Good Life Project - My Dad was a Fugitive: A Life on the Run: Tyler Wetherall

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Tyler Wetherall didn't know her dad was a fugitive, until Scotland Yard came knocking. As a child, Wetherall's family was constantly changing countries and homes. But, to her, that was just "how things were. Life was an exciting adventure, until it all came crashing down and she realized the family had been on the run and the dad she loved so deeply was the one they were after.Now, a British writer and journalist living in New York, in her memoir, No Way Home, Tyler shares this journey, how she discovered the truth, navigated the fraught relationship with her father and found a new normal. We dive into her life and also the decision to write a book that would reveal her and her family's secrets and how she created something that was true to her experience, while being respectful of those involved.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dad was wanted by the police and he was going on the run or had gone on the run and we weren't going to see him for a little while and it might be some time before everything was sorted. So imagine this, you wake up one day, you're nine years old, and you find out that Scotland Yard is at your door. Your mom is being questioned and your dad is on the lam, a fugitive. But you have no idea a fugitive from what? Because as far as you know, your entire life has been kind of fun, kind of mystical. Forget the fact that you've been bouncing around and moving and living in 13 countries. This was just a great life.

And then everything starts to unfold. And you learn the truth about who your family really is, about who you really are. And then you have to grapple with that. Well, that is the story of today's guest, Tyler Weatherall, who's the author of a really fascinating, compelling new book also called No Way Home. So one more thing before we dive in, it's about our once a year gathering camp GLP, which is short for Camp Good Life Project. So imagine stepping out of your day-to-day life and just dropping into this gorgeous 130 acre natural playground for three and a half days of learning, laughing, moving your body, comping your brain, and reconnecting with people who just see the world the way that you do and accept you as

you are. No facade, no posturing, just straight up you. Well, that's what we've created with Camp GLP. We've brought together a lineup of inspiring teachers from art to entrepreneurship, awakened careers, writing, meditation, everything in between. It's this beautiful way to drink in ideas that'll completely awaken your life and your work. And it's also one of those rare opportunities to create the type of friendships and stories you thought you'd left behind decades ago. And it's all happening at the end of August, just 90 minutes outside of New York City. So I know, why am I mentioning this when it's April? Well, because more than half the spots

are already taken. And last year we sold out months in advance and had to turn people away. And right now you can lock in your spot and get $200 off full registration, but you've got to register by April 30th or the price goes up. So you can learn more and grab your $200 discount at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes. All right, on to our show. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So, so good to be hanging out with you here. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. You are, these days, primarily a writer, journalist, who navigates between the UK, New York, and all over the place, depending on where your stories take you. You have, shall we call it a highly unusual backstory? I know. Sometimes I tell people and I have to kind of double take to myself like, wait, is that really what happened?

Because it is extraordinary. And then, you know, you are just an ordinary person who happens to have this very unusual backstory. Yeah. So let's kind of go there. You grew up in what to you seemed to be a fairly normal life, but what did that look like to you when you were a little kid? Because we moved so often, I'm not sure. It's hard to say what every day looked like because we moved at first, first four years of life every few months. And then I guess the everyday life was my family. You know, my mom is an absolute rock and she always created a home that felt like home wherever it was, wherever she was, was our home. And,

you know, we cooked family meals, but there were three of us kids. We were very raucous, happy, you know, we had a huge amount of fun as a family. And I guess that was the normal, was us together. The other stuff around it often was changing. It was hard, yeah, to find a thread in that. So it was you, two siblings? Yes, my big sister and my big brother. So my sister, Caitlin, is two and a half years older. My brother, Evan, is seven years older. Right. And your mom and your dad? And my mom and my dad. Yes. So and where were you in those first four years? Like where, what country, what areas? I was born in California in a beautiful yellow house. Which obviously from your accent, we can tell it's California, Southern California. Yeah, clearly. Then we left

when I was 18 months old. So that was when the FBI, the FBI's investigation began into my father, I think just shortly before I was born. So by the time I came along, I think the house was already under surveillance. So really it was, you know, from the very beginning of my life, it was surreal. And by the time he tried very hard to fight the case and to find a way out of the trouble he was in. So by the time we got to, when I was 18 months old, he knew that he was either going to jail or we were going to have to go on the run. But as kids, you have no awareness of what's going on? Oh no, none, None at all. And at that point, we left for Italy, originally. And we spent a few months in Italy, in a few different places. At this point, Dad was just trying to kind of lose the trail.

So wherever he was, he would be hard to find. He was disappearing. And after Italy, we moved to London, which was for him to season his fake identity, which was a British identity. So he was taking out bank accounts and beginning a life under his fake name. And then we eventually got to Portugal. And Portugal was where we were going to stay because Portugal doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

So the idea was once we got there, we would then live legally. And my dad would live under his real name. They wouldn't have caught him in between. And then we just set up Life in Portugal. Right. Was your name changing as his names were changing? No, we didn't then. We did later, but never officially. Mom always insisted that she never break the law, which makes a lot of sense. The idea being she didn't want both of our parents to end up in prison, and then who would look after the kids. So when eventually dad did, the Portugal plan didn't work out, and he then went into his fake identity, and he wanted us all to go under fake

identities, but mom wouldn't live under a fake ID. She agreed to introduce herself under the fake name and for us to take on the fake surname but we never actually changed our documentation because at that point we're all, you know, you're in a different level of trouble then. We're already in tons of trouble. How old were you when you started introducing yourself differently? See, at this point I was probably three.

Okay, so you're too young to really understand. I'm too young to know at all. Maybe it's just fun. No, I did go through a stage, which I do remember. I don't remember being told that our names were different, which must have been an unusual conversation to have with your kids. By the way, this is our new name, everybody. But by the time I was three,. By the way, this is our new name, everybody. But no, by the time I was

three, we changed the name and I started changing my name all the time. I decided in the morning I want to be called Rainbow Raindrop Sunshine. And then the next day I would decide I want to be called Moonstar. And every day I would insist that my whole family call me this name and I wouldn't answer to anything else. I didn't announce it over breakfast. I am now Moonstar. What? Why? And I imagine that must be something to do.

You know, you change your kid's name. I go, OK, this is fun. I'll do this every day. But I do remember when I got older, I was aware that my name was Wetherall in some kind of way. Like, I knew that it was my mum's maiden name, and I knew that it was on my passport, but I also knew I was king. So there's this family tree I made, you know, these school projects you do where you have to do your family tree.

And I did. I've got this family tree, and it's, you know, it's got Grownie on my mum's side and my grandma on my dad's side. And the names are, they're real names. And then my dad's fake name, and then my mom's fake name, which obviously come out of nowhere. And then my fake name, which doesn't make any sense. And you can see that, you know, anyone who'd looked a little bit closer would be like, this doesn't make any sense. Was this like for a school assignment? Yeah. And did the teachers say anything?

People, they probably just thought I was confused. Or just making things up. It's just playing as a kid, right? Yeah, who knows? So there must have been like some vague awareness, but no, it didn't occur to me because it doesn't. And I mean, you have two older siblings too, who still were very young at that age, but also maybe slightly older, maybe older enough to sort of ask, have you sort of said like back in those early, early days, even when the first, they started to play with different names, whether they had even an inkling or sense that something was

a little bit off? Well, my sister didn't know, but they, my dad told my brother because he was that much older. So, so we weren't, he was nine when we left America. And so he was old enough to have friends and, you know, he played baseball and he went to high school and was very much an all American kid. And he's actually got a, he is from mom's previous marriage. So he has a different dad. Our dad's his dad as well. And so when he left, I think it was a much more traumatic thing for him because his life was already there.

So dad sat him down and explained what was going on and confided in him. You know, Evan always, he always knew everything first and that meant he could take care of us. Yeah. I mean, but also it's on the one hand, he has a level of understanding of what's really happening that you guys don't have. But on the other hand, I mean, what a burden to hold that to himself at such a young age. Yes. Yes. And to be aware, you know, that he was going to take care of us in that way, you know, that he would make sure that this thing was going to come out eventually and he would be there for us to make sure it wasn't, you know,

as untraumatic as it's possible for it to be. You know, it's amazing he kept it, you know, he kept it secret for so long. I think it was a confidant to both mum and dad. Yeah. So what was going on between your mum and dad sort of times? I'm assuming, obviously, she knew. Or maybe is that an accurate assumption, actually? 17 and she was living she'd just come to New York as a model from from England so she had run away from home at 16 and married a American film director and then become a model and ended up here working for I think she was Ford Models and so she was living this kind of wonderful totally wild existence and some at some, a friend of hers took her over

to dad's apartment as, oh, I know these great, two great guys. You've got to come hang out and meet them. And the two of them just fell for each other straight away. And she left her husband and moved in with dad after like three dates. And they were together for the next four years. And I think had this just beautiful early love affair, but they were both so young. And I think after a certain amount of time, mom needed to go off in the world and figure out who she was. So they broke up for 10 years, which is when my dad got into the drug business. So when she came back into his life after she'd married my brother's dad and had my brother. And then a mutual friend of theirs had discovered that she was living now separated from her second husband with her son

in California. And so he told my dad and my dad had always, you know, she'd always been his sort of the love that he'd never really got over. And he looked her up and they very quickly got back together and fell in love all over again, now adults. And at that point, he was doing quite big smuggles at that stage and had made a lot of money already. So he was very open with her from the get-go and said, this is what I do. I try very hard to minimize risk. He did one or two a year. He did everything he could to do it in a way that he didn't want to ever get caught. And he sort of explained what his approach to it was. And also everyone he knew was doing it. And at this point, we're late 70s. And I guess it was probably the Carter administration. Everything was pretty freewheeling. And it didn't seem like such a terrible thing.

And so she said, okay, that sounds fine. And they got back together. So from that point on, she knew and she accepted the potential risks that came with it. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because it's interesting how much detail you actually have given the fact that this wasn't stuff that you learned along the way. This is all stuff that you've had to now go back and reconstruct in no small way. So they fall back in love. They get together. They start to now build a bigger family with more kids and then you. And there's always this stuff in the background with your parents, but you and there's you know like always this stuff in the

background with your parents but you're completely unaware you start bopping around Europe playing changing names from Portugal because still this keeps going on for a number of years more yes so from Portugal we at some point the indictments come out against my dad and it's a lot more severe than he had anticipated. They were charging him with the Al Capone charge, the Kingpin charge, continued criminal enterprise, which carries a very heavy sentence. And at that point, I think that really scared him because he was looking at serious time. So we got legal advice, and the lawyers there advised him that he could be extradited, that there was some treaty that said drug criminals could be extradited to the US.

They were exempt from the lack of extradition or wherever you want to put that. So at that point, he became very anxious about being in Portugal under his real name. And he decided he couldn't live there anymore. And even though we were very happy there, and we would all have loved to have stayed there, we'd made amazing friends, and we really sort of found home again there. Mum was very reluctant to leave,

so it kind of came up with a compromise that they would move and try again, go back to England, where Mum felt she could start a new life again but that turned out dad wanted to move to France instead because he knew a lot of other fugitives in France so there was a network for us to be on the run and in hiding and you know it's the lifestyle you you have to learn how to do everything again like how do you get your kids into school without like the names bringing up something that the authorities might be able to track you down through? Or like there's all these steps that are hard enough when moving country with a family, but then you're doing that

with this added logistical issue of being fugitives. So we went to France at which point my mom was really getting fed up. She didn't, it was really dictating everything about our lives, what schools we went to, where we lived, what friends we had. And that made her, I think, started the process of her falling out of love with dad. So she said she needed to move back to England where she thought she could be happy. We moved to England together and they separated shortly after. So at that point, dad was living under a fake name in London. And I don't think anyone was looking for him anymore. So we really started a normal kind of existence there.

So we went to live with mom in another house. So it's like house number seven at that point. I can't, I lose track. And dad got a place in London and, you know, we visited him every weekend and we all kind of settled down into being English. So it was just sort of like, okay, so. Yeah, that was kind of normal.

This is just life, you know, and sad, it's unfortunate. You know, our parents fell out of love. They're no longer together, but we do the thing that so many other kids and families do when that happens. There's no big deal. swimming or sleeping and it's the fastest charging apple watch getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s are later required charge time and actual results will

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I mean, certainly at that, I remember being at school when I was, you know, seven or eight. And I guess now it's maybe more common, but not many of my friends had divorced parents. And thinking it was just this really big thing. I really, I was every time, you know, every birthday wish on candles would be for them to get back together. And I, you know, I was very sad that they divorced. Then it obviously got, when I found out about everything else that was happening, suddenly that sort of fell down the hierarchy of problems. I was like, okay, I can deal with divorce, but this. Yeah.

So how does this, how does that whole thing start to crack open? I mean, there's a moment that you would count when essentially Scotland the Heart shows up. Yes. So I was nine years old and we were living at this point in the West Country in Bradford and Avon. I remember it really well. It's actually right at the beginning of the book. We were coming home from school and there were two people in our living room who looked official and we didn't recognize and mum sent us to go stay with a friend for the night and I remember me and my sister talking about it and saying mum had said granny was sick and that was why we had to go stay with a friend and me and my sister

that night said to each other we don't believe that granny's sick and I don't know why we some we thought it was something to do with dad but we thought maybe dad was trying to get custody which is is weird because that isn't something that I remember saying that but I don't know it's a strange thing for us to have come up with maybe because they looked official so we thought they were lawyers so we sensed that something was wrong and this wasn't normal which is strange because all we saw was these two people and them going away in a car with our mom and the strange thing of being sent somewhere else for a night. And then a week later, she sat us down and she told us that morning. I remember we didn't get woken up for school and I remember waking up thinking, you know, today there must be snow outside or there must be a reason that we're not going to school.

And it was exciting not to be at school. And then she was waiting for us in her room and she sat down and just told us that dad was wanted by the police and he was going on the run or had gone on the run. And we weren't going to see him for a little while. And it might be some time before everything was sorted, which is, yeah, I remember the conversation very well. And then it gets hazier after that because I think I probably was quite shocked. I would imagine. What was her, do you recall her demeanor when she was telling you? Yes, she was stoic I think she was trying very hard to make sure we realized that

that we were aware of what was happening but we weren't going to be scared and we weren't you know she she was doing her best to make it seem as manageable as possible like plain speaking direct stoic and she you know she we always were very open as a family and talked to one another about everything. Right, except for this one. Except for this one. Massive, massive thing. There's, oh, and there's this.

I thought from that. Right. Completely open, except for this one little thing. It's amazing. It never, it must have been, there must have been many moments that mum has thought about telling us and, or hope that she never had to. I, you know. Have you talked to her since then? What was going through her mind and how she felt like in, when she woke up that morning, you know, and sort of like leading up to this thing where she knows

she's about to sit down with her girls and have this conversation. I think mainly she was shaken up by it. I can't, I'm not sure I've ever asked for the run up to that. We've spoken about that conversation and her recollection of it but no afterwards I think she was very shocked by the return of this of this issue in our lives they really believed it was behind them um it'd been seven years no one anticipated so I think when they show back up again she was very scared and I think she went into kind of a survival mode of this is what we, this needs to happen and this needs to happen. Yeah. It's like mom of air mode. It's like, I need to protect my kids, my family. Yeah. And whatever we need to do, like

stiff upper lip and protect. Totally. And, and she did, she, you know, she'd had a week of kind of dealing with this. And also I suppose, because they'd been through this once before, there was a sense of kind of slipping back into that mode of we're on the run again in ways even though we were there we were under surveillance so you're kind of living with this this other presence and she'd been through that once before already so i imagine there was a sense of familiarity as to it's like okay i'm back in this space again was she concerned at all that she may have legal exposure to and that and that she, in fact, lose you as well and that you would end up in foster care or somebody else or something like that? Yeah, definitely terrified of that.

You know, looking, we speak about this and she says looking back now, the decision she made she finds incomprehensible because now it seems so obvious that there was no way out. And I say to her, you could have just told them exactly where he was and it would all have ended. And it was going to end one way or another. She just said, these people, they ruined our lives. They took everything from us. We were happy. We were complete as a family. And we lost all of that. And she was just so angry with them. She didn't want to let them win. And she says that seemed to be kind of the guiding passion that meant that she kept resisting what seems in retrospect and what, you know, in hindsight was inevitable. It was only ever going to end one way. So, but in the moment I can see her sort of resisting that. I think also she knew that it was important for dad to do it on his own terms. So she wouldn't have betrayed him. You know, she, he was a loving, caring father and he had done, you know, he made mistakes, but he was doing his best in many ways. And she wouldn't, I don't think she would have, I mean, what was the other option was to sort of give him up.

And that would have seemed too much of a betrayal. Yeah. Even at the time where they were at odds, they were separating and there was very likely some level of anger or unease or unhappiness between them, but she still had this fierce sense of protecting him as well. Yeah. I think we were always on the same team fundamentally. And for us as well, we had a very good relationship with dad and I don't think she wanted to be the person that stepped in the way of that and I mean I don't actually they did talk quite a bit the understanding was always that he would turn himself in well the agreement was as and when she was ever in any serious trouble if life life was getting very hard, that he would turn himself in. And I think one of the sources of anger as I got older and I learned more about the story was when I realized that he didn't.

And the time came when he should have and he didn't turn himself in. And that was something I had to, one of the things that did make me angry when I was younger was we were, you know, at one point it did get really bad and they were giving us a really hard time. And Scotland Yard were arresting her and interrogating her and taking away all of our stuff, invading our house and following us home from school. And at that point, you know, there was one way somewhere in hiding, unaware of a lot of what was going on and how bad things had gotten for us and going through his whole own set of regrets and sadnesses and stresses and fear of what he was facing and knowing it was going to come. So I understand from his position, too, in that moment. Yeah. When as a child at that age, going through it from like your lens, looking out though, what were you experiencing during that window? So what, from when I was nine to 12? Yeah, exactly. Between the time where you learned this, oh, there's this other little secret on the side and the time that he eventually did turn himself in or that he was found? I think in that moment, Dad and I have always been incredibly bonded

and had just a very close relationship and the most fun together. And we talked about all kinds of things. And I really felt like Dad was always on my side. In those years, I missed him terribly. And I was very sad for him not being in my life. But at that point, I knew he was on the run. And I knew that he was in a lot of trouble. And I was still on his side. I very much saw it as the police were trying to take him away. And you've got to think this is sort of 10-year-old logic. I don't have a very nuanced understanding of,

and I didn't know what he had done. So, you know, I was, I had faith in him as my dad that he was doing everything he could to make this right. And I was supporting him in that. And I want, you know, I wanted my, I wanted my dad back. I wanted him in my life. And I didn't understand at that point that there was nothing, there was no way that was going to happen. I really didn't think about prison, which seems bizarre.

But we didn't talk about it. So it just wasn't really a reality. We talked about turning himself in as if it was kind of a euphemism. But we never really spoke about what happened next. So I didn't have this sense of fear. I had mainly just, I just missed him and I was going to do whatever I could to support him on this, on this journey that he was on. So I don't think, I think it took a little while before that changed and I think probably once he was in prison and then I and I learned what he had done and I got a bit older and you're probably at that age as well where you're you know you're defining yourself against your parents anyway whether

or not you have this crazy situation you know you hit 14, and you're figuring out who you are. And often who you are is, is needs to be something that at odds almost with, with where you've come from or, so I was doing, you know, you're in that process, that teenage moment, which is awful regardless. And at the same time, I'm discovering the choices he made. And I think at that point, I became, that's when I started to get angry about it. Because I realized he could have made a different set of decisions and none of it needed to happen. Yeah. When he was finally arrested and ended up in prison, he was brought back to the U.S.

And that's where he served time. Yes. So he was arrested in St. Lucia, where he was in hiding. He'd moved to St. He was so, from when he got arrested, from when he first went back on the run when I was nine until I was 12, he was on the run mainly throughout Europe with his girlfriend of the time and moving quite quickly around Europe. He was in the Alps in the summer. He was in the south of France. Sorry, south of France in the summer. He was in the Alps in the winter.

Sounded really quite lovely. And we visited him secretly every holidays. We would change our names in the bookings to make a mistake on the plane booking and go visit him. So our names wouldn't come up on the system. So we were seeing him regularly. And then he moved to St. Lucia, which for him was going to be a moment of a fresh start. He really felt that that was far enough away that he could start again. And at that point, they followed me on my 12th birthday to where he was in hiding, which is how they found out where he was. So I was spending my 12th birthday in St. Lucia with him. So we got arrested on the island and was there for a little while

in a really terrible prison that they have there. So you were with him when? No, that night. So the St. Lucia night, my birthday, when mum called and let us know that they were coming, they'd arrested her. And then she managed to get word to us that they were on their way. So dad booked flights for me and my sister to get off the island early the next morning. So we left and they said goodbye to him. He was very, the scene really sticks in my, it was always stuck in my head.

It was saying goodbye to him. He got a cab with us. We were going to go to the airport, but he was going to in my head. It was saying goodbye to him. He got a cab with us. We were going to go to the airport, but he was going to get out halfway. And he was standing in the middle of the road, holding a sports bag, wearing swim shorts and waving goodbye to us as we looked out the back of the taxi. And then we didn't know what happened. We didn't hear from him until I think we got a letter at Christmas. And then we didn't hear from him again until he got arrested three four months later in February and during that time he had got off the island

and then gone back because I think he was in a kind of state of extreme stress and trauma and realizing that his life was completely falling apart and he'd been trying desperately to stop it from falling apart for 10 years and had lost so much and it wasn't going to work they wouldn't make a deal with him because he was a fugitive and they won't deal with fugitives so eventually they found him in a kind of shack in St. Lucia and arrested him. And then eventually then flew him back to the States where he served his time because he's American. So all this is going on, you're back with your mom trying to live whatever semblance of normalcy you can, knowing that your dad is now in prison in the United States.

And also, like you said, now you're moving into your middle teen years, where in the best of circumstances, this is a moment of stepping out from under the umbrella and the guidance of your parents and redefining yourself as separate from them and very often against them for windows of time. And now you had a real reason to be defiant. So as you're in this process i mean all these questions have got to start coming up where you need answers from from

your dad like directly from him yes and looking back i'm amazed we didn't, we accepted him telling us that he would explain what he had done when he was ready. And I'm amazed that that was okay with us. You know, when everything is happening around you, you would think you'd put up more of a fight for like, wait, this is, this isn't acceptable. We need to know what's going on. And I was very curious about it, but I never asked him directly what he had done. I think with this strange situation, he had a furlough, which is a break from prison, where you have a time between, normally a furlough is a weekend during the end of your sentence where you're trusted to go into the world and come back. This was kind of like a pre-sentence furlough, which is really

rare. And it came about because my sister had written my dad a letter when he was in prison in San Francisco and was just feeling very bereft about the loss of him. And she'd written in a school fountain pen and the page was like stained with tear marks. And she wrote this letter to dad just to say, we love you and we're thinking about you and we miss you and we're going to support you through this. He sent it to the prosecutor, which was a bold move because I don't think you're meant to communicate directly

with your prosecutor. And then she was very moved by it, I think as a woman. I think I've just assumed it was a woman maybe it was a man and agreed to let and maybe maybe this was influencing factor I'm not sure but for someone who had been a fugitive for so long it seems a risky move to then give them he had like maybe three weeks off to go and sort his affairs was sort of how it was told to him so we went to fly out to San Francisco to see him and it's funny it was nice it was like giving us an opportunity to say goodbye before he started his sentence and to get used to the idea that he was going to be inside from then on so we

went to visit him and he sat us down on that trip and said that he was he'd like to explain what why he was going to prison and what he had done and told us that he had been a pot smuggler for much of the 70s and early 80s uh that he very much wanted us to know it wasn't, you know, no one had got hurt and it was a victimless crime. And when he began, it was a very benign community in the pot smuggling world. The sentences were low. People weren't getting long sentences.

So the people who were doing it weren't career criminals necessarily. It was part of the culture. This is sort of how he explained it to us and I remember just I know I hadn't smoked I was I think at this point I was 13 I don't think I hadn't started smoking pot yet and I knew what it was and I you know knew people did drugs but you're still a little bit young to really understand like the difference between drugs and it just seemed like an incredibly radical thing to come out the blue. I don't think I'd even been aware that he smoked pot. And it, you know, yeah, it was, it was a shock and we didn't have much

time on that first trip. So he, he told us the story and we had some questions, but really it was those long conversations in prison where we slowly learned more and more about why he had done what he had done. What was the why? What was really the deeper driver? You know, this is something I come back to often and think about. And I talked to him about it. And, you know, he says it was incremental, that he loved doing it because he was good at it. And he enjoyed, he enjoyed the process. He enjoyed the challenge of it. And he felt like it was something he was good at. And he enjoyed bringing the work to the other people that he employed as part of his, his organization. And I think he liked the status of it. Mum's theory is that

he wanted to be like the godfather that everyone came to for help and support and that center of the community, that figure of power. And I don't know if that was it. It started very small and he was very nervous when he first began. I remember him telling me the first pound of marijuana he got when he was living in New York and he just got a pound or something. He was shaking. He was so scared, picking it up. So he wasn't, you know, he wasn't someone who's doing it for the thrills necessarily, but there must have been something enticing about it that as it grew and grew and grew, he never really had much of a respect for unnecessary laws. And I don't think he saw the criminalization of marijuana as something

that was necessary, so paid very little heed to it. And in that way, maybe just somehow got carried away. And the more he did it, and the more he got away with, the more invincible he felt. And I feel that maybe that's getting closer to the heart of why he kept doing it because he genuinely didn't believe he could be caught and I think that invincibility was reinforced by every time he came across a problem either his wealth or his connections were able to dismantle that problem and solve it. So he never, yeah, he never felt vulnerable, which was amazing. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Yeah, I mean, when you guys, for the whole time that you were on the run, been a part of a decade, I guess, was he done at that point? Yes. Yes, very much so.

And when you finally learned what was really going on, and then when you finally talked to him and really learned, okay, so, you know, not just my dad's a fugitive, but also this is why, and this is what happened, and this is sort of his lens on what was going on there. And again, you're starting to define your own life and now without a father present. Anger at some point, like this, because at some point

you got to go through the stages. Yeah. The stages of grief, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, I think definitely anger. Because it seems like even now there's still this really, there's still a fierce love and there's like a sense of protectionism. Yes, which is, I think, you know, one of my,

I was very reluctant to call this book a memoir. I wrote it as a novel originally. And I was just keeping the whole thing at arm's length. And there's many reasons for that. I think one of them was also protection of my family because we, you know, we are incredibly close and I have huge admiration for the choices they made. They were radical. Most of us go through life and we don't make these kind of radical decisions and leave, lead extraordinary lives. We, we do what's safe. We do what's conventional to kind of

follow some other inner sense that leads you down this deeply unusual and brave path. Yes, it didn't work out the way it was meant to, but I have a lot of admiration for the kind of the goal of it. Yeah. And at the same time, you like sort of zooming the lens out those same choices put the entire family in jeopardy yes and and it was a criminal enterprise it was and definitely when I was so when I first found out what he was doing and I was 14 I guess that was when it I started to get angry and I saw it in a black and white sense of if he had loved us, he wouldn't have let this happen. And it was once I kind of came up with this construction in my head of that, of that was how I was telling myself it worked well. If he felt this, this wouldn't

have happened. And this very simplistic kind of understanding of the situation felt like at that point, you know, you feel abandoned and rejected by this person that you love and it's their fault that they're not in your life anymore. And that took a long time to work out. I think maybe longer because I didn't ever tell him he was was in prison and prison is pitiful and awful experience that people have to go through. And I didn't want to make it harder for him by unloading what I was going through on him. So even when he is serving time for incremental enterprise, that was the root cause of your suffering. You still withheld your own pain from him because you didn't want to add to that perceived suffering. Yeah. Yes. We wanted to protect him from it.

And maybe, you know, that maybe there's partly that maybe also to an element that was, you know, he'd absented himself from our lives. So, you know, I was going to absent myself from his life in not a we still spoke every week on the phone we wrote letters to each other we visited every summer for a couple weeks which is sort of with the transatlantic thing the most we could do so we were present in those kind of tangible ways but I think maybe, I was absenting myself by not sharing with him what I was going through. So he got sentenced to 10 years and he served six. And so he started when I was 12 and I was 19 by the time he got out. So you really, you've gone through a whole world of change in that time. And I think by the time he got out, I was coming.

I'd worked out a lot of the anger anyway. I remember he had a weekend. We had a weekend together. I think maybe he was out already. And we went to California together. Just the two of us is the first trip we'd taken after he got out and it was the first time I think I started trying to explain to him that it had been really hard for us too and that I needed him to acknowledge that and hear that because he'd always seen us as being very well adjusted and and happy kids who dealt with it incredibly well and we were in many ways. But that didn't mean that it wasn't hard. And I think for him, he chose not to hear sometimes what was harder

or to ask the questions that might have revealed the answers to show that we weren't finding it as easy as he wanted to believe we were because I think he knew that he would find that very difficult. And to a degree, he just had to get through it. Because that would essentially make him, it would force him to confront his own responsibility for your pain. Yes. And, you know, we all tell ourselves stories to survive. And the story he was telling himself was that it was a it with a sense of of like as you say responsibility and and regret and so he came up with a different way of looking at it which was

that we were all in it together and we were all victims of the authorities pursuit of him has he ever come around to yes i think the process of writing this book which he's been very present for and involved in has led to that which i know i have mixed feelings about that because i know i love him very much and i don't want to make him suffer for things that happened you know two decades ago what point is there in that but at the same time I think it has brought us closer to have him know what our experience of it was what my experience of it was and to see it from that side because this book began as his biography in its long long journey which is why I know his story so well I realized I didn't want to tell his story or I couldn't tell his story because his story

and his version of events, he was the hero and went on these wild adventures through the pot smuggling scene of the 70s and 80s. You know, I wanted to tell it from the point of view of the, you know, women and children are always sidelined in these stories of great adventurers, of antiheroes, of kingpins. You don't really hear about women and children as they're the sort of sentimental subplot. I was like, wait, what about us in this story? So I started looking at it from a different point of view and started writing down what I remembered. So, yeah, we did a lot of talking through that process.

And he's read it. He said he cried and laughed all the way through it was a scary moment sending it to him but I think he's you know he's proud of what I've made and he thinks it's fair he thinks it's a fair representation of what happened there are definitely a few points that he would like he'd probably contest but he knows that it's your story it's my story and it's my truth and everyone's memory is different of the past and that this is this is you can live with this yeah that's fine how about your mom you said uh you know like the stories of the families are always and the women very often are you know are sidelined while the hunter s thompson and tah, that's like sort of, that's where the excitement and the adventure is.

You know, that's where the movies get made. And yet, you know, like there is this, you are living and your sister, your brother living this story and your mother is living this story too. I'm wondering how it's been for her over this last chunk of time. I mean, for the book writing stage. And also just living through this and seeing her kids effectively lose a father for a chunk of time, and grapple with the fact that this man who they love dearly

and want so much to be present and still accept as their father and was there in every way that they thought he was, was in fact like a wanted criminal who was the head of an enterprise who then ended up in prison and then seeing you suffer and grapple with that for years. What has her experience been? I guess mom's life has always been unconventional.

She's always made radical decisions and has been fiercely independent, something I admire hugely. She's not dictated by what society says one ought to do or not to do. It's made her brave and we've learned a huge amount from that. So I know that it was incredibly traumatic for her. Firstly, the loss of the yellow house and our home and our family and our friends there is still a source of deep sadness. And I know the experience when we were teenagers and dad was on the run in Europe and we were going back and forth and we were under surveillance. I know that was hugely anxiety inducing for her and very difficult. And while at first she was definitely doing her best to support dad in every way, by the end she was angry and rightfully so that he hadn't resolved it.

But, you know, fundamentally, I don't know how much of that, you know, we've gone on as, you know, me, my brother, my sister, we lead, we have healthy relationships, we have careers. Like, while we still grapple with that, it's often we grapple with it as like an extraordinary thing in our past that we try and understand quite how it happened and how we all got you know it got so out of hand really but it doesn't haunt us in that way does that make sense yeah i mean it's so it is really it's so interesting right because as i as i mentioned when we started in the first few seconds of our conversation as we sit here today you know're in New York City and you split your time between New York and London, I believe. You have built an admirable, rewarding career as a

writer and as a journalist and you travel the world. Sitting across from you, you seem light, you seem joyful, you seem well-adjusted, you seem accomplished in your career. And as you mentioned, there are no big trust issues or attachment issues. You have great relationships. It seemed like, you know, it could have gone one of two ways, either wounded for life and in a dark place and struggling on every level. And somehow it seems like you and from what you're saying, your brother and sister also have somehow found a way to be okay, to flourish, to live good lives and to find, to navigate your way back to understanding and like actual genuine family relationships with your parents and with others and go out there and live good lives. Yes. I mean, and I'm hugely grateful for that. I think we were always loved, deeply loved, and we felt deeply loved. I mean, even at the moments where I was pushing back against my parents and I was working out these issues of anger.

And, you know, I mean, I wasn't, you know, I'm now in my mid-30s. Certainly those moments as a teenager wouldn't describe me as happy and flourishing. You know, I rebelled like the best of them. And I've lost my train of thought. You were just saying you went through rebels. So, love, we were, I think you can do a huge amount so love we were I think you can do a huge amount kids are very resilient and you can do a huge amount to them and as long as they feel loved and I think that will carry I mean I don't have children so I'm just speaking from being a child

myself but I think the fact that we always had that and that bedrock behind everything else that was happening. You can rebel and you can push back and you can, you know, go through that process of understanding and redefining your past so you can better live with it. But at the foundation of it, there's this sense of support. And I think that's probably why it all turned out okay. It's because of that. At the end of the day, come sound to love. That makes me sound like a hippie. Taking it all full circle back to the 70s in California, right?

Yeah. Yes. And a sense of community. We looked after each other incredibly close with my siblings and with my mom and my dad. And you can kind of take us anywhere and drop us anywhere and we're going to be okay because of that. How are your mom and dad today with each other? I mean, mom lives in the far reaches of Cornwall. She barely talks to anyone she doesn't want to. So I think they exchange Christmas cards. No animosity, but no, they don't really speak. She doesn't really speak to anyone much, apart from us.

What's that about? Is it just the way she's always been or the way she's wired, or did something change? No, no. She's very, you know, her world there. She has a beautiful house with a big garden right by the sea, and that's what she needs and what she wants. Does your choice to become a writer and to continue to travel and write about sort of intense experiences in other places, do you feel like that ties in at all to any of this yes I'm sure it's strange when I was younger I hated moving I remember the point

where we decided we were moving again and we'd pack up all our boxes and our bags and always we'd have to mum's motto is always if in doubt chuck it out so we'd go through everything and you'd have to get rid of half your toys and half your clothes. And we'd have months of you'd only eat whatever was in the cupboards because you couldn't buy any food because we were moving. This is regimen we'd be on, which I now instigate every time I move. But I hated it. And I never wanted to move.

I used to just kick and scream and cry. And I would get terribly nostalgic and I'd kiss the letterbox goodbye as we left the house and then find it difficult in the new place. I found it hard to make friends when I was younger. And then somehow now as an adult, I can't seem to stop moving and traveling. So I guess even though I resisted, it must have ingrained something in me of a rhythm to life of renewal and starting again and moving from place to place. And I still find it difficult. Moving from London to New York, I found I miss people terribly. I found it so difficult. I moved back and forth about four or five times indecisively. So it's not that it's necessarily easy, but it's

definitely compulsive. It's definitely part of who I am. There's some, mum thinks we're just nomadic. It's, you know, we're linked to the nomads of our past. But with the traveling, I always had this urge to see the world. And part of that probably was because we'd be going to see dad in these exotic places and we were living in these exotic places. Mom had traveled a lot when she was younger and she'd talk about modeling in Paris and when she first moved to New York. And it just was something that felt very exciting to me. I remember being in St. Lucia visiting dad for the first time and feeling excited about the world and what there was to see. So the first opportunity I had to, I packed my bags at 16. I went backpacking around Central America. Far too young, I got in tons of

trouble, learned a huge amount, got stuck in the same hurricane twice. And then from there, it just was something I knew I needed to keep doing. And it made sense as a writer to write about it if I was going to be doing it anyway. I went to live in South America for a while. And I think that was the point where I realized that I needed to start writing about traveling. Otherwise, I was just on like a prolonged holiday and that couldn't live like that forever. It's like, well, if I write, then this is a job then. It's like, right, if I can call it work, it's a whole different thing. I'm allowed to keep doing it forever.

When did you know you wanted to write? I mean, did it just kind of evolve organically in that way or was there something that happened where you're like, no, this is what I'm about? I mean, every writer will always say, you know, I always wanted to be a writer. And definitely I was always writing. Mum said,

wherever, if she gave me a pen and a piece of paper, I'd be amused anywhere she took me from, you know, the moment I could hold a pencil, basically. And I was always writing stories or plays or I think once I wrote a musical briefly, it was terrible. No, so I was always writing anyway. But I don't know if it, I remember this one trip, me and mum went to Paris when I was 16 and I was reading Maggie O'Farrell's After You've Gone, When You Were Gone. I can't remember, After You'd Gone, I think. And I'd just come out, I'd just broken up with my first love, believed it to be my first love at that moment, and was feeling totally bereft and really indulging and heartbreak. And I felt like the biggest thing I'd just broken up with my first love. I believed it to be my first love at that moment. And I was feeling totally bereft and really indulging and heartbreak. And it felt like the biggest thing I'd ever felt.

And I was reading this book. And in the book, it's about a woman who's suddenly lost her husband in a tragic accident. And I found myself walking around Paris weeping, except I wasn't weeping for me. I was weeping for her dead lover. And I just thought to myself, I want to do this. I want to make people cry for someone else's pain rather than their own. And it seemed like something grand and wonderful to be able to like lift the heartbreak I was feeling and to then feel it through this character in a book. I remember that moment as kind of crystallizing. And it's something very sad for like, I want to make other people cry.

That was the move of it. I felt ping too. No, but actually it's really interesting because I've spoken to so many people where there is, yes, they've been doing this thing and doing this thing and doing this thing, but there is something, it's a moment or a conversation or it can be a blink of an eye. It doesn't have to be this big grand thing, but there's something that happens. You're like, oh, this is something that matters more to me. You know? So it's funny that just that one moment for you keys in on it. And it's not, I had the chance to sit down with Milton Glaser a couple of years back and talk to him.

And shortly into the conversation we were talking about, and he kind of said, you know, I knew from the age of five or six, what I was here to do, I wanted to make things that move people, which is effectively what you're saying. When you say, I want to write in the way that makes people cry, you want to create something, you know, that didn't exist before that when people interact with it, it provokes emotion. And it's so, it is so interesting because I think a lot of times there is a catalyzing moment that wakes people up to that thing. And that's for you and there are other expressions of it for other people. You're so grateful to the artists in your life that have helped carry you through your suffering. So I think for many people that remains just grateful for the art in their life that carries them through.

And then for some people it's like, I want to make that. I want to do that. I want to pass that on, you know, pay that forward. And I do wonder, I was a compulsive journal keeper. I've got boxes and boxes of journals. And weirdly, I never wrote about what was happening in my life with dad because we weren't allowed to talk about it and I that meant that because our phones were tapped and because they could turn up at any moment and we didn't know who we could talk to and who we couldn't or if we told someone maybe they would tell someone so there was this this total blanket wall of secrecy and that applied to me writing my diary as well. So I didn't tell, I didn't work out any of those issues until I was a bit older. There's a few entries start coming once he's in prison,

but even then not often. So it wasn't like I was working out this thing, this big thing through writing. And yet somehow I'm sure there was a sense that this was a story that I would have to tell. And me and my dad wrote to each other in prison, and he started writing his memoirs when he was in prison, which I used as research for this book. A huge thing written on a typewriter. So, you know, he didn't have a computer in prison, so he had just no paragraphs, no chapters,

just maybe 300,000 words on a typewriter. And he would send us chapters from that and talk about how one day we'd do this project together. So I guess that seed was always there that this story would be told. What do you want to happen? You mentioned that in the beginning, this was actually intended to be fiction. So nobody would really know this was true, especially your truth and your father's truth

and your mother's truth and your sibling's truth. But at some point you made the decision that no, this actually, people need to read this as truth, as reality. Now that this story is about to interact with large numbers of people, what do you want to happen through telling this story? Or have you even thought about that? No, I haven't thought about that. What do I want to

happen? I think I've been so busy being scared, I've forgotten to think about what I would like to happen next. And the readers that have read it so far, when someone tells me that I moved them, that it resonated with some part of their childhood, that definitely keeps me going and makes me feel like this was the right thing to do and that certainly if more people could read it and feel that way about it and feel touched by the story or feel moved by it or for it to in any way help them understand their own childhood,

then that would be wonderful. So I hope so. I hope people enjoy it. I mean, I think it's interesting also because part of what I get out of it is love is complicated. Life is complicated. Family, relationships. You mentioned there was this kind of shortish window of a couple of years where it was pretty black and white. But once you step into a little further, you step back into nuance, you start to realize, yes, some bad stuff happened, some bad decisions were made, but that doesn't eclipse the existence of deep and profound love. It doesn't, you know, there is, it's complicated, you know, that I think part of the message for me also is that there's a difference between what happens to you and the choices you make to allow yourself to move through it, to integrate it and to build the realization that we have a choice how we view our past. I could have come out of dad's incarceration, that time of separation, the sort of wild years when I was, you know, as a teenager and I was really hurting a great deal.

And seen it as a tragedy that this had happened to us. And told the story that our dad abandoned us and you know and he made this choice to be a drug trafficker when he had young children and can you believe that you know I could have I could have decided to tell the story that way and then I would be a different person and a less happy person but I chose to tell it differently and I chose to see it differently and And I chose to see it differently. And I believe in my version of events very truly. But it is a choice that we make. And, you know, our past is a story we tell. And how we tell that story is a choice we make about who we are,

and how we want to be perceived, and who we want to be. And I think being aware of that suddenly empowers you to rethink in some ways. And the process of writing this is kind of mirrored my, you know, I started when I was 24. I knew nothing about anything. Thank God I would never have done this if I knew how hard it was. So when I first began it, the reason I think I called it a novel as well as I was still keeping this story at arm's length for me. And I still hadn't done any of that work that you need to do to figure out what happened and what it means. And that complicated web of family relationships and love and blame and guilt and regret and how it all interacts. I hadn't even begun the work of untangling that. And I think through the writing process, I did do that. And certainly the point where I decided to write it as a memoir,

suddenly all of that was just, I was deep in there trying to work it out. I know that was hard. And those points of writing this, I just said, God, people do this. Other people write memoirs. Why would anyone go through this? You know, because you're thrown right back into the thick of the pain of it. But you come out and you have made a narrative out of it. You have decided how you're going to tell the world.

And that helps you figure all that stuff out. And I think the choice between novel versus memoir also demands that you be honest in a way that you wouldn't have to. You wouldn't have to face that reckoning and be that honest had you chosen to make it a novel. But when you say, no, this is a memoir, memoirs that aren't honest aren't good. So it's like you're not just making a choice about the memoir. You're saying, I'm choosing to stand in the full catastrophe of the truth of what has happened on all levels. Yeah, and I remember an early version of it. Someone read and Edith just said, she just needs to dig deeper.

And I remember being furious. I was like, how dare you? Dig deeper? You dig deeper. Like, just could not believe that someone, you know, it felt like I had done that. I did the digging. And then I went back and I was like, hey, dig deeper. And I did.

And I remember one chapter I wrote, I think one of the chapters about visiting dad in prison during that time. And I looked down afterwards and I was shaking. My whole body was shaking. I was like, oh, this, and it's funny because sometimes your brain hasn't fully taken on board what's happening to you emotionally. It's like, why am I shaking? I went outside to have a sit down and a drink and I started crying and I realized that it had somehow put me completely back there in my head. So my body was reacting in a way it probably didn't even do then to what I had re-experienced. And at that point I was like, okay, this is digging deep. This is the moment that I've been avoiding by calling it a novel for so long was it was this confrontation with the past yeah and feeling that

way yeah yes we do we're self-protective yeah creatures it's so interesting I know I know when I'm writing and I've hit the truth because same thing. I physically, I have a very physical visceral reaction. Yes. It's not always fun. No, no, no. Very often you're like, oh, let's not go there again. That didn't feel good. But at the end, there is something like profoundly cathartic about going there.

So as we sit here today and anyway, this is a good life project. And I always come full circle and ask the same question. If I offer the phrase, the term to live a good life, what comes up? Redefine your idea of success to suit your needs. At least I would tell you a different answer every day. But this is one of the things I've been working on is this idea. We all want to do better all the time. We give ourselves such a hard time because we're not the best at something.

We're not being the best we can be at any given moment. We should go to the gym more. We should do this. We should do that. I should be getting published here. I should be acting in these shows. We're always pushing ourselves in such a way. And I think sometimes that can lead to such huge amounts

of dissatisfaction with the present moment and with who we are in it. And not every form of success is applicable to us. And if you have a think about actually, okay, what would I need in my life to feel happy every day and to feel that I have been, I am a success to me and work out that rather than chasing these goals that we're told that we should have and often are unattainable to everybody or not even applicable or might not even work or make you happy. Yet we keep pushing for them and trying to get them. So I think taking a minute to figure out that idea, how will I be happy? How do I feel successful as a person to me alone?

Anyway, that's where I am. Just trying to work that out. Thank you. My pleasure. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks to our fantastic sponsors too. If you love this show, please support them. They help make the podcast possible. Check out the links in today's show notes. Oh, and don't

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making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg... You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.