're pointing at it. And I just put up the old hippie sign, oh, and shook my hand out of them. I didn't think they would shoot me. So they just kept swarming on me. And I kept slowing that DC3 down until they were just standing on their tails, burning all kind of fuel, black smoke coming out of their tails.

Oh, those planes aren't meant to go that slow. No, so. And anyhow, they kind of went under me. and then started shooting them 20 millimeter cannons, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just shake the airplane. So I pushed the nose over so they couldn't get under me. I'd fly a treetop level. And later on they said that I tried to crash into one of them, but I really did,

and I didn't know it. So later on they come and they shot holes in the tail with 50 caliber just with a sweet zip. Let me just put a few in. And oh boy, that got my attention. And then they shot up the left wing tip. and I said, oh my. And there was a, there was a one of them left, I guess, for fuel. So there was a black rolling clouds ahead.

Well, wait, first off, Thunderstruck? First off, I couldn't get my wheels up. I didn't take, on a DC3, they have pins that you stick into struts so that if the hydraulic collapses, the plane won't go down all the way on the ground. Okay. So it's just like a strut goes up down. And I'd left those pins in. I got in to go so fast.

Oh, okay. It was a big pasture up ahead, so I landed, and it was rougher than it looked, and the fuel caps popped off all over the place. And so on the World Series baseball game, it interrupted this baseball game to tell you that America, and DC3 has just been shot down by Colombian jets. This is the first plane that's been shot down on Reagan, due, war on drugs. And then in a minute it says,

up he's up in a way we'll keep you posted i took off again this was in the middle of the world series that you were getting chased by these columbian fighter jets yes we have copies of that transmission yeah there's actually like a recording of it yes during the world series uh-huh wow so uh that would be a cool thing to find if you can i would i think i got my friend jerry's got a copy of that really yeah okay so uh we um went on and i went into these ball took off and i went off and i went off and i went went into these boiling clouds and the clouds stick close to the mountains in the tropics and those mountains go up 20,000 feet there and that part of Columbia in the Andes and I was afraid to go in much further so I went on up to about 20,000 feet and I started getting some ice so I came back out

again and there was that jet right there boom boom dot your plane that's it wow was it all metal like that too all like shiny metal like uh one of those uh those airstream vans yes that one was but they um that one that one that thing is beautiful was a blue and white one so uh um where was i oh yeah so i mean boom boom boom he shooting at me again the pins the pins are in the struts you forgot i already i got the amount i took off again with no new fuel caps on top oh oh you let you crash landed no i just landed on a pasture just straight of just a big cow pasture okay those things got huge tires big as a semi-truck so they had stuff like that okay that was rough i mean it was up and down and i got out and took those

pins out and took off again holy shit so but i was afraid that he was going to hit one of them tracers shoot through the fuselage and right you got fuel i'd be able or hit the gas tanks i'd just go up in a ball of the lanes so yeah i was i was serious about it so when i went back in i thought okay i can't get away in the place the plane was icing up real bad at that hour altitude. So I just kicked it over into a stall into a spin, spin right down to about 2,000 feet. And I just came out under it. It was just beautiful down on the... So, okay, explain that again for people who aren't familiar with flying and aviation. So you took off again from the cow pasture. Yes. And you flew up to how hot 20,000 feet? 20,000, I suppose about that. And that plane wasn't made to fly that high. Well, to go that high, but you need oxygen. Yeah, but you can stand. You're not supposed to go 15,000 feet.

without oxygen, but you can stand for a while without it, for sure you can. Right. You lose your, you get fuzzy. Okay. And so what was the reason that you purposely stalled the airplane vertically? Oh, to get away from that, to get away from a jet, I was going to leave him up there. So I just stalled it, and when you stall one, you put it up into a stall and let it fall over one wing. And then it's like a falling leaf.

It'll just spiral, and it'll spiral, and it's just almost go down as fast as you, if you dropped it. I mean, it really goes fast. It's like it's falling on one wing. Is this something that you had done before? I mean, this seems like a crazy maneuver. Let's try. No, people learn to do that. So you learn this when you're...

Oh, yeah, I think a lot of people learn to spend. And the reason that you stalled the airplane was to get off of his radar or... Just to get away from him. Just do something to maneuver real quick. Just so, like, out of nowhere you stop and then drop and then he would lose you. Well, I didn't know that you would be he did. Right. So I got away from him, and now I feel bulletproof.

All right. Your adrenaline's part. Humping. I'm going to go get that load of marijuana. It's three tons waiting on us down there, but we can't go back to those gorillas because they don't run us off. We've got to wait until about dark to get there. Right.

So I'm flying along the Guavieri River. It's way on down in Columbia, closer to Brazil. It's on the same flight. Yeah. This is right after. That's where I was supposed to go to start with. Okay. We're waiting at that other farm until we could go in the evening to get to the guerrillas.

Right. So I see a long, grassy street. It looked like it's 20 feet above the river and I said I got to find a spot where we won't have enough fuel to fly all afternoon and then and then fly on Mm-hmm. And so on this grass, I guess it was about way steep and I just I just touched the wheels down lightly and I made a half a mile strip and the wheels are 18 inches wide, I guess and the first ray it looked good and the second row it looked bigger and the third row and I went four or five times and put a little more weight on the tires each time and it was hard as a rock and so I told so you kept circling and going down and touching down and going to make you're making your own runway right so wow so i did it and uh where did you did you learn how to do this is this is this something that you

learn like you know but on the on the farm and a tractor you do all kind of stuff to get there didn't you know it looked like it was smooth but what i didn't know and so i had the copilot's name al and so when he's almost coming to a stop i said get your feet off that breaks out i don't have my feet on the brakes. And what has happened, that thing weighs 30 tons. And on those two tires, they were breaking through the crust. It was like, oh, I guess about eight inch is deep, real hard clay-like. And beneath that was soup where the water had stayed. So the wheels went through, and it just started slowly doing a handstand until it went right straight up. And the nose and all just came in slowly on us. And we fell in between the seats to save our lives. Because it was collapsing

on you. The nose was just in the plane was coming. up on its tail just like this year, just like that. And it stopped right, straight up and down 90 degrees. You couldn't have put a ruler on it in it straight. And there's two big engines. You see those big engines, they held it up. Yeah. And so I just undid the emergency hatch and stepped out in the grass.

And Al came behind me and we reached in and got our suitcases. Now the two guys back up in the fusillade, they got kind of banged up. with all that drum cases. And it's 100 feet, not 100 feet, but it's high up there to that door. I mean high. So they tie a couple of fuel hoses and they shimmy down.

And we set out walking. Unbelievable, man. And that's when I, they went down the road and I went through the jungle. So you're in the middle of nowhere in Columbia. Yeah, and I said, listen, I'll eat snakes in this jungle for a year before I go down the road.

After the jets had done what they did and what we did. And so I went through the jungle, and after 11 days, I came to a place. I kept asking the Indians, Dandest a avionnes, where are airplanes? Loma Linda, Loma Linda. Where is it? Lohs, it's far. And I kept going.

Where are airplanes? Where can I find an airplane? Okay. In the Spanish, Dandia's da avionnes. So I speak into the Indians, and I eat brown sugar and drink the water. And I had a St. Paul. bag from the cleaner plastic and I'd put the brown, I bought a block of brown sugar

and I'd put that water in it and I'd get along pretty good on that. Huh. There's brown sugar and water. And brown sugar and water for some days when I didn't have anything to eat. So, I, uh, finally I came to a place and, uh, wow, what is this place? It looked like, Hawaii World War II,

green roofs, a pasture, a nice, long runway, several airplanes, a tower. And I knocked on the door. I said, what is this place? What? How did you get here? My name is Katie Sue. That a lovely voice. He says, I'm touring.

We don't get tourists here. So what is this place? You don't know. This is Loma Linda, headquarters for missionary aviation fellowship for the Amazon. So God just tapped me on the shoulder. The same people that I had learned to fly, these are the people that went to their place.

And one of their pilots with an old missionary from Canada, flew me out the next month. morning and we flew to the same military base where they tried to get me to go and a policeman reached in and got my bag out of the out of the airplane and put it in a taxi wow and the other fellas went on to prison for some years down in they went to they went to prison oh yeah I knew they were going for sure I knew they were going I said come with me please wow and that was the part where I remember in the book there's a there's a specific part where you guys are in a jeep And you're riding through the jungle and you see there's a checkpoint.

And they all went through the checkpoint. They thought they could pay them off. Yeah. And you got out of the Jeep and you walked the other way. We went some ways to start with that first day or the second day. We got a Jeep to take us. And so we went, I don't know, 20 or 30 miles. So was it at that checkpoint where they got?

Yeah, I'm sure it was. I never talked to him. Yeah, I saw one of the guys in prison. He got real mad with me trying to beat me up. Really? Because I left him down there. I did, you fool? So at what point, at what point in your life,

There's a chapter about the creation of the Medelline cartel. Yes. Now, was that the party that you went to? Yes. Out the airstrip that was supposedly all of the drug gangs around Colombia coming together and forming the cartel? What had happened was, the way I understand it, was it? They was 10,000 people killed down in Colombia, killing each other. The price of cocaine was $10,000 a kilo in Columbia at that time.

It was $50,000 in the United States. And one fellow had 10 or 20 kilos, and he'd give it to another person to say, I got a pilot or I got a way to get it there. And they would look into paper. And, oh, in New Jersey, I see 40 kilos was busted. Oh, I'm so sorry, signiors. Yours was busted.

Bang, bang, bang. Of course, he was being ripped off, and he knew it, so he was killing them. Right. So the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar and a guy named Gauchel, the Mexican, several other ones, they got together and said, all right, we will form it. They didn't call it a cartel. They just like an insurance.

We will send it to Miami to you for $10,000 a kilo. If it gets busted anywhere between here and your man in Miami, we will replace it in Columbia. So you can't lose. But it's going to cost you $10,000. $10,000 just to get it to Miami safely. That's right. So they got inundated with 100 tons of cocaine.

So they were like an insured transportation company. Exactly. And I'm there Pollitt. All right there at the beginning of it. I was there. So you were there at that party, that purpose of creating this alliance? Well, I don't know. That was a purpose of it.

They reached some kind of agreement at that time. But you had no idea when you were going there. No, I didn't know. I was just down there trying to get some work. Did you meet any of these guys? Any of these big-time drug? Oh, yeah, I met all of them. You met, Escobar was there?

No, I didn't see Escobar at that party, but I saw a lot of the other ones down there. And I got a job. The Ochoa brothers? No, they weren't there either, but they were behind it. Okay. There was police chiefs. They were stand-up comedians. They was actresses.

They was all kind of, all the people. These were all lower-level. I don't know. They're pretty big. There's one guy that I did the first load. He had got caught with a ton of cocaine in Columbia, and 16 judges were murdered, and he was rather nervous. Wow.

I did a load for him, and I didn't like it. The man I gave it to, got shot in the stomach. It took a while to get paid, and I just said, I don't want to fool with those. So then, okay. So what? Okay, let me just tell you, I'll tell you how it happened.

Okay. I back up and tell you a little bit. I sold an airplane to a woman. from Bolivia, Sonia de Attila. She was like a black widow. I understand she had a lot of people killed. I sold her an airplane and she wanted me to fly base from Columbia and up, but I didn't deal with her.

But through this, I met a man named Jaime Correjo. Brilliant man, kind of like Churchill. Beautiful apartment, overlooking Medellin at 20 floors up. and he was a drunk, but he had cocaine and lots of it. He had a lovely wife. They were older people. And he says, yes, I pay $5,000 a kilo. I get you all you want.

So in sachets, this woman from Bolivia, and she kisses them on both cheeks, and she has fur, rabbit fur coats and boots. And so I have this lawyer with me, this introducing me of Robert devala, from Bogota. and she says she's going to the United States to buy a plane. So he winks at me and he said,

Roger, over here's got some planes for sale. And so she looked, yes, yes. And so he's doing his fingers like this. So I tell her, yes, I have a queen air. Oh, queen air. She likes the name queen air. Anyway, I have the plane broken down and I have to go to Columbia to get to Bolivia to take her in a troop,

her entourage. to get my money. And this is a gruesome story. Anyway, we land there. So is the queen air of the plane that you guys fly there? Yeah, I had several queen there. So you take her there to get the money so she can pay you for it. So it's just a interest story.

So we land and, oh, they just bow to her, the police and all. And they get limousines with flags on it from Bolivia. We get into cars and we go through town and we go out to the water tank. And there's something of marble. house that looks like a mausoleum with a razor wire fence all around it. Wow. Like it's a prison with itself. And they open the gate and the helpers are all crying

and red-eyed and what is, what's the matter with you people? She's just really nasty. Your lion ate the baby. What are you mean leaving a baby on the floor in front of a lion? She had a cougar in the house. I went in behind her And there's that cougar with blood on his mouth, and diaper and shit and blood all in the room. What?

Yes. Oh, my. And she hugs the lion and runs all the people off. You idiots, you idiots, I never want to see your stupid faces again. The lion just ate the maids baby. The maids baby. The maids baby. Holy child.

Holy shit. So I got my money and got. on out of that. Are you fucking kidding me? And James Clavel wrote the book, Deep Cover, and he also wrote the Big White Lie, the CIA, and the crack cocaine epidemic. And it's got a couple of, I got a couple of mentions in it. One of them says that I was in more, more DEA files in Noriega. And who was, who wrote the book? James Clavel. James Clavel, the same one that wrote Deep Cover. He was a DEA, high up and the CIA tried to

kill him for you. exposing him about the crack cocaine. Okay. So he wrote the big white lie, the CIA, and the crack cocaine epidemic. They developed and put it in every city in the United States on one weekend. So. The CIA? Yes. What's the story behind that?

I don't know. They just wanted to sell their stuff, I suppose. Wow. So he said that you were on more DEA reports than Noriega. Yes. And then he's asking her if she can find me. and says, we've been looking him for five years. He's on the 10 most morning list.

And if you can tell us of anywhere to find Roger Reeves, we'll give you anything you want. That's in the book, the big white lie. So you sold this lady your plane, and then this fucking lion eats a baby. And then, so at this point, at what point do you become aware that America is looking for you? Oh, they weren't looking.

Oh, this was years later. that this has happened. Okay, so I hold... And how much money are you making at this point after you sold her your plane? I'm not making much money at all. I mean, I'm, in fact, losing some. I'm losing a pretty good bunch of airplanes

and different reasons. I'm not doing very well during those few years there. Okay. About the early 80s, it was kind of a dry time. Mexico had got so hot, and I'd been shot up down there and tortured in a Mexican prison until I didn't want to go to Mexico anymore. Well, when did this happen?

You were tortured in a Mexican prison? I was tortured almost to death. Would you let me tell you about that? I'd like you to tell me about that. Yeah, please, Roger. And is this before or after the menacing cartel was formed? Oh, before. Before.

This is why I didn't go back to Mexico anymore. A couple of episodes happened down there that it was not healthy. Okay. Yeah, please tell me about that story. Anyhow, I was arrested in Mexico. and by seven agents, and I won't get into that long story where I knocked one in the head and got away from all of them with the bullets flying and got away.

But I had a pilot coming down, an older gentleman, and he landed at Hermesillo at the International Airport, and he was supposed to land five miles beyond at a cattle ranch, a feedlot. And he just, I don't know why he did it. But anyhow, he had my phony name and my room number in his pocket. And he had $5,000. and the federal he tried to take it from him and he rassar with him. No, no, Roger said, give it to someone so.

So anyhow, they arrested me and put me in prison down in Mazzalon. And they done a number on him up in Hermesia, and he told. So they want me to confess. So I just can't believe it. I haven't done anything. I'm just in a swimming pool, and I'm in my swimming shorts, and I get handcuffed in the pool when the guy shakes hands with me. Wear it, like a house or something there?

No, in a real nice hotel. A real nice hotel. So they take me to the prison, and I sat there, and I sat there, and I mean, it was miserable, and it was so hot. And after about three days in that cell, we just were just where all the drug addicts and drunks were thrown, they take me back there to the torture chamber, and they decided I'm going to tell. And they hold my head under agassious water until I can't stand it any longer. And then you just fight like crazy to come up. I mean, it burned you daylight.

They held your head underwater? Yeah, it's like a tub, and it's got some kind of... bubbly. If you inhale it, it will make you and it'll explode your head. It goes up your nose. And after one time of that, it'd take four of them to hold you down. Wow. So anyhow, I had that, and then I was beating all over until I was just yellow and black. What were they asking you? Were they trying to get any out? Are they, they just sign the papers

and they'll all be over. Sign it, it'll be over. They'd grab your hair and shove it up. Sign the papers. So... What were the papers for? Just to confess that you were marijuana smuggler and that you're going to get six years. in prison. I thought, well, if you don't sign it, I knew they can keep you two years for nothing. Right. But so they give the, they, the room was about five foot square and 14 feet high and it was hot. There was a little spot on the door about that big. And they brought a man in. He's a black man. And he was wrapped in, he was frozen, and he was wrapped in newspaper about inch strips around

just like you'd wrap something like a mummy. And you're completely frozen. And they stuck the ice hook in his rib. He must have been used over and over again, and they hung him on the wall. And as he thawed out, his eyes, the water run down his face, and it looked like he was crying.

And then, of course, the formaldehyde ran out of his orpheus, his other ones too. And the old paper come running off of him, and later on you could see his liver where it's pulled apart. And he'd open the door, you next son of a bitch you next and so anyway that didn't scare me so bad i'd butchered large animals all my life but i didn't the smell was awful with that formaldehyde puddling on the floor and the floor didn't bother you that much well as far as liver and a dead man it just that that didn't scare me

okay all right it's i don't like it but it was no more than if you had a whatever yeah so that i had to sleep that floor was filthy and on the wall, we dried blood where they, that was just one of the room that they hurt people in. They kid you back there. So I went to sleep, and I put my head down at the bottom of that door to breathe like that, and I'm breathing the fresh air from that side, but I'm getting a formaldehyde over close to me, and I went to sleep.

And I had, I know where Walt Disney got some of his cartoons from. I had pink flying for pigs and horses and all kind of colorful animals flying around in my, in that state of mind from, from breathing the formaldehyde. I was high or something. And so then when I woke up and I saw that dead man hanging there, it took a minute to figure out which was a nightmare

and which was real. I had to kind of pinch myself to see where the reality was. Right. And then they took me out and they bent me over naked and buttered my rum bum and packed it full of hot chili,

a ground chili. And I'm talking about streaming and talking ugly. I did something. some of it. I looked at their faces if I can find you, I will kill you if I can get out of here. Oh my God. And then so just one day after after that they put me back in general population for a few days. And you didn't sign anything obviously. Of course I didn't sign it. I would have died for it signed up six years for nothing. Right.

So back there I got a word out and to Mari and to some other people and then one morning they just come said, come, come quick, and they took me out the back door of the prison. And they put me in a pickup truck brand new, and it had a horse's head on the door, and they sped through the streets of Mazatlan, and they went to a bank. And I went in the banker spoke English, and he said, listen, Joaquin, that's where I got shot down that morning, and I slowed it. I went back after, has given Roberta the $17,000 that you paid for the loan. And he has paid it for the, to get you out of this prison.

Are you satisfied with that? Don't ask, man. So I went to the hotel where Marry was, and we got on the 747, and I didn't believe I was out of there. I looked terrible. How many days were you there? About three months. Three months.

So I got out of that place, and when the tires of that 727 was a brand-new plane, I just couldn't believe they're not going to come get me again. I was, I was, I was, and the wheels went up to kapoom, next stop, Long Angeles. these eyes like wow that was on the 4th of July 1974 after that I got to say man I would have been like ready to call it quits I didn't I didn't want to go back to Mexico anymore that's one reason I kind of quit I had another encounter that was bad there too so after after several of those encounters okay I I decided to go to Columbia they don't they don't treat you as bad if you go to prison

there they're more professional more professional you didn't go to prison you just had professional people loading you and had good gasoline and okay they had a better operation they were these other people were were peasants that you know someone maybe couldn't even read and write it had something going oh man so at what point did you meet barry seal i'd been flying uh flying cocaine and uh marie and i decided we'd look for a place of it was in Honduras. So we flew down. Look for a place, a place to live? A ranch, a place of kind of a hideaway, a beautiful place in the mountains. So we could have a place and I had all this money. You were going to purchase a place, a ranch. Okay. So we flew down to Honduras and, oh, we did go to a

beautiful place. And, but we decided not to buy it. It was just too remote, but it was just beautiful. So we came back to San Pedro Sula and our clothes is all muddy and dirty from a week up there on that ranch and fooling around by Lake Azul. And so we took them to the cleaners and he said, I'll have them ready tomorrow afternoon. Of course they weren't ready. Well, okay, first thing tomorrow morning. So Mari had the children with her. With us, we had the three children. And I said, well, you go into the airport because it's easier for me to get out to New Orleans on just one of us, if all of us missed, it's going to be hard to get out. So she went on to the airport and I went after the clothes.

Of course, it was slow getting. I got on an old taxi and I had a lot of them in plastic bags. And I give the guy $100 and to go faster and he just blew the horn more. Oh, he didn't go. So I got there and the plane's taxiing out on the tarmac. And so I run and I got the clothes on my back and I waved to the pilot. And I waved to the pilot, nice looking fella. And he waved back.

Then I see Marie's face in the cockpit. Yeah. And then I see the nose wheel go down and he stops and he laughs and he lets the stairwell out for me. Yep. And then he pulls it back and takes off again a little bit like a hitchhiker going to stop, I'm not going to pick you up. So you had some fun. So finally he put it out and I go on with that load of clothes

and the whole 180 passengers are clapping for me when I get on. That's so funny. So I go down and I sit down and my daughter sitting in the middle and she saved me a seat about halfway down on the airplane. And I sit there and we take off and the wheels come up. I guess she's about nine years old. And then they're going up about 5,000 feet. It went to clunk.

She said, what was that, Daddy? I said, he just turned his auto poland on. Oh. So a fellow leaned over it. I don't look to him. He had a nice, clear blue eyes. He just looked too sharp. I said, he's T-E-A-R-B-C-I or something.

Really? That big fellow sitting there. They looked like Rex Tillerson. Where did you guys take off from again? San Pedro Sula, Honduras. San Pedro Sula, okay. It's over on the Caribbean side. Okay.

Death capital of the world for some years. The what? The death capital, the murder capital. The murder capital. The murder capital. The world for a good number of years late, some years back. But at that time, it was laid back and wonderful, but a nice halfway stop coming up.

So when I said, Elino said, you fly these things? I got a few hours, mister. My name Barry Seale, how you doing? And so then he got to talking to me, and we talked to airplanes and so forth. He said, I just got out of prison this morning in Honduras. I got caught down here. I didn't believe him one bit. And he said that he had been a transworld airline captain, and I don't believe he told me he was XCI.

Commercial? Yeah, he flew 747s. I believe he was the youngest 747 pilot that the TWA ever had. and he took a load of explosives down to the Cuban Contras and got caught with a DC-6 loaded with 10 tons of explosives and he lost his job with TWA. So then he was working doing whatever you can, like this freelance and got in trouble.

So I didn't believe him a bit, but we chatted about airplanes all the way on the new arm. He straight up just told you this on the airplane. They just got out of prison this morning, you know. Blind explosives to the Contras. That was before. I believe he had got. caught with a hundred kilos in a little piper.

Okay. Down there, and he served a year. Okay. I didn't believe it a bit. I thought he was just trying to pull me out. So when we landed in New Orleans, I shook hands with him, a nice fellow. And got out there and here's 20 or 30 people, women and children hanging on him crying, begging, hanging his neck.

And I thought, that guy's telling the truth. Ain't no weight he could state that. Wow. So I went over to him. I had already write our name and address and the phone number on it. I said, Barry, I might have some work for you if you're interested. Come out to see me in Santa Barbara. All right, I'll do it.

So a week or two later, he comes out. I had a... Didn't learn his lesson, huh? Well, he was ready to make some money. Oh, yeah. So I said, I'm hauling cocaine out of Columbia. And would you be interested? Oh, yeah.

Let's see what you can do with flying. I didn't know what kind of policy. All kind of policy. People get the license still can't fly. I don't know. Right. So I had a... What was your biggest concern with him when he came out to meet you in Santa Barbara and you were talking to, and you were talking about hiring him? What were you worried? Were you worried about anything like, like, obviously his flying skills or like were you, did you have any sort of suspicion that he could have been CIA or undercover or anything? Not after that. Not after seeing his family. And I found out he was already in prison and all that sort of stuff.

They just, they don't do that. I was comfortable with him. Okay. I really like Barry. He was. my friend. He cheated off with some people. All right, we were just like... You guys got along great. We got along good. Really, I liked him.

And so I had a 690-a-tribal jet arrow commander. That thing was nearly knew. What's it called again? Arrow commander, a 6-690. 6-90. 690 B. B arrow commander. Yeah.

And it had a little jet engines that turned propellers. That thing was fast. It'd go to 300-something miles an hour, and it'd go right on up there. right with the jets for a while. Anyhow, he got in that thing, and I said, show me what you got. He said, show enough? I said, yeah. And it wasn't.

But a little while, I said, you don't have to show me no more. He was like Bob Hoover. He just did the, I mean, he was aerobatic, like the blue angels. Oh, yeah. I fly all right. But that guy was like the blue angels. I mean, it was just like, zzz. Like a god.

And then he cut the engine, and he just let it fly sideways to sideways until it comes hits the ground. The only person I've ever seen that is in the air show with Bob Hoover, the world champion. So he was that good. He was good. He had a thousand parachute jumps. And in that movie they made about America made about him, it was so wrong. He was such a gentleman. They had him coming out of whorehouses and women hanging all over him.

Yeah. That was just, I never heard him say damn. He didn't smoke. He didn't drink. He didn't do drugs. He was a businessman. He was a pilot. And a gentleman.

So after you were so impressed with his acrobatics and his flying skills, then what'd you do? I said, Barry, I got a point. This plane needs tanking. You know somebody? He said, yep. Needs what? Need tanking.

I need, it won't go to the range. Oh. And needs tanks in it. So he said, yeah, I got a mechanic in Mena, Arkansas. It keeps his mouth shut. And so I gave him $10,000, and he flew away in my new airplane. A few days later, he called and said, come to my house. I went to his house, and it was all tanked up.

Wow. And that's when I told him, you know, I've been stopping it. I'll hire you to fly. and I'll give you $2,000 a kilo. I was getting five. And so he was happy with it. And I said, but now we don't need this plane tanked. Well, first off, we did a few loads, and he would fly down and meet me in Belize at a ranch I had,

orange walk. And we would change a load over. But then it got dangerous. I figured, you know, we got $15, $20 million with cocaine changing planes here. And I would go into Jamaica because I didn't mind flying out of flying that southern end, but I was scared across the U.S. border. I'm not scared, but I'd rather not if I hire it done.

So, but then I told him we can refuel in the military base in Nicaragua. Well, he just couldn't believe it. So that was the only time I really ever impressed him. I said, yeah, can come out of Bolivia, out of Columbia anywhere. And they had that military base, no words, just come right in. They'll fuel you up, give you steak and eggs,

and polish your airplane, you'll be on your way. Really? Yeah. So, Barry flew. And I mean he would fly, but he wouldn't fly another until I paid him. So he did 500 kilos at the load. And so he was a million dollars he made. A million dollars for one flight.

Right. And he hired this guy, Emil Camp. I had to give the $20,000 for him to go down, get an meal out of the Honduranian jail. And Emil wasn't much of a pilot. Oh, he could fly, but he wasn't. He just get him around. Right.

So the two of them flew together. They were great big fellows. I said, good, and it's gracious. Two of y'all, you can put 400 kilos in there where y'all said. But anyway, he wouldn't fly without it. So you might like this little story. Hayward, moan and groan until I paid him. Well, I didn't get paid until they got paid.

And so I had a pipeline coming. And sometimes they'd owe me $6 or $7 million. It'd take three or four weeks for them to get money, and then I'd get what they did. So I was paying him. before I got paid. So I was like a loss. I'm back. Right. You're front, you're fron that money. Exactly. Yeah. So he wanted. So you were, you were paying Barry. Uh-huh. How much would you pay him on one trip? Uh, $2,000 kilo. I paid a million dollars a trip.

So you'd give Barry a million dollars cash. Yes. He would fly where? He would fly. We'd, we'd, we'd, we'd, he'd fly out of, um, where he wanted to up in Arkansas or Louisiana. And he would come over to a little radio station. Like where would he go? Where would he go? Where would he fly like to he'd fly to Columbia yeah but but we didn't know where we were going a lot of the times uh we would we would come over el banco it's at the forts of the magdalena river there and uh behind barren kia and there's a radio station i believe it's still 720 a m on your aisle and we come at 10 000 feet and circle and pretty soon they'll be a plane you'd see it it might be already there it'd be like usually a cessna 180 and he'd be circling and you'd get right behind him and you wiggle you

wings, you might go 100, 200 miles, and he'd land in the jungle. Oh, and they would tell you where to land. They wouldn't say a word. We didn't speak. We just followed that other air. You just follow the plane. Follow him where we'd go. And there was a signal they would do with the wings.

Well, we just knew it was him. Yeah. Okay. And so follow that plane. Did that sometime. Someone would go to the same place, but if they were the new place, we'd follow that plane. Okay. That was pretty neat.

And then you come back, stop it, Nicaragua refuel, and come all the way on it. He'd go, and he went to Mena. And this is what So he had the million dollars in cash? Yeah, I'd give him the million dollars every week. And what would he do with that million once he landed there? I don't know. So that was just his.

That wasn't for his cost to buy the cocaine or anything. No, we just, I got paid $5,000 a kilo. So I got paid $2.5 million and I gave him $1 million. Okay. But wouldn't they have to give him all of the cash, though? No, they didn't give him anything. Okay, okay. He just gave, all right, he would land in Mena, Arkansas.

Okay. And then he would put it in three different cars. Okay. And every day I had a fellow buying me six cars a week, great big ones. So he was, okay, okay, that was where I was confused. None of the transaction revenue is going through the pilot at all. The pilot is just the delivery person. He's a truck driver.

Okay, got it. So, but anyway, he would, I had, he had the drivers. I didn't even want to meet his drivers. That's how I was afraid to meet people. Right. They get caught. They're going to tell on it, which you all did. Exactly.

I had somebody buying cars. and they buy these LTDs or the Ford or Mercury Marquise. And they had big trunks. We put air shocks on, tires. It wouldn't go flat. New hoses, boom, boom. And then I gave those to the Colombians. And they would be a trunk full of cocaine and duffel bags.

They'd have rattlesnakes on it. Some of them have cowhorns. That meant this one went to this one, that went to that one. Oh, wow. So I had to just point the cars out to my friend Lito. and give him the key, bam. And I never want to see that car again. I said, it's going to your stay house.

I don't want it back. Right. It's $5,000 to you, buddy. And, oh, I said, you take it in New York, Canada where you want to. It's as good as you can do. So they liked it after a while. So anyway, one time, Barry was a belly aching a little bit about might be being slow on pace. So I was in the store, and I saw these stay-free minipads.

A pretty package. Stay-free minipads? Town packs. Oh, tampons. Tampons, yeah. Australia, Tampa. And so I got a million dollars and put it in a box, and I put those tampons on top of it, stay free, and wrap that thing up and put a bow on it.

That's great. Barry loved it. He made a place on his mantel piece for the stay frees. That's amazing. Yeah. That is absolutely amazing. So how long did you and Barry's relationship last? About two years.

Two years. Two years. Two years. And when did it again? go south what happened when it went south i got arrested in august 1982 so that that was the end of it and then he was still and then he went straight out full on working and he bought the planes from me he gave marie the money for all of them and what was owed and all that he took care of it 100 but he cut me out of the deal he ought to give me a little percentage after that but he didn't right so you how did you end up

getting arrested oh i just flew down a load i had 15 million dollars I was in a jet and I chartered it out of San Antonio and I flew down to what kind of a jet just like a private jet falcon I believe it was and I and there's two pilots and I was laying on top of the money and I took it to the bank and put it into the bank and the pilots said they wanted to stay for the weekend oh man this holiday da da da da da da I said all right I'll catch a jet back to Miami okay which and so when I landed in Miami I was arrested and they charged me with all kind of stuff but marijuana all marijuana stuff all marijuana they didn't get you any cocaine charge you Nothing. They didn't know anything about it. So I did two years and I got out and by that time I found Barry was Had been working with him and he'd been working with Oliver North and he'd been paying off How did you find out he'd been informant and working with these guys? I had heard it already Okay, so I was scared of him so when you were in prison, but I'll just tell you know Barry had it paid off He's whenever I wanted to land in Louisiana had a sheriff there sheriff there in a place it could for ten thousand dollars

or I landed on Interstate 10. They was building. It was beautiful. I followed that thing all way across Texas landing on it as they was building Interstate 10. The best runway you could ever find. Wow. With a truck there and turn light on, that's it.

Mile along 10, mile long runway. Jeez. And we go out in the next morning rub the black marks off where I'd land. Oh, my goodness. So after you got out, did you try to reach back out to him? You were done with him. You didn't even try.

You wanted to know. No, no. It wasn't that. I couldn't think that very. I didn't know what the deal was. So I was watching, I was having breakfast. And there was Ronald Reagan's blue eyes

right there on television. We said, we have absolute proof that the communist Sandinista government is in the cocaine running business. And there was that old fat lady the C-126 on the runway in Nicaragua

would bail a den. And I, oh shit. Did you sell the plane to? No, that was the one that Barry owned. He bought that after me. but I knew what he was doing, and I knew that they was into it. So, but Barry, I'm going to back up. Now, he wouldn't land anywhere else.

He says, I got paid off to the governor. I got paid off as high as you can get, but it's going to cost you $50,000 every time my wheels touch the ground in Minnesota. So every time he landed, I had to pay $50,000. Wait, wait, wait, what? Yeah. Well, what part of the story is this? You're backing up now.

You're backing up, but this is before you got to... No, I'm talking about you. talking about Barry wanting to land at Mena, Arkansas instead of Louisiana. When I started flying with him, he said, I will not land anywhere else except Mena. I got it paid off. I cannot be arrested. I cannot get caught in Mena, Arkansas. Okay, so he claimed he had some sort of a deal in Mena, Arkansas, where he could not get, he wouldn't get caught, he was protected. Exactly. So later on we know that it was a CIA. And they were shipping guns back down with him. But he also,

said he was having dinner with the governor. So Mr. Clinton was not far away. He was a strong manor of the governor in his home in Mina. And the movie that Tom Cruise made was written and played out as Mina, the name of the movie. And the Democratic Party got so hard behind him until they couldn't come out with a movie until after the election with Hillary Clinton. Because it shed bad light. Wow. So the director quit.

And that movie was changed all around and changed into America made in a very poor movie. Right. So they were hitting too close to home. So what did Barry did, what kind of details did he tell you about, about Mina, Arkansas and his sort of like cloak of invisibility? He just said, listen, it's going to cost you $50,000 every time my planes hit, touch her down. I cannot get caught. Listen, plane out, I cannot get caught in Mina, Arkansas. all. It's 100% protected.

Immunity. He said from the highest to the right on out. And then the time of two, he said, I'm having dinner with the governor tonight. I don't know where he was or not, but that was what he. He mentioned to you casually. I'm having dinner with the governor. Wow. So, and then later on, we know that the CIA was putting some small arms on his planes

to take back to the conchre so they could load it up with cocaine. Can you imagine what they thought they was going to do with a pipe? FIPER full of AK-47s in a war. That was just a front. What do you mean it was a front? The CIA, some outlawed CIA agents are saying, okay, we're going to supply the war. Congress won't supply the arms that we need to fight the communist in Nicaragua.

So we're going to have Barry, and he's going to take these guns down for us in his Piper. Right. It's like a BB gun. It wasn't enough guns to really make a difference for anything. Nothing, absolutely. but we're going to bring tons of cocaine back to pay for them. Oh, my gosh. So what, I mean, I'm not super familiar with the story, but what were they doing?

So if Barry was bringing back tons of cocaine to Arkansas, who was buying it? They were spreading it all over. They was putting it into that crack cocaine business, I suppose. So anyway, they had to hammer down. Yeah. Now, so you're saying that actual like politicians and stuff and CIA officials were purchasing this cocaine and spreading it out and selling it to people? They were having it. They were buying it in Colombia, shipping it up by Barry.

And of course, they were distributing it. Oh, they had their people distributing it. That means that's what the whole story is about it. There's no secret. This is what I'm telling you. It's just real. Wow. And you, and you kept in touch with Barry.

So after you got out of prison, did you keep in touch of Barry at all? No, I didn't keep in touch with him. Mari did somewhat. Mari sold planes to him after you will. He just came and brought her the money for the planes and said, Mari, this is straight. So I didn't think too much about it anymore. I was all right.

So when I got out of prison, I went out, just a short while. And some days, when I saw Ronald Reagan blue eyes on the television saying that the communist Sandinista government was in the cocaine business. And my guts turned to ice water. I said, oh, Barry has done it. So then it was later on that afternoon, I got a call from him. He said, I'm coming out tonight, Roger. I'll meet you at this little French restaurant town.

I didn't know it was there. So I'll be there at 9 o'clock. Where was this? In for Santa Barbara. Okay. So I came in the door at 9 o'clock, and he was leaning at the back of the laying in he had gained weight, and he was leaning back. And I walked up to him.

I said, are you wired, Barry? And he said, no, I'm not. I said, well, I'm not going to say anything. Just tell me. So he just started talking. And I looked around and I said, DEA agents. He said, every one of them is about 20 people in the room,

blue jeans, ladies with leather skirts and all on. So the room was full of DEA agents, and I'm on this hot seat. So he started telling me, and he just said, Roger, they wrapped me up. And they left me hold in the bag. I couldn't do anything but testify. I couldn't do three life sentence.

And he put his hands up over his eyes, and the tears ran down between his cheek, between his fingers. He said, I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. He said, so I've gone to Congress. He said, I went to see Edward Meese. That was an attorney general at the time. I flew my jet up there, and I knocked on the door,

and told him that they was bringing tons of cocaine out of Columbia, and he wouldn't believe me, he kicked me out. And the next day I went back, and I said, I can prove to you. They're doing it. So get the guy, Jake Jacobson, he put him with him. He was a DEA agent. And we went down and did one and a half tons.

And I bailed the plane in at Nicaragua, took a thousand pictures. And I testified before Congress, and I've told them all your part. But you're under my umbrella. As long as you testify with me exactly what I say, and we use my lawyer, you can have your passport, have your money, you can live anywhere in the world you want to. The bear, they're going to kill you, friend. Oh, no.

Oh, Chua brothers, this and another. He's in Spain, another one dead, and this and that another. And so the DEA came over and he sat down, and we had Chavez Riegel and ice, and we had a nice time. I liked him. He said, I think, crop dust from Alabama, would have been on the same team.

I'd have been all right. I really did like the man. Yeah. And he just said, listen, you can come to Miami tomorrow in chains or you can come first class with Mari. It doesn't matter to me, but you're going to testify before a federal grand jury. And if you do, you can keep your money, your passport, you can live anywhere in the world you want to live.

But if you don't, the only place you're going to ever see your family again is in a federal prison visiting room. And he said, and you got to have your pilot from Santa Barbara. You got to give him up. Barry knew that I was flying, had another airline going, same as him, did more than did but he didn't know who Colombians told him I didn't ever tell him right right they trying to give a little competition I think so I just my guts turned to ice water and I went to see my friend my friend Jerry I'll see his name and me had been him been friend

50 years I wouldn't know way I could tell on him just couldn't do it I mean I was just sick so I went told him I said Jerry I don't know what they're going to do but they can cut my tongue out I won't tell on you it's not going to do it So I thought, well, I better go down to Miami and see what I can do. So I went into a fancy lawyer's office and he was on the treadmill and he got off and I talked a little bit and he said, well, being a snitch is like being pregnant. You either are or you not. That's an interesting way to put it. No, no, no, it ain't that man.

I've got to say something. I'm in a mess. He said, well, if you say something, you've got to tell them everything. You leave anything out there, use everything you did, you're going to get several life sentences. Now, whoa, whoa, whoa. I went to see another lawyer, and he was just kinder, but he said the same thing. You fool with him, you've got to tell them everything. You leave anything out.

If you work with him, you've got to go all the whole way. All the way, you've got to tell them it's all or nothing. So I couldn't do it, not even on my life. So I went to a festival restaurant that night. It was on my birthday, January the 26th, 1985. And Barry knew that was, I liked that restaurant. It was lovely. There's no name on the door.

In Miami? Yeah, and Carl Gables. So I went in there and him and his wife came in, Gabby. She was looking real pretty, and Barry was. And we had dessert together, and I just tell him, Barry, I just can't do it. I said, they're going to kill you, friend. He said, oh, no, da, da, da, da, da. I hugged his neck.

Who were you telling him was going to kill him? The Colombian is going to kill him. Colombian. Certainly they're going to kill him. Of course they're going to kill him. If he testifies against all. You're just going to die, man. You ain't got no choice.

Right. And you can go now, but you guys are ruthless. Doesn't matter where you are. They'll find you, right? It's almost anybody you tell like that. Most of these people kill you. You're destroying their lives and their families and children and all that sort of stuff. And you did it and you did it with your eyes wide open and you made a deal.

You just, you just can't tell. So most people don't live by that honor and so a lot of them get killed and so anyhow I hugged his neck I may have kissed him and anyhow I and the children fled to Brazil and the next day or what? Oh yeah right away I think we went back to the house and got some things and we were gone and so we living in Brazil and I got worried I was up in somewhere in Brazil and I was calling the Colombian they owed me a bunch of money They owe me $3.5 million. So I was trying to collect some of that. And as long as Barry was alive and this thing was going, they was going to pay me.

But when Barry died, oh, have good news. Good news. They killed Barry Seal last night or yesterday sometime. And I cried. And I told Murray and the daughter cried. How long after this? How long after you moved to Columbia? Do they tell you this?

Six months. Six months after you moved to? I'm sorry, after you moved to Brazil. I think that it was January of 26th of 1985 that I, was with Barry. Yes. At the restaurant. Yeah, and I think he was killed July of 86, just thereabout.

About six months later, he was killed. Wow. So now they have no case against me. So he was the only thing they had against me. And on the first load that I flew. So how did he die? Do you know exactly how he died? I mean, I know there's the story.

I mean, what is like the official story of how he died? Well, of course, he was assassinated. by a guy, they're still three of them still alive and doing life in Louisiana prison. The guys like... Rinaldo was a trigger man. I know him quite well. I'll tell you a little story about Rinaldo. On the first load I did for somebody, I don't know where it was, I think it was this guy,

Jaime. This guy is a hit man and ugly fella. Anyhow, I landed at a banana plantation there somewhere in jungle. And I had a terrible property. and it was small wheels, a large wheel well. And they put 300 kilos of cocaine in there. And this guy got him with me with a Mac 10 shot pistol. And he used to make sure I go to Louisiana.

I could have went to Argentina. He wouldn't know which way it was. So anyway, we took off, and the wheels, it was muddy, and the wheel wheels filled up with mud, and the gear wouldn't come up. So here I am doing 200 miles an hour instead of 300. I'm not going to get home. 2,500 miles, I'm just not going to make it.

So, Belize where I used to land and refuel, the old prop planes with marijuana, a really nice fellow, Mr. Carter there. For $10,000, I could stop and refuel. So I told this fellow, we got to stop. No, no, no, no, Louisiana. He put the gun right to my head to Mac 10. I said, well, shoot me, fool.

You're going to die, too, you know. So I wasn't worried about it, didn't you? So we landed at this cattle farm in Belize. and oh, he was terrible beside himself. He didn't even know where he was. But anyway, Mr. Carter sent a boy out to wash the plane, clean the wheel wheels out. We went and had chicken and potato stew,

and he was all happy with it, and we flew on up to Louisiana. Wow. That's when he met Barry. So he's a guy that actually shot and killed Barry. Okay. So his name was Ronaldo. Wow.

Now, what's the story with how, Bush was involved with Barry. I don't know anything about that. Barry has two pictures of George and Jeb Bush walking away from his plane in Opelaca Airport where they just bought two kilos of cocaine. That's all what he said. That's what Barry said? And they got a package.

And he snapped their picture as they going away from the plane. So I don't know. And I think that's been on the Internet some too. Is it possible that the, I mean, I mean, isn't it true that the American government or the CIA or the D.E.A. Made it extremely easy for the Colombians to kill him and to find him. DeBerry? Yeah.

I don't, no, I don't think so. I think that they were, yeah, well, I tell you, I don't know who did it, but. Do you think that they wanted him dead? Do you think the U.S. government wanted him dead, the DEA? Not particularly. No. I think that the police in Louisiana wanted him dead, the DEA in that area, right where they've been chasing him. just say, you guys ain't got sense enough to catch me.

Or I'm not doing anything today. He'll be burning that government gas up. You know, he just bait him a little bit. Yeah. They wanted to go and take his picture and make sure he was dead. But I don't think that he did anything to make people really hate him that bad. But anyway, he was flaunting it in front of him. Right.

And the judge is the one. Now, who influenced the judge? The judge killed him because he has already testified against all these Colombians. And the judge gives him six months. in a halfway house every night at 6 o'clock he's got to come in so the judge said him

so that's his death sentence that death sentence 100% and they told he's attached to that fucking halfway house and they're definitely going to find him there he got to go every night

at 6 o'clock and the DEA stood up in court and said your honor this is a death sentence they will kill him he said he should have thought of that before he did this wow

and he said what he's going to have body guards no a guy in prison can't have body guards can't have arms he can't have nothing he got to drive right up into that halfway house every night at 6 o'clock and they was waiting on him just riddled him you can see the

pictures on the internet he just they said he put his hands over his ears he shot him like 50 times in the car when he came oh my god it was sad how did you feel where were you what were you doing remember the moment when they came to tell you oh we got great news barry seal i called mario in columbia and that's when he told me oh great news great news they killed barry seal you know well i cried i went to morri and miriams they cried he was all for friend. Even though he had testified, he put me in his, he did the best he could.

The CIA had left him hold in the bag. 100% they set him up. And whenever all that Oliver North stuff come about arms for cocaine and Iran-Contra deal, they just split. Everything was in his name, everything.

He was a one. What's he going to do? His own people. See, he was a CIA, man. Did you know that? Barry was with the CIA. prior to all this. Prior to the airlines. Right. And he had over a thousand parachute jumps,

and he was George Bush's real good friend, the old man. He was his protege. And when he died, George Bush's personal phone number was in his wallet. And the lawyer called, and he said, hey, Barry, how you doing, old buddy? And he said, they just killed Barry last night and a click.

And he hung right up. Yeah. Jesus Christ, man. Wow. What a fucking story. I'm glad to be out. I thought one time I'd never get out of prison. So you're in, when you got the phone call about Barry, where were you in Brazil?

Yeah, I was in Brazil. And what was your next move after all this? What were you thinking? Where were you in your life at this point? What did you want to do next? Like, what, did you have any sort of plans from, you guys wanted to just like to stay in Brazil and just lay low there for the rest of your life? Well, me and Murray had different plans. Okay.

I kind of like Brazil. I'm not like it, but it was an opportunity for me to go into the interior and grow soybeans. I'm a farmer. And I mean, the land was $6 an acre, and it was just like easy to clean. Oh, you got no fertilize, nothing, just plant the seeds. Right. Need combines. So I took Mari out this year's 30,000, let's see 30,000 hectares, 75,000 acres.

And she just cried and said, Roger, if I die and this guy, this Godforsaken country, please don't leave my bones here. So I just felt sorry if I didn't matter to me, wherever I had a lot of money and just go where I wanted to. And was all your money in cash, or did you keep it in bank accounts? Or did you obviously have you had tens of millions of dollars, right? Yes. But I invested it with crooks.

With crooks. Everybody's just about to crook if you give them your money. Yeah, that's, that's, it just don't come back. I don't know what happens. That's the way it works, no matter what business you're in, isn't it? Exactly. You let somebody else hold you money, and it's gone. Yeah.

So I invest in a lot of people on huge real estate deals. And one thing I did buy, I bought the world's most expensive coin. It called a Brasher de Bloom. Really? Yeah, I paid $350,000 for it, and I already needed some money. So she sold it for $7.50, and the guy turned around the next day and sold it for $1,000. And it's worth $10 million now. What? A coin? A coin. How do you say it? Brasher de bloom.

Brasher de bloom. I'd love to get a picture of this on the screen. A de bloom is the pieces of eight. You've heard of those? Oh, yeah. Well, that's an eighth of a de bloom. Is this it right here? Oh, yeah, that's it. There you go. There's five of them. I had the unique one. There they are. I don't know that that's it. No, that don't look like it. No, I haven't seen it.

got a wheelbar on one side and look up Brasher de Blume. Yep, that's what he typed in. Okay, well, that's what it would be then. So that thing is worth over $10 million now? Today, yes. And you paid $300,000 for it. $350,000 to be exact, and a little story to go with that. They, it was in, I can't pronounce it, but the N-Korn newspaper, Nenumistic.

Uh-huh. A paper. And the Bank of Miami read about it. So they went to Sam, the corn dealer, and it says, and it says, mystery buyers but buys most expensive corn on earth, you know. Really? So that was just one thing that brought a little light to me. So they said, we would give you a million dollar insurance policy

against it if you will loan it for us to put in our bank. So they built a pedestal in the bank of Miami, an old marble down there, and they put that corn in it with lights on it. And they give me the insurance policy, Sam did. if anything happened to it. You get a million bucks. Well, I had that in a lot box in Grand Cayman Island, and guess what? It was on the judge's desk.

Oh, my God. Oh, they was unmerciful. Did you have bank accounts set up in Cayman Islands? Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah, and that money got stolen, too. The guys out in Bakersfield live in large. Who?

The banker. He took the money out of the bank and just closed the bank down. and now he lives when I got arrested, now he's out in Bakersfield. And if I even say boo to him, I'll go to prison for extortion or something. Wow. So after he finds out you're in prison, he just says, fuck it, I'm taking his money. He just shut the bank down and took my money. Oh, my God.

That is wild. That is just wild. His name is Stephen. What's his name, Mighty? McTaggart. You guys remember his name. I called him. How much money did he steal from you?

Oh, I'm not saying it. You don't want to say? Oh, three and a half million dollars at that time. Okay. Yeah. Good Lord. Good Lord. So, Marie doesn't want to be in Brazil anymore.

But you guys are still in Brazil, you guys. So we went out there. We went all the way to the tip of Argentina right down to the right to the bottom of it, almost to the straits. And you swaya. And then we visited Argentina and looked at all the glaciers and the ranches and things, and we just couldn't find it. So we got first class tickets to Amsterdam, Marie, where she's from. Her eye was just sparkling.

She got on that flame with the Dutch people and speaking her language, and we went to Holland. And they lived in France for a year, and then we went down to Mallorca, Spain. Oh, Majorca. That's a hotspot. Where I met Mr. Howard Marks, the author of... Myorca is the big island, right? It's not very big, but it's an island. It's famous.

You took a ferry there. Yeah, right. And so I met Howard Marks, the infamous Howard Marks. Who was Howard Marks? He wrote Mr. Nice, a famous book, one of the first ones about marijuana smuggling ever come out. Oh, really? Yeah. He was sleazy.

What do you mean by the sleazy? Oh, we did some deals, and whenever he knew his time was up, he hired me to haul a load out of Morocco for two. million dollars and he turned me in instead of paying me wow bastard nice word for him and i was and i escaped from police three times and i still couldn't believe he did it to me i couldn't believe it so you were in spain you're still doing deals yeah still running shit and i was i bought a ship my was holding hashish on a ship now you're you're giving up the planes and you're taking ships taking ships yeah all the 20 ton loads out of Pakistan and 20-ton loads out of Thailand. How did you get, where did Pakistan come into the picture here?

We just buy hashish there. You go over there and the camels and ride the camels around with the fellas up towards Afghanistan. So this guy, this guy said, hey, we got hashish in Pakistan. Oh, we can do it. You move it, we can do it. So we did. And he had all these connections.

He had connections. Okay. And a real nice fellow. They all did now. But anyhow, it was a good fellow. So you bought a ship and you sailed to Pakistan. Uh-huh. What was that like?

Nothing. Nothing. Just nothing. You don't, was the, you don't, the experience wasn't anything? Not particularly. We was in Malton, the taxi drivers, the, they had some guys from North Africa that, that killed the taxi drivers and they gouged their eyes out and reached in there to get the little bullet out and throwed them in behind the ship.

And they came up all around the, the taxi drivers did around the turn of the ship. That was the most exciting thing. They would have all this policeman all over me. Jeez. 20 tons of hashis from Pakistan to where? To Canada. To Canada. Uh-huh.

How long did that take? I don't remember. I really don't. More than a couple days. Oh, six weeks, something like that, I reckon. Six weeks. I didn't do that part of the trip, but I met the trip with a float plane. And then I flew the...

So you didn't stay on the ship the whole way? No, I took it over there. Okay. And then I bought a Cessna 206. on floats from catch-catch them and on floats i love the way you say it's basically it just means you could land it on the ocean right yeah on the war and he would land the side of the ship no we they unloaded it and piled it up and then i hauled it down across the sand one fugus straits between Canada and the United States and I landed on a lake in Washington state

and I haul load after loading that's naughty weather you couldn't see nothing just pull the power and come in and land on the lake and hope you didn't hit nothing Jeez That's insane, man That's just so Bunk such a crazy story It's amazing that you're sitting here alive right now After all that you've been through

Like it's just like Yeah, I almost got killed on the first load of that Across the It was a moonlight night Full moon And I'd been to that Lake O'Sette I believe is how it's pronounced In Washington? Washington State

Just over on the Olympic Mountains Just on the coast It's a pretty big lake. Got some islands in there. It's got a radio station at the end of the lake. And you can make your approach right over that radio station and land on the lake. And so I'm coming, and I think, oh, I'm a little early. I must have a tailwind.

It's clear. And I see the lake, and I see a white sand around it. I didn't remember a beach on the lake, but okay, it must be nice. So I pull the power to land. And I get right down almost to land, and I see that it's not a lake. It's a burnt over area where it's been clear cut and been set on fire and it's black like the lake. And I see stags sticking up 10, 15 feet high everywhere and I'm down in them. And I just pull the power and just go out of the jaws of death, just trying to pull that thing straight back out of there.

What I didn't realize is that what I thought was a beach was a logging road going around this cutover area. Oh, my gosh. So you can just sometime your mind can just fool you, something terrible. How much are you making when you're starting to start? to run the stuff from Pakistan up to... We didn't make much. I don't remember how much we paid for, but we should have made a lot,

but it had too much yak fat in it, and it wouldn't stay lit, and I think we found... Too much what? Yack fat. Yack fat. They take the fat from the yak and take the marijuana, the glue of the...

the juice from the marijuana, and rub it with their hands like this until it gets hot, and they make hashish. And if they put the yak... fat in it to make it stick together. And if you put too much on it, it won't stay lit on their cigarette. So it just brought the price way down. So it just wasn't that.

It's what. No, no more cocaine deals once you went over to Europe? No, I stayed away from that. Okay. So, yeah, I did. I did a load of cocaine to Australia.

The biggest ever in the history of Australia, I got caught with $400 million worth down there. When was this? After you moved to Europe? Yeah. How did this deal? come about and who are you doing business with it was it the same guy that you met in myorka no we don't we don't split now he's done he doesn't rip me off real bad okay

I got to prison I escaped from the I they arrested me in Spain I I escaped three times and the third time they put me in jail there in myorka and oh you're in jail in myorker and so in prison in myork and so I was they took me to court for extradition I had double extradition And Germany is asking for my extradition with this hashish. I hired a guy to haul the load. And the United States is asking because I owe them 25 years special parole. And they're asking for that.

And they say they got me from moving several million dollars with the gold coins. They said they could have, before money laundering, they said, he moved these gold coins that the United States government would have seized, had they known they belonged to Reeves. That was the indictment. Wow. Heared five years, and I got five years for it. But Germany wanted me because I...

So they just made up some bullshit. Oh, just anything to get you to extradact me. Because now Barry was gone. They really had nothing else on you, so they just made something up. So I paid the German captain of my ship $400,000 to haul a load of hashish. And he bought, he bought him a long cigar and a long BMW. The police arrested him. They found the money, and they said, if you'll tell us who it is, you'll be home by Christmas.

But they didn't tell him which Christmas You got seven years up in Germany So now they've arrested me in Spain After I got away from so much They handcuffed me this way Like over my hands this way Everywhere I go And it's very painful if you left that way overnight

Oh yeah I can imagine You can't get out of them that way So Let me see So anyway they take me to court And Mari's there and my son And I'm there for the extradition hearing

and I have four guards guarding me. All my paperwork says use maximum restraints. Because you had already escaped. And they got my history from Interpol. So I'm sitting and I talked to the lawyer. I said, I'm above the palm trees. How high is this place? I'm on the third floor.

And he said, you'll kid yourself. And I said, I'm dead anyway. I've got this thing, three and a half tons of hashies charge in Germany. and 25 years parole in America plus the coins. Right. So I bound across it. When two of them leave to go smoke, I bound across the room and jumped upon the desk of the sonographer,

which is nine months pregnant, and I kicked the window out of the courtroom. And I jump upon the ledge. I'm handcuffed. Not like this. No, I'm in front of them. Oh, you're in court. And so I looked down, and it's an awful, awful long way.

I thought there might be some power lines or telephone lines I could grab on the way down. down and break it, but they wasn't. And there was a car parked a little bit up on it. It looked like it was a station wagon. And I'd worked on the Los Angeles Fire Department practice jumping in the net from four floors. So I'd bailed out and hit the top of that car. Wham?

What was your strategy when you were falling from the... I hit right on my heels and my butt right in, and the roof caved in and saved my life. But it went down and destroyed that car. And the... Like in a sitting position you landed. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay.

But more on my feet. Okay, more on your feet. And I still have a dead spot in my back from that jump. It gets hot if I get upside of something. I have to get it off. So, I mean, it was like Donald Duck. I jumped out of that car and ran. Anyhow, the next day the newspaper said,

Spider-Man escapes. Anyhow, they caught me, and they asked that I to get him to Germany. And Germany gave me eight years for using a German citizen in the international crime. They didn't have any hashish or nothing, but because I'd hired a German citizen. And he told, if he'd have kept his mouth shut,

there'd been nothing. Wow. So I got eight years up there. So you spent the next eight years of your life in Germany and prison? No, after one year, I escaped from Lubeck, maximum security prison.

What? I don't think anybody else escaped. So I went out to the bars and got all cut up real bad and hurt and and lost my clothes and got my shoes and... So this wasn't some sort of like tunneling escape. Oh no, I went through the bars and

went and went on the roof and went above the guard towers. Then I jumped down on one guard tower by the Sally Port and bailed over the fence into a pile of dirt, a sand pile and got away. And a woman was there, I watched her and it was raining real hard and I'd lost my

clothes most of them and I had my blue jeans on and I watched her and a little boy come and she brought her husband to the door and when she went back, I jumped on top of the guard tower, which was one floor below me, and the guy went, hey, it was a tin roof. And they're trained to kill you. I mean, they got to save the moves out there.

And then I went across, and I went straight towards her so he couldn't shoot me. And then I went around behind the cars and was running down the hill, I mean, stride. And here her bam, bam, bam, bam. She's up on the sidewalk, knocking the parking meters over, trying to kill me. And I jumped behind some car, and she just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, at me. and the little boy standing in the seat, she tore the fender off of her car on another car trying to get me. Really?

I jumped over a fence and it cut my hands all up. They had glass on top of it. And I had shoes on with $200 that Mari had slipped me in the prison. And my shoes went down. I went off my knees in the mud and the blood and cut my chest all up. Oh, man. And so I took off running and lost my shoes and my $200. Now I'm barefooted and just having a pair of blue jeans, no top on.

And I get away and get to Holland. And you got to Holland. You crossed the border. Crossed the border. I had a heck of a time. At what point did you meet up with Mari? I didn't. She was mad with me.

Told me to go back. Ooh. Ouch. Why was she mad? Because you escaped? You destroy my life. What do you mean? Oh, my gosh.

That police is going to be here anytime. I can't get the papers out of the house. What do I do with them? Right. I bury them under a rock. I don't care. Go. Mm-hmm.

I think she was tired of it at that time. How old were you at this point when you escaped that prison in Germany? It was 1990, so I was 47 years old. 47 years old, wow. And what did you do when you got to Holland? I met up with Mari's cousin, and she had buried $100,000 for me on the place there in case I did get out. And she told me, you go to the Linden tree, you go to the haystack, And you go to the linden tree and you turn right and you go 10 steps.

But she didn't tell me there's 20 linden trees. We had fun. So they were messing with you, huh? No, no. I mean, Marie just remembered where she buried it. So I got iron rod and just I finally found it. Okay. And then I got me some clothes.

I stayed there for a while and got a passport. And I went back to South America. And then I went back to see the Colombians and the people that I had. you and stayed there for a while and then I got a job to take a boat to Australia with a ton of cocaine on it so I took a boat down there and I got caught took a boat from from Columbia no I took I bought the boat in home of Louisiana and I took it to Australia from there what kind of boat was it it was an oil supply vessel one that goes out to the oil wells okay and when they get old they can't get insurance on them so they sold his scrap but there's some you

could eat off the engine room floor. Oh, really? Like a museum piece. How long? How big was it? How long was it? Like a hundred footer. A hundred footer.

And how did you, where did the cocaine come from? It came, they loaded me in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just above the equator. Oh, really? A tuna boat came out of an old wooden tuna boat. Came to me in rough weather and throwed it over. Just they threw it over, they threw it over the deck? They swarmed over and stole everything they could. They wanted my food, my extra fuel.

Oh, really? Oh, boy, it was a bunch of savages. Jesus. And how many people are on your crew on that ship? Three of us. There's three of us. Me by myself, really. I had my brother-in-law with me, and the Colombian that got on him, both of them were seasick and couldn't stand up and didn't know how to do anything.

I had to cook and wash the dishes. Oh, my gosh. And how long? So, talk to me, tell me about this trip from, from, from, you know, from. the Caribbean where they loaded up your ship to Australia. What was that like? Well, that was interesting. I left home of Louisiana.

I never run the ship before. I mean, it was a learning curve for me. And somebody left the water on down in one of the bathrooms. We only had 600 gallons of fresh water because we'd change it all to fuel. So we ran out of water before we got to Key West. So I had to go into Key West and get water. And then I took off and went across the tongue of the ocean through the Bahamas, and I went to Senegal. What's the island's off of the, anyhow, some island 600 miles off of Senegal.

I can't think of the name of them right now. Anyhow, I stayed there a week. The Colombians told me they'd load me there. Like Barbados? No, no. This is a, what? Canary. No, south of the canary is about a thousand miles.

I can't think of it. I know it as good as my own name. I know the praia is the name of the town. Hmm. Oh, it's anyhow. It's Senegal. Okay. And so I stayed there, and then the Colombians said, no, come back towards Columbia a thousand miles.

I'm like, what? Because I just got enough money, fuel just barely to make it to Australia. So I have to go back a thousand miles, and then they're not there, and I have to go three or four days cruising around up and down below the radar, of the satellites, and finally they show up and throw the stuff. phone and then I go down and I go fall out of the center of the Atlantic Ocean down because the current goes counterclockwise in the southern oceans clockwise and the northern oceans and I went far south of Cape Town and went down about 50 degrees in the great

southern ocean near Antarctica and I came with it and I woke up one morning and the waves was I fished in Alaska, you remember? Yeah. These waves was just indescribably tall. It wasn't rough, but they were just mountains. Giant swells. Just swells, and it was sharp. I mean, almost straight up and down.

And the boat would come, and it would just come up, and it would stop and go, and then the propellers would come out of the water, and it'd be a curled off. And then surf down it, and the nose would stick in the ground, under water, it'd come back over. Well, I was real uncomfortable. I was supposed to go under towards Melbourne, And so I got out of it and I turned north to get out of that sharp latitude.

And I went unloaded up about the middle of the West Australian coast in the real desert area and was arrested there. But I have visions. In two weeks before I was arrested, I had a crystal clear vision of me being arrested and how it was and my feelings. they was on my back when the hands and putting a handcuffs on me and I was in the sand down there and I was crying and I was just laying poor, poor, poor Mari. I knew our life was over together and it happened exactly like I saw it in that vision.

So I turned my ship from and went 500 miles from where I went both to go but the snitch was waiting on me so I didn't have any choice. Who was the snitch? The guy named Eduardo, the owner's brother, friend and he had been working with him from day one so they knew all we were coming from before we left so your vision of this all this happening and everything fallen apart came came to fruition yes so what happened after they arrested you oh they put us in a bulletproof vans one of those things like armored trucks and took us to prison wow and how many and you ended up obviously you

didn't escape that prison right you stayed in austral no i didn't i i could have one time and marie wouldn't send the little money needed it have some help. Marr was pissed at you. She ain't going to help me get out. Were you guys in communication at all? Did you guys communicate back and forth? Every day, Australia prisons is so much nicer than American prisons.

Really? Yeah. Oh, they give you a long time and it's hard, but they treat you good. The food's good. The officers seem to go to school to have a little more intelligence than just the scumbags that they have. The officers are way different in there. Oh, yeah. I feel like I've always, I've always.

always thought with all the people that I've talked to that I've been in and out of prison, especially on this podcast, is that the people that end up in the United States that end up being prison guards are like the people who couldn't even make it as cops. They couldn't even make it as security guards. They are sort of the lowest-lis-lis-slum on the face of the earth. And it seems like the people that are the security guards are prison guards in this country, they're not people that are there because that's what they wanted to be. It's because they failed at something else and they just... They got a job.

And they got a badge and they got authority and they just struck. Right. Like you woke up, well, you get talked ugly too. They kill people in there. Mm-hmm. They hurt you. And the prison guards in Australia, was it like they were paid better? They were educated more.

They actually, they were. All of that. Was there like more of like a sense of like a mission to get something done there? Like we got a. Oh, it wasn't good, but it was just not, it wasn't such hatred as these fools here have for you. It just didn't have that ring. for it. Oh, you had some nasty ones once in a while. Right. They'd be like one out of 20 or 30 might be nasty.

Okay. But here, you get every other one that's nasty. Right. Good 50% of them. It's some nice ones here, too. But it's rare. So how many years did you stay in that prison in Australia? 18 years. 18 years.

And it was the most maximum security prison that there is in that country. It's the most secure prison in the southern hemisphere. The most secure prison in the state. the Southern Hemisphere. No one has, yes. And what was your experience like there for 18 years? Well, when I first went in, I've been in a week or two, and when they've got my paperwork that I escaped from five different prisons,

they came and arrested me right where I was having supper. And they took me to that prison. I was in the Hakea prison. They took me to a Kazarina prison. And they put me in a shoe. And I was in there for over a year. And that's it. The shoe is basically just an isolated box

just by yourself. Well, there was five of us in this. Okay. And it was a, they had room for 12 prisoners in there. And they had, it was kind of like the silence of the lambs. That was a big cage.

And they had six guards on the other side looking at you through a one-way mirror. And they come in the morning with all of them had big clubs and they opened the door. And they brought food in. We cooked it ourselves. And then they come in,

six o'clock locked our doors and that was it that's all we had in them you had a little you could talk to them through a through a speaker and that was all it wasn't bad but it was just like how long am i going to be in here and that's when i had the uh i wondered okay i've got 25 years in america and i've escaped from the german prison i've done this got life here i might never see my children and my grandchildren they might ever know me i believe i'll write about when my grandma bought me the little horse and they had a computer room in there so you were there for life

you thought you were there for life I was hoping I'd get out I certainly behave myself I had to go 18 years before I could ask for parole so I'd write it down okay when I got the Mexican Pinto I'm gonna write that story tomorrow

so they had the little computer room there and I didn't know how to turn the thing on and it had a thing called paint brush. You didn't have a program on it. So I could type, so I could type one line. And then the next day I think about

when my daddy was robbed in Chattanooga, and I'd write that little story. And then I got where I'd write two of three of them a day. And in the end of about three or four months, I had over a million words written in one line. Wow. So when I got out of the shoe,

they gave it to me on disc. And I went and got out, and they let me buy a computer. They let you buy a computer. Oh, really? Yeah. It wasn't hooked up to anything, but you could do all the, you could put a lot of programs on it, like encyclopedias.

Like a laptop or something? No, it was a full-on computer. And where did you keep it? In your cell. Really? I had a cell with a door and a lock to it. Yeah. Oh, wow.

It's pretty nice. They didn't know a lie about it now compared to America. It's quiet. No internet, though. No. Okay. Nothing like that. But you had telephones, and it wasn't expensive.

I call them Ari every day for 20 minutes. So anyway, I do that thing out, and it took me two years to straighten out what all I had written and saw what. It was all different colors where I'd misspelled. I just put what my thoughts were. So you went through and edited it and revised it. I had to write it, really, because I was just writing my thoughts as fast as I could just put them. So that's how I did it. So I took it out, and I took two thirds of it out.

So there's only 520 pages. They'd have been 1,500 pages. I'd put it all in there. Wow. And you have it published into a book now, which is called, what's it called? Smuggler. The smuggler. They'll just smuggler.

Just smuggler. Smuggler, Roger Reeves. A memoir. A memoir. And it's on the Amazon best-selling list. It's done good. I enjoyed it. It's a fascinating.

And you have the audio going to be done soon? It's already done. I'm just waiting for Amazon. For approval. Right, right. Yeah. So what did you take away from all of this, from this crazy, amazing life that you've had? And after all the time, well, actually, let's go back.

Because you were in Australian prison for 18 years. But once you got out of prison there, you went to another prison, right? Horrible. I was treated something terrible. There was three Australian marshals with me. I come back handcuffed because there's a warrant from the United States, from parole from 1977. 43 years ago for possession of marijuana. I got off the airplane laughing and chatting with the Australian guards.

I was slammed upside the wall by border protrurity. Eyes forward, eyes forward, kicking my legs apart, putting handcuffs on me so hard to cut the blood off, leg irons, irons, irons for us. And they walked me about 100 yards, turn me over to the marshals. The marshals took some of the leg irons and stuff off. chain me to the wall and left me there all day. Then they took me to the Metropolitan Detention Center.

On Conair? No, I was just in a van. There was in Los Angeles. They took me to Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles and put me into isolation. I said, what in the world am I in isolation for? I done nothing. I was there three or four days, and I talked to the lieutenant when he'd come by the morning. He said, nothing I can do for you, Reeves.

So there's a guy came there, and he was in a suit, nice-looking fellow. He opened it up. He said, hello, Reeves. I just want to see what you look like. My name is Associates Warden Short. And I saw your National Geographic documentary me, and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation. And he shut the little Judas window,

and that's the last I saw I never could get out of there. So I stayed in nine months without a hearing, which the parole board has to give you one within three months. They never did give me one. I paid a lawyer $7,500. His name was Cam. up in San Francisco. He never once made a phone call, never, and somebody got to him.

What was his name, Marty? Christopher Cannon. Christopher Cannon. Christopher Cannon, the lawyer in San Francisco that the Pro Board said, don't touch it. And he stole my $7,500 and never made one phone call. That bastard. I mean, thoroughbred. Thoroughbred.

Yeah. Wow. And what was the documentary he was talking about? National Geographic come down to Australia, and they did one. on me called Australia's hardest prison. And they did one. I got some action in that one. Because I was looking for that online.

I couldn't find it. I saw something on that on a history channel. They take it off after a while. I understand National Geographic doesn't, and they put it back on. It was real big at one time. Okay. Yeah, I remember searching for it,

and I couldn't find it. I got a copy of it. Okay. I got several copies of it. I could send one of it on it. So how long did you end up staying in Los Angeles, Metropolitan? They sent me to, they sent me on the con air to

Oklahoma and there I got put on the shelf floor but I had to report to the officer every two hours so they was going to go back in the shoe so I couldn't believe it and I just saw the corruption of the con air and whoever, whatever Congressman of Senator owns at I met people. Oh yeah, explain that. That's interesting.

I met people from Wakefield, Georgia, Albany Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida and they got caught with two grams or something, three grams, five grams. They face in five years and they mentally probably little problems with mental. A lot of prisoners do. And they were being sent to Los Angeles for psychiatric evaluation. And it takes about three months to go and a month or two to come back.

And they stay in Oklahoma and they go from one place to another on Conair until they finally get to some doctor in Los Angeles. It says that they have a problem or not. And then I met the ones from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and they were going to Atlanta, Georgia, to have psychiatric evaluation. So no matter where you got busted for these small-time drug offenses, they would find a psychic or a psychiatric psychologist on the opposite end of the country. So they could shuffle you back and forth. So they had a reason to fly conair all around the country. It's just blatant ripping off the government. That's as bad as I've ever seen.

Who owns con air? I don't think you better ask. I might be back in prison. That's interesting. Can you find out maybe on Google? Like who owns, like, Con Air, you would think that would just be part of the BOP, right? No, it's, somebody owns it.

Other BOP wouldn't be doing that. How many, how many airplanes do they have? I saw three big jets. There's three jets. And then they got a lot of, that's all I know. But that tower in Oklahoma, which is center, He's got 1,800 rooms. And those planes are landing and coming in there day and night.

It's just like Grand Central Station of federal prisoners. Wow. Why are they moving them like that? I don't know. Somebody's making big, big money. Whoa. That is kind of wild. I had no idea about that.

Yeah. He's trying to inch it over. You just double-click the top, yeah. It probably won't tell you the truth. Fleet size. 59 parent company Con Air Group Inc. Headquarters

Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. They have 59 planes Conair Group Inc. So it's a corporation. Yeah. Whoa. They own some politicians. I guarantee you.

Oh, yeah. They're a... Wow, man. Wow, that's... What a world we live in, Roger. What a world we live. And I'm telling you. That is incredible, incredibly corrupt. Yes.

The whole system is. Yeah. Let me just tell you about the drug war. Today, I'm not talking about, but done. A policeman gets a job here or any town. He's 10 or 15 of them going this year. And one of them, he's a go-getter. And he lets his hair grow, and he gets some tattoos and some dirty clothes.

And he goes under the bridge. And he gets one of those poor mentally ill people. bombs, hobos, and they sell two or three or five grams to their neighbor over there, and he arrests both of them, federally. Now he's got two, and next month he does it, and he's got two more. In the end of the year, he's got 15 or 20 major drug bust, and he does that for two or three years. And the other fellow, he's at a desk somewhere, and this guy makes a captain.

This guy's a captain, the guy at the desk? No, the one that makes all these little tiny busts, all these insignificant, nothing. He's just putting poor people in prison. Now he's captain. Now he's lieutenant. Now he's captain. Now he goes up the latter rocket. Now the prosecutor, the one that can say, I got him, I got him.

He has two grams of methamphetamine. Two grams, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he has five, give him five years in prison. No matter about his poor wife and children crying. Give him, put him in prison. We need fodder for these private prisons and for the federal system. Oh, boy, we got him. And if I'm a prosecutor and I get enough convictions, I got a 98% conviction rate. I'm going to make judge.

And I'll never lose my job at $500,000 a year. It's all about climbing the ladder. Yes, climbing the ladder and making money. Wow. Yeah, that's exactly how it works. That judicial system is just so, so corrupt. Are you familiar with the story of Ross Ulbricht? No.

He was a kid. He was in his early 30s when he got bussed. He got like two life sentences for, he started this website. It's like a, it's called Silk Road. It was basically like this dark web place where people can go buy any kind of drugs they want. So it was like an online marketplace for people to buy anything they want. want as long as it didn't like the only rules were you can't harm people or you can't like you can't order people to get murdered or you can't there's no human trafficking allowed but it's it was mainly

used for drugs so you could buy any kind of drugs that you wanted online and it was kept anonymous like each all the buyers and sellers were protected because they used this form of currency called bitcoin which is a cryptocurrency and it's it's easily you can easily keep the people making the transactions anonymous. And he was just created a website, basically, that anyone could go on there and make a transaction. And he took a small fee. And he ended up getting two life sentences because he didn't take the deal. They obviously offered him a really big, a really big plea deal. And he didn't take it. And he didn't take it. They thought he could beat it. And there was a bunch of corrupt, corrupt agents involved in his case. And the kid got, basically, he got double the sentence that El Chival

got and he was just some 20-year-old kid that made a website an e-commerce website that's i mean that story really hit home for me as far as exposing like the real issues of the judicial system in this country and they they made a documentary about it and it's just disgusting it's sick it's disgusting vomiting sick on the floor i mean here i am i served 33 years mostly for marijuana and i woke out And big billboards, relax. We deliver your marijuana to your house. It's just like in the prohibition, this guy's got 12 years in Alcatraz for making whiskey.

They went when they got out and the law was passed the next year, yes, but you broke the law then. So you got to stay. And after 12 years, they walk out of Alcatraz and walk across the street and get them a drink out of the bar. Right. That's insane things happening. It's insane, man.

It's stupid. I mean, President Jimmy Carter had it all. Most of the prison, a great portion of the prison is from mentally incapacitated. They are somewhat have some problems. They had problems from probably their early childhood. They were unwanted, unloved, orphanage, foster home, beaten, abused, men and women. And they come to prisons, and they treat other people that way. We need help for these people.

It's a health issue. It's a social issue. It's an issue that society owes to the people that we have here. Is there any country that's doing it right? Like, obviously, we're doing it worse than anybody. We have more people locked out per capita than any other country in the world, right? Is there anybody who's doing this right? The same thing that we can take from another country and learn from them?

I understand it. What's that? Oh, Holland. Holland. Holland? Absolutely. Holland's great at it. Oh, didn't Holland legalize, like, heroin or something? I don't know exactly what they've done this. I heard that if you're addicted to heroin or you want to, if you want to

use heroin. You can actually go to a doctor and they'll give you like a clean needle and they'll give you like a small. Oh yes. That's been a long time there. And even Birmingham, England does it. And they got proof. Listen, the people clean up, the prostitutes clean up, the people get a job. But America goes into Birmingham and says, you can't do that. You can't set a precedent like this. We must have our prisons full. So they fight so hard the American judicial system, the DEA. They won't, they won't this stuff to go on. It's wrong. I mean, it's wrong in the eyes of man and God. It's just wrong. They take them away from their children, their families, and they take their homes. I mean, they work for forever. They inherited from their grandmother. They just, you better believe

if they're some money in it, they're there to get it. So it's just wrong. Do you think it'll ever change? What do you think there's a? Of course it's going to change. It can't be. It's already swung hard the other way now. It's just got to. It's just... What's the answer? Like how, like, what kind of, what sort of steps do you think is, it's going to have to take to... Make this be a healthy issue.

If a guy's got a heroin addict, let's just say heroin addict. They know right now that they, this creton, if they will take those tablets, they have no withdrawal whatsoever. But the federal drug administration... Cratum? Cratom, yeah, they couldn't take. They fight it hard. They don't want it.

Right. It's just like the marijuana oil, relieving all these pains. They don't want it. They fight it hard and they pay their politicians. They got lobbyists walking the halls of Congress. You get trips and you get money and you can do anything for you. We got big pharmaceutical companies that produce pills. We got oxy cotton. We got, we got Vicodin. You got to go get, go to the doctor and get a prescription to some opiates. That's the answer. Not this unregulated stuff. Exactly. But it's coming to light. It's slowly, slowly, slowly coming to light. This is wrong. It is. It's terrifying. And then another thing is parenting. I feel like parenting is so important.

And a lot of the people that end up in prisons, a lot of people that end up in the streets, homeless, addicted to drugs, it seems like the catalyst, the one thing, the most, the one common denominator across all these people is messed up childhoods. Absolutely.

And parents, that weren't prepared for children. My mantra is that a couple should have a permit before they have a baby. That might be mean, but a little sparrow builds her nest before she lays an egg. The problem is how the problem is you can't stop them from having babies though, right?

You can't stop them, but you have to permit, have to have a permit to ride a moped on the streets of America. Right. How much more important is to bring a child into it. My daughter who's a doctor, she delivered a baby to an 11 year old child. Your daughter delivered a baby from 11-year-old child. Four generations in the waiting room all on welfare.

Wow. 12, 14 young ones. That's the problem is even if you put in a law like that, people are still going to breed. People are still going to have babies. I don't say they wouldn't, but I'm just saying that's the answer to it to educate people or to encourage people. Have a mother and a father.

Have a home. Have a living. Have something. You get babies we want instead of babies that we're just going to get for the welfare check. That's awful to encourage the wrong people to have babies. It is. It is. It should encourage the right people to have babies.

I don't know the answers, Roger. I don't think we have them, but anyhow, that's the question now. Now gets the answer. It is the question. It's a very hard question. How are you going to stop this? It's a very dicey, it's a very dicey subject. And it's, I don't know, I don't know what the answer is.

But yeah, I totally agree. agree that having, you know, having a child is definitely one of the most important, like, serious decisions that you could possibly make. I mean, you're, you're creating another light. I mean, that is going to set up, depending on how you raise that small baby child, depending on how conscientious you are, how prepared you are, how willing you are to be committed to doing that. I mean, that's going to send that human being into a spiral one way or the other, whether it be good or bad. And the effects, the consequences, the repercussions of

it going wrong, of it going the bad way are exponential. So it's just, yeah, I don't know the answers. It's definitely a dicey topic because you can't take away people's human rights to reproduce. but at the same time, you know, I can, you know, it's, the logic is obviously there. Like, you can't just have people reproducing just because there's a financial gain or just for the hell of it, you know, let's have a kid and then, you know, it's on its own. Exactly. I don't know what to say about it, but there is an answer. I know that if the government would take this as a health issue,

and part of it is being family planning, and spend a tenth of the money that they did on eradicating the marijuana from the country. Right. What a world we would live in. Right. It's all about money, right. It's all about money allocation. Schools and teach these children.

Right. Education is huge, right? What was it? Victor Hugo says, no one here's a close of school, open a prison. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, there's so many stories of,

of people who who had abusive childhoods, who had parents that weren't there, they were neglected all their lives. There's so many stories of like the biggest success stories. They're people that had messed up childhoods, right?

And, but it shouldn't be. Obviously, it's rare. It's rare. Not all kids that have messed up childhoods end up successful. But if they had the access, like if they,

I think it, put something, like if you're, if you come up from an early stage in your life with lots of obstacles in your way and you, and you, and you over, you're able to overcome a lot and you have to deal with this. You don't have, you have, you have a very difficult life. It puts something in you, I think, that it makes you hungry, right? So I think if those people are hungry and they have access to get educated or to go learn or say, hey, it's not going to cost. It's not going to cost. me, you know, I have to go out and figure out a way to make $100 this week. Am I either going to spend my $100 on food or drugs or am I going to spend my $100

on getting an education? They're obviously going to choose survival over education. So if those kids had access to some sort of a free education and we took care of people who didn't have money who actually wanted to learn and wanted to get better, that would be better for society, right? Because we would have, in the country, we would have less losers. we would have less people that are just that are just leaching off the system. Does that make sense?

It makes sense, but also not. Because you want to have people that are educated. You don't want to have you, that's the goal, like in our community as a country. Like you want to take care of, we want to think of the country as one community. As unfortunate as it is, we think of people as right and left,

Democrat, Republican, whatever, we wanted so polarized. If we thought about it as one community, and we want to educate our community to make it better, you want people to have the access to the education to get better. I'll tell you what, for a son, maybe a daughter too, if they had a father to put their arm around him and say, son, you should study this or you should do this.

I encourage you to do that. That needs that in addition to the choice of where you're going to do that another. You need good parents to make recommendations. And also, you shouldn't put such high standards for college and that sort of stuff to everybody. Right. They should put, I mean, you know by seventh grade or eighth grade whether a child's going to be certain university material or not.

Start them in trade school. Right. And our prison system should be only trade schools. Yeah. You get a young thief comes in there and the judge says, oh, they give them a wrong, said, okay, you could be an electrician. We need electricians. We need plumbers.

We need tank. Okay, your sentence is to become an electrician. When you get a Class A license to be electrician, you walk out the door. Boy, you see them straighten up and stop taking the drugs and... Right, and that way when they get out, they actually have a path. You go to work, $30, $50 an hour, whatever. And, I mean, it's not fair to the people that I tell you, but if they do a crime, well, I just set them there just in a cell.

Right. You can have one teacher to 20, 30 guys. and when they pass the test and they can do it let them loose that's their sentence and we'd have workers and the hardest thing also about

about the whole prison system is that I've talked about this before but once you're in the system it's almost like even once you're out once you get released

it's almost like you have those shackles on you for life because there's things like probation there's things like restitution. You're always checking in. There's only certain things you can do, certain things you can't do. If you do accidentally slip up once, you're done. I had 30 years of that. They give me 25 years special parole. Anytime you violate it, you can serve all apart.

And on top of that, sir, I'm giving you 5,000 hours community service. You can do it shoveling horse shit in the zoo. And on top of that, you're going to pay all the cost of prosecution. And on top of that, I'm giving you 30 years for this, five more years for that. It's just ridiculous. What year did you get out? I got out last year. Last year you got out. 14 months right now.

Wow, man. Wow. I stayed in another nine months. It was harder than the 18 years in Australia in isolation here for a parole violation from 1977 for possession of marijuana. that somebody was after me. They wouldn't let the lawyer talk, and they wouldn't let me out of isolation. So what happened after you were in that nine months isolation in Los Angeles?

They let me out, and I went home. You were a free man? No, I was on parole, and I didn't know how long I'd be on parole. But you were at least, you were able to go home. I was home. I was home and the COVID was out, and the parole officers didn't come. And so after a year, they said, we dropped the parole. You're free.

I got my passport. I got my driver license. I got my pilot's license. Wow. I'm ready to go. Wow, man. What an incredible, fascinating story. So he went back and got my pilot's license and went down and rented the plane for a day.

I had a good time. So what's your goals now? What's next for Roger Reeves? What's next in the, what's the next chapter for you? I just don't know what's going to. I'm going to take it one day at the time. I'm just happy to be on. with Marry. No more plain loads of marijuana.

No, that's over. They got over the horizon radar. Oh, that's incredible. You and your wife, the bond that you guys were able to form and the way you guys were able to stay together for that long period of time, even though you were gone for 33

years, is just so amazing. I never heard of it. I've never heard of it. I've never heard of that. I mean, And it's rare you hear of that with people that didn't go to prison. Yeah. Let alone did have to be isolated for 33 years. It's just unbelievable she waited that long.

What is the key? What's the secret? What's the secret? What's the secret? She's a Christian person. She's lovely. I mean, she's like too good for this earth. I said, what did you tell them, are you a beautiful one?

She said, I told him, I'm not available. And said, that worked. Yeah. So bless her heart. It waited on me all that time. I tell you, when I came home, there was the same table, a round oak table that I had sanded in. And there was the same place, Matt, said I had left 35 years ago last thing. There was the same silverware and the same plates.

I just sat there and cried. It's like, oh, it took me three days. I couldn't even look at pictures of her when she was 40 and when she was 50 and when she was 60. I wasn't there. Yeah. So it was. How did it make you feel? It made me feel sick.

Still, I don't like to look at the pictures. And I was gone that many years. Half of my life I was in those prison cells. It just was, maybe, I certainly, I broke the law and my outlaw. But I'm not much of a criminal. I don't hurt nobody. I'm for good in this world. Just got caught up in this and did it.

Yeah. And there were so many people like you, too, that got caught up in that part of history. You can pull up to almost any point in the world, and you just saved Rio and say, I'm going to pay all of you a million dollars to hold this load of cocaine. We might get caught. You could sink the ship with young men and women to get on it. So true, man.

It would. It's so true. Well, Roger, I think we did it. I think we covered pretty much everything. Is there anything that we missed? That's important that we left out. I can't thank you enough for coming down. A baby deer in Alaska.

Mari wants to bring up a baby deer. Oh. What happened with the beach? baby deer in Alaska. We can wrap it up with that story. Oh, that's just a whole another story in itself. We went to... It might not fit right in now. It's okay. We can still tell it. All right. Let's tell us. Let's tell us. We're about the baby deer in Alaska. We're going to wrap it up with the baby deer story. All right. Marry and I went to Alaska in 1972 and bought a salmon trawler. It was an old sailboat. It was a Bristol-day gill netter.

And somebody put a little gasoline engine in it, I think 3850s. and we went salmon fishing with our little daughter at five years old and uh oh we catch those great king salmon put them in on the ice and uh we come in to goddard hot springs and anchor the boat in the evening sometimes they go for the hot spring and shower oh it was nice and the sharks would cut their salmon in two on the way up sometimes and we'd hang the head up and get several stakes behind it and then uh one day a little boy was crying on the radio that had boat was on fire that he'd blown up. His daddy's legs was crooked and blood was coming out of his ears and help, help, help.

So pretty soon the Coast Guard was flying and I said, what, strong where I was here. And so they told us to be watching for an overturned boat or a burn boat. Yeah. And I had the little boys cries on my mind all day. And I was cleaning, Shyam, back on the back. And I turned and looked and there was a bow of a boat coming up. I was almost to hit it. So I ran up out of the fish hole and knocked the boat out of gear.

And then I saw my mistake. It was not an overturned boat. It was a giant blue whale that was surfacing under my boat. And he blew his stuff all over me. I could have gapped him from where I was. Everything was huge. Anyway, I had four cables out in there, 6,000 pound test each, and he wrapped himself in those things or they got around him.

And he went down. And that back of that boat went backwards faster, like a cork going backwards faster, and the devil went forward. Jeez. They took all the gear off and all the stuff just bent down, my lifeboat and all that just splintered. So we was out of business. So we said, let's take a vacation. So we did all the southeast Alaska, just putting from one place to the other.

And we'd go into some of these bays that were just very seldom visited. And we were looking for glass balls. The Orientals used to have glass blowers on their boats. And they didn't have corks. So they put these glass balls. Some of them that big, some this big, most of them about that big. And they would put floaters on the nets. And in the storms and the rot, and they lost a lot of them.

And the Pacific Ocean is 70 million square miles. And those things are drifting round and round out there. And in the storms of Alaska in the wintertime, some of them get caught up behind the brush on the beaches. So Marry walked one way and I'd walk the other. There's always a bunch of bears and I'd take a 44 and she'd take the rifle and we walk different places looking for those glass balls. And I came up to a big granite boulder at the end and a doe ran out. And behind her was a grizzly. And the grizzly she turned around because she was kind of caught and he knocked her down into surf.

And I just thought, oh, you rascal. And I took my pistol and shot a bow. And he stopped and looked at me and then he looked and he looked and he looked. going off. You shot the grizzly bear? No, I just shot in the air. Shot Adam? Just shot in the air. Okay. I got out of here. Right. So I walked on up there, and there was a dole in there, and the little waves lapping up, and I looked, oh, I saw why she was giving birth, and the little nose was sticking out.

Oh, no. So I drug her out on the beach, and I took out a razor-sharp salmon knife with the spoon on the back, and I cut her open and took the little fawn out. I dried him off and put it down my coach sleeve. I had a red and white plaid coat coat. How big was he? About big as a cat. and long legs, though. And I put him down my coat sleeve, and I went down, Mari. What did you shoot? I said, I shot a grizzly, and she laughed.

I said, put your hand down here. I'm not about to put my hand down your sleeve. Anyway, she did, and the little deer was just beautiful. And we took him and put him in a box on the boat, but he wouldn't eat anything and wouldn't drink any milk. So we said, he'll die. Well, we had left our daughter a couple of days with some friends in Sitka, Alaska. and we went back and she met us down at the beach, out on the dock.

And when she saw the little deer, she held him, oh, she was five years old. And he took her by the ear and started sucking, just like it was his mama. So we got a little baby doll bottle and put some milk in it, put it behind it, and it was running all down her ear and the milk. And he got to it, so we filled him up on milk. Anyway, we took him on the, we had to put burlap on the boat so he could walk around. And we raised him for the next month or so that we, We is on the boat and going on vacation.

And so when we got ready to go back, I was still on the fire department in Los Angeles. I had taken a leave of absence. We had to go back. And what we do, we named him flag after the little flag on his tail after Marjorie Walters, Walton's a book, the yearling. And so I bought a big shopping bag with a zipper, and I put flag inside.

Now then he's about knee high and he's rather spunky. So Mari has two bottles, and I put him on, walked on the plane, put him in the seat, under the seat, my feet over him. And halfway down to Seattle, he gets to crying for his bottle. So the stewardess comes by, and Marry said, would you heat these please? And she said, where is the baby?

So I said, shall we show her? And we zip it up and flag popped his head up. And oh, all of them had to come look at him. That's so funny. And he says, I've smuggled everything on my plane, but never over here. Well, you let my wife see this one. So we did. So we took him on to Redondo Beach with us, and he got too big.

He got where he could just jump six or eight feet high, and he was afraid he'd hurt our little girl. So we gave him some people up in Apple Valley that had a horse ranch. And he stayed up there, and we went to visit him, we had a huge rack of antlers on him. And an unusual deer, because none in California like that. So we got a call one day, and he said, some dog scared flag, and he jumped that eight-foot fence, and he got away.

He said, all right. So the next year we saw an article in the newspaper that a strange deer and they had picture of flag was nuzzling some tourists in Angeles National Park and they took him and Rangers took him and they took him to Santa Claus Village where he spent the rest of his life in a petting zoo. Oh my God. One of Santa's reindeer. Yeah.

Wow. What a story that is. Unbelievable. Roger, thank you again. Thank you. I appreciate you doing this. Tell people listening and watching where they can find your book. Find it on Amazon or Kindle.

Smuggler by Roger Reeves. That's right. And I'll put a link in the show notes below. Okay, good. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. My pleasure, too, Roger.