Julian Dorey Podcast - 😳 #105: I Was One Of The Biggest Drug Smugglers Of All Time | Tim McBride

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Tim McBride is one of the biggest weed smugglers in American history. In the 1980s he rose to the top of the ranks of the legendary Chokoloskee, Florida illegal import conspiracy. His story has been featured on VICE and he wrote a book about his experiences called “Saltwater Cowboy.” Tim’s Book, “Saltwater Cowboy”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NKFX3Y2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Tim discusses the documentary VICE produced with him; A wild story to kick things off; Tim talks about for Sammy Davis Jr. when he was 20 31:15 - How Tim ended up in Chokoloskee, FL; Billy: The Captain; Swimming with sharks; The cover story of crabbing; Tim talks about how his first time smuggling went down; Where was the coast guard? 54:50 - The Yucatan and how pickups would go down once the product was smuggled towards shore; The Island Community of Smugglers; Stash Houses; Cleaning Weed; How much money the crew charged 1:13:10 - The Daniels Brothers; Griselda Blanco; Carlos Lehder; Chase boat procedure; The Dead Drops to the Cubans in Miami; How the cops were dealt with 1:32:05 - The story of the most lucrative RV drive in American History; Tim becomes the Godfather 1:48:08 - Tim talks about his first trip to Colombia as head of the operation; Park rangers on the payroll; Was Tim ever worried about getting caught?; Why Burying Money doesn’t work; The crime money problems that movies don’t show 2:14:39 - Tim tells stories about how he and the crew spent their money; Matt Cox was Tim’s real estate agent (not really, but really) 2:24:25 - Tim tells the story about smuggling for infamous Panamanian President Manuel Noriega; The 5 Brothers & The Judge; Tim explains what “square grouper” means ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier   PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That's when George winds up finding me. He knocks on my door. I open the door and he goes, Timmy! Dude, he says, I said, George, what the fuck, man? He says, man, we got work to do. He says, the shit's packing up. Can you do this? And I just went, yeah, fuck yeah.

You know, because I didn't give it a second thought, you know, because we were actually the infrastructure, all of us younger guys. So you just went from, like like prime deckhand to godfather. I went right on to making the deals with some Cubans in Miami, and now I'm the guy that's flying to Columbia and to Jamaica to Central America. What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by my friend, Mr. Tim McBride. And whoa, is this a life story if I've ever heard one. Tim is the author of the book, Saltwater Cowboy, which I would highly recommend. It's phenomenal. It's in the Amazon bookstore and wherever you get your books.

And that is because Tim, when he was younger, this is now 35 years ago, Tim was one of the biggest pot smugglers in the history of the United States of America. He was down in a very remote place called Chukaluski Island that you're going to hear about in Florida. You're going to hear about how it all went down and how he got involved with it, which is crazy in and of itself. And they lived in a different world. I'll just put – there's no real way for me to put this i mean the guy explained a lot of it today and i got a little surprised because he was here for i guess like almost five hours so this is going to be two podcasts you're going to get the first part today and you're going to get the next part i believe next week is when i'm going to put it out because essentially not that we could have

planned this but it just worked out beautifully where the second half was kind of like his whole how he went down in the aftermath. So you can watch that without hearing the first half really at all. And the first half goes through how this all went down and what he was doing and the whole story with Chuck Lusky. It's absolutely wild. I was thoroughly entertained the entire time, and I'm sure you guys will be too. So I hope you enjoy. Now, if you are on YouTube, please hit that subscribe button. Please hit that like button on the video. And as always,

we'd love to hear from you down in the comment section as well. To all of you who have been sharing these episodes with friends, sharing the link, sharing it on social media, even just in text with your friends and things like that, like people who would enjoy the podcast. Thank you so much. We got to keep that rolling. That's really what grows this show. I often get people to reach out like, yo, why does your long form not get seen in my feed? Or why do I not hear about it as much? Or why doesn't it get the views you get on shorts? It's because YouTube measures this channel as a shorts channel. It is a problem that all shorts creators have. And so they do not really put my long form content in a lot of feeds. And that's just, that's an algorithmic thing

that they're trying to figure it out. So while that's happening, the best way to get around that is to share the content. I'm probably going to say this and repeat this over a few episodes and then sporadically so that people kind of remember, but spreading it around with friends, actually watching the episode, if you come here to view it on YouTube, so that it gets the proper watch time and things like that. That's huge. And I would really, really appreciate it if we kept that ball rolling and kept getting the word out, because that's how we're going to grow this thing and actually take it to the next level. So once again, thank you to everyone who's been doing that. If you're on Apple or Spotify, same deal, share it around with friends. Thank you for checking out the show over there. And

if you have a second, we'd love to see you leave a five-star review on either one of those platforms. And of course, make sure you're following. And other than that, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendify. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. John just became one of my dearest friends, you know, and when we started to do that, you know, pre-production of that Viceland video, which was actually an hour-long documentary that they they aired but they only put nine minutes and like 38 seconds of it online i wonder how they do that because it's like they have all these different series that's the one thing like it confuses me sometimes like they have the drug series then they got like a regular crime series and then

they have stuff that's like 45 minutes and they have stuff that's 10 but right i see one like yours and i'm like i want more of that right well that video when they put it online it had within the first 24 hours 1.1 million views i'll bet it did and now it's gotten as far as australia new zealand and the philippines i've got fans in the philippines that are buying my book wow you know and i get them you know trying to dm me shit all the time. Who approached you to do that? One of the producers for Vice Land. How did they find out about you? The book? They just, yeah, look me up. And I was all over the place at that time, you know, and they said, well, we've got to get this guy's story. And I talked to John one day, you know, I said, do you happen to by chance know any of your old buddies that were involved in this thing that might want to come, you know, be a part of this?

And he said, I know the two perfect guys. I'll call them John and John. So you were like cast in the whole thing. Yeah. So he says, these two guys, they love to talk about themselves, man. And I'm like, cool. So I wound up being, you know, John A. come from the CIA to run interdiction vessels for customs. He swapped out of CIA and came to U.S. Customs to run interdiction vessels.

Oh, the guy you were just showing me who was in that. John. Yes, the guy, the arresting agent. John, the guy I showed you the picture of, he was a colonel in the Army. He was a ranger. Badass motherfucker. And then he was CIA and then Customs? No, no, no, no, no.

The two guys he introduced me to. Oh, I got you. Ron and Ron. We'll call them Ron A and Ron B. Too many Johns. Yeah, a lot of Johns. Sorry if I confused you on that one. And so John A came from CIA to run interdiction vessels.

He wanted to learn how to do that. And then Ron B came from Secret Service under the Carter administration. He wanted to come down and run interdiction vessels. He wanted to learn how to do that. And then Ron B. came from Secret Service under the Carter administration. He wanted to come down and run interdiction. So those two guys actually chased me for six years before John arrived on the scene. This guy. All when you were a kid. And he introduced him to me. We're having this chat. We're talking. Having a lunch. And I'm telling him what's up and this and that kind of shit like that. know and and uh we just you know wound up being this you know close friends after that shit because it wound up because of who we are and how we operate and what we did

you know ultimately just a bunch of kids that were family oriented and we we grew up in this industry as generational there was no guns never once did i ever see anybody handle a gun yeah this is a way different people are going to be very surprised to hear how simple this was it's one of the things that endears most people to the story and allows them to relax and say oh yeah i kind of like to hear about this because it's not that typical gangster gun play cocaine cowboy shit louisa shout out and and most people would say you know they asked me about you know um they have this image in their mind it's this confused image of a of a dimly lit smoky back room somewhere in miami and guns on the table and we're making these deals dude nothing could be

further from the truth i'm making 100 million dollar deals standing out on a street corner you know in front of a cuban cafe dunking cuban bread and coffee have a handshake that's just or literally just sitting on a boat i mean this is how it was done this is nuts man but and by the way when vice comes down and does that i've always wondered this how big is the crew for a feature like that it was a producer a sound man and a cameraman that was it wow it was that it was it they do such a good job with that following us around they went up there they went up to stream with my buddy tommy and i yeah yeah i saw that yeah and they just they just let you guys for three days and just did they tell you what they want you to do well they kind of

prompted a little bit of as producers do you know they'll pull out a particular storyline and the flow of how they want things to progress but not knowing the story as intimately as as they could have there's not so much there's not too much pulling me along as they you know as as they would think is you know like i i'm fond of saying there's no real quick answer to any one question i've got to give me i've got to give you a bit of a preamble and prelude to that answering of the question. Otherwise, you're just not going to get it. Well, that's kind of also like a great way to describe the beginning of your book, too. Because I got to tell you, man, that's one of the best hooks I've, you had a story of when you would be out on the boat and go meet up with like an industrial vessel where the weed was.

And this one particular time you went there, what was going on with the cows? Yeah, well, like you said, I've been pot hauling for some time now. And I had thought we had seen this shit coming in every way possible we could see it coming it would come in shrimp boats it would come in yachts it would come in freighters and i've unloaded you know i've helped unload freighters that had as much as two three hundred thousand pounds on them are we talking like freighters that would pull into like 400 400 foot freighters wow you know with huge hulls holds in a man yeah you know we, man. You could put 150 tons in these fucking things, and it would take us two, three nights to unload these. And three or four boats working our Everglades crew.

There were five crews in those days. There was Everglades City crew. There was a Goodland, which is the next island up. I had a crew. Marco Island, which is the next island up, had a crew. That's bougie, Bill. And then Naples. And then Pine Island, just north of Naples, had a crew.

So five crews working. And we were unloading this shit. All five crews working because they were parked out there like a parking lot, man. And how far out are we talking? Like 60, 80 miles? 30 miles. That's not that far. As close as we could get them, the better off we were because then we could get it in and get it in the house and get it shut up before the sun come up.

That's the whole key to the whole thing. And this is all in the Gulf. This is all in the Gulf, all off of these islands right here because we're making it through the pass to Chokoloskee back in here, and we're making our own way through here. I'm going to stick a map in the corner so people can see what we're talking about. And then maybe I'll put some pictures as well, just so they can see the terrain. Visual of this gives you a pretty good indication as to what it was, the government and everybody was dealing with. This was our backyard. Yeah. Like, you know what it made me think of?

You ever seen the movie or not the movie, the show true detective. I don't think so. The first season was unreal. It was Matt McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. But it takes place in Louisiana. And Louisiana is basically like a character in the show. Because they have the lands. They show how there's all these backwoods and back creeks and stuff.

And these people know where these places are. And it's like it throws people off. It throws people on the trail off all the time. And when I was looking at this, I'm like, especially when you're watching the Vice documentary, too, and they literally have you going in a little boat back there. I'm like, there's such an advantage if you're on your home territory here. I'm just thinking of some asshole customs agent. Like, what the fuck? Where'd they go?

We were taking them up the river. There was a section that we had as kids. We were instructed by the adults to carve out through the mangroves this waterway that went from a little grouping of houses and trailers and stuff on a little island called Plantation. It was right there in Everglades City. And the Barren River was right next to it. And everybody had Gulf access. But to get to Turner River, which is about another mile over that goes all the way out to Highway 41,

albeit it gets very shallow, but we had carved out this waterway that nobody knew about. And we called it Halfway Creek. And it was always somebody's job to go in there with chainsaws or whatever and keep the overgrowth and closing it in. Your own little Panama Canal. And there was a house on Plantation Island. And we had, at one time, there was every house on Chokoloskee Island, and Plantation was full of hot.

And we had to unload one of them because we're going to refill it that afternoon or that night. So we have to take it and shovel it through up to Turner River and put it in the woods and then put it on a truck and send it right out 41, right? Instead of coming to town. We'll get to – I want to walk through all this, but not to get you off because i was asking how far out it was that first part though this this one boat maybe this is like two three years into doing it they got cows on there and what were they doing with them yeah um i'm you know i'm just riding that out in the wheelhouse on the bunk just kicking back and and captain billy and you know the the typical scenario is um to to approach the boat give it a call sign every boat has this particular call sign so they know that the boat coming to it is the one that should be right in this case it was felipe felipe

felipe zorro now are you doing you're doing that on the radio right right on right on the radio okay felipe felipe felipe zorro And you guys weren't worried about someone listening in wondering if it's code? It didn't matter because it was just a call sign. Right. Okay. You know. And it was done over the VHF, which was an open channel. You know, anybody, you know, could be on that channel.

And we get that communication back as a confirmation to the boat so they know that we're coming. You know, typically three, two, three hours, four hours before the sun goes down, we'll try to approach a boat like that, depending on the size of the load. So we have some daylight to work with. Get our load onto our boat and start heading ass back into shore because this boat now is, you know, you got 30,000 pounds, 40,000 pounds on this damn thing. It's barely moving. All weed, all packed away.

I mean, there's no hiding this shit right and if you were to fly over it and get a look at the boat from above yeah all you could see was the radar turning and a big pile of weed with a radar sticking out of it what it looked like couldn't even see the boat and um and that's um then we would make our way into shore and those you know it doesn't seem doesn't seem like that far of a distance, but when you're only moving two, three knots, because this thing's like. Yeah, the whole boat's being dragged down. You've got this huge turbo 12-cylinder Detroit diesel engine that's hauling this load, and it's turning a prop, a brass wheel that weighs about 700 pounds, and it's walking this shit through the water. We bring this out there.

So we're doing that approach. He calls the boat, and we're going to make an approach to it. And I'm standing there looking out the window like this. And Billy, Captain, hands me the binoculars. He goes, watch this, dude. He says, you're not going to believe what you're about to see. I get the binoculars up, and I'm looking. And all of a sudden, we get about a mile from this thing.

And it's a pretty good-sized vessel. And there's cows on this, cattle on the weather deck. How many cattle? I don't know. There must have been 150, 200. Easy. So all of a sudden the tailgates open up on this thing, like the corral opens up. And these guys are cattle prodding these fucking things off the back of the boat and it's like a bovine waterfall these things are just splash splash splash in the water and you know and cows don't fucking swim man did they just sink like a

rock no they're just you know turning eyes and we pull up there and we're kind of making our way slowly through these things you're just navigating around the fucking cows. We're trying to get up to the boat because they're floating everywhere. Oh, my God. Were you trying to save Eddie? Fuck no. What are you going to do? You know, so.

And we're like, what the fuck is going on? You know, this was news to us. You know, like I said. And the cows are just mooing and going fucking down below the surface. Yeah. And they're all bobbing down below and they come up and down below and, you know. That's got to be like fucking traumatizing to watch. Dude, we look up to this fucking captain

and, you know, and he's leaning against the railing. He looks down at us and I yell up there and I said, what the fuck are you doing? Holy shit. And he's peeling an orange. He goes, just, you know. No worries, Chico. Yeah, no, he goes, you know,

we got all this shit down below. He says, we can't get it up here with all these cows in the way. So they run them off the back of the boat. Why the fuck were there cows on the boat? I love getting messages from people who have just recently purchased the 8 Sleep Pod Pro Cover because they're always so excited about it right away because the product's incredible. The 8 Sleep Pod Pro Cover comes in queen or king sizes. It goes right on top of your current mattress and it is wired directly into Eight Sleep's proprietary app, which measures all kinds of stuff throughout

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So use that code TRENDOFIRE. Once again, that's T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R, and you will get $150 off your own 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover. Go check it out. For an excuse to be on the boat. Like I said, I've seen it come in many different size shapes of vessels that there is, and this guy happened to be his, was buying cattle in South America, reselling them on the market in New Orleans. He was selling those ones.

And they approached him one day and said, look, would you, you know, hey, well, you're talking about, you know, three, four hundred thousand bucks for an eight-day trip. Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah. So stuff it all down below, throw the cows on there you know nobody would ever know you know who cares nobody that's a cattle vessel like that so when it got to us fuck them cows man they weren't you know fuck them what they were making us worth more than the goddamn cows on the boat right wait this doesn't still happen today right no way okay pita stand down stand down we got it we're good those cows are gone it's sad this was a unique a unique environment in which you know nobody else could

cooperate like this anywhere in the world because they don't have this yeah to work with again you're pointing at the like the actual like terrain the 10 000 Islands is what that's called it's literally 10 000 Islands like what you see here is a fraction it. There's 25 miles of coastline that looks like this. That's two miles deep. Well, Tim, I want to start at the beginning then. Now we got a little preview of what's to come. This reading your book, obviously, when it opened up with the whole cow thing, I was like, oh, fuck, I'm in now. Like, now I'm going to sit here and read this goddamn thing.

I don't have time to do this right now. But your upbringing, I thought, was all in pretty much in the Midwest. Right. Yeah. There was really. So you weren't from Florida. No. I was raised, born and raised primarily in North Carolina.

My father was 82nd Airborne out of Fayetteville, Fort Bragg. And he took a sales job that landed us between Milwaukee and and chicago because he could work both areas and that consequently was a little town called delavan in wisconsin next to lake geneva which is a lot which is a pretty well-known tourist tourist spot from people in chicago and um i had uh did my high school years there and that's when i got done working with sammy davis jr for those couple years i came back home and that's when my next door neighbor called me and said, hey, dude, my brother-in-law owns a fish house on this little island down in Everglades. I'm going to go work with my sister and my brother-in-law

on a fishing boat. You want to go? Before we get there, though, how did you end up with Sammy Davis Jr.? What's going on there? Like the legend. He's on that picture, by the way, right behind you. See him down there?

Oh, the rat pack. That's it. Yeah, man. Yeah, right behind you. See him down there? Oh, the Rat Pack. That's it. Yeah, man. Yeah, I knew all those guys. Oh, my God. How'd that happen? My cousin Joey in Ohio and his best friend drove Sammy's tour bus. Oh, wow. And I was there over a holiday kind of visiting and recuperating from a little operation that I had had, you know,

and he said, why don't you come on out to L.A. and hang out with us and recuperate a little bit. So I went out there and I met Richard Wayman, the guy that they lived with in this apartment that Sammy kept for them. Richard Wayman was his financial advisor. So I got to know Richard and he liked me, you know, and shit like that. So he offered me a job to come back and, you know, be Sammy's personal videographer, videotape. He liked to, because of the Broadway shows and the touring and stuff that he was doing, he was so busy involved in the entertainment industry that he wanted to watch television without commercials in it.

So my job was to literally take a TV guide from him every week that he just went through and checked off what he wanted to see. Oh, he would get the guide. And then I'd give him a new guide from him every week that he just went through and checked off what he wanted to see. Oh, he would get the guide. And then I'd give him a new guide for the next week. And then I would take that week ahead and tape everything that he, and edit commercials out of it. That was your job. So my apartment was three different styles of videotape at that time. There was the three-quarter-inch Betamax, which was a big giant mugger like this. And then VHS, which was just coming onto the scene at that time that there was the three-quarter inch betamax which was a big giant mugger like this and then vhs which was just coming on to the scene at that time um and i would transpose them

from and if i didn't want to sit and actually watch it i could take off with my buddy sean and go through topanga canyon because we were in the valley i was in encino i had to go over the hills and in um down highland avenue into hollywood across Sunset on Highland Avenue was the Video Duplication Inc. it was called. Richard owned a side business that was taking first-run motion pictures from the big motion picture houses of that time, Columbia United Artists, Paramount and such, and transferring it from the cellulose film reels to VHS tapes in this building. And he had, you know, besides doing the daily taping for Sammy, he had a list of all these new movies that he had coming out that he was taping that he was only privy to. This shit wasn't coming out for like three months.

Oh, wow. So then he had a list of celebrities around Brentwood, Hollywood, you know, and West Hollywood and the Hills that would give them a list and they'd check off one they wanted to see. And I would make a copy for them and drive around in LA and deliver these things to them, you know, and personally give Sammy his videotapes and then take another TV guide. And if I, like I said, if I wasn't watching this shit, you know, Topanga Canyon, go right through Topanga Canyon to Topanga Beach beach which was just between was between um santa monica and malibu right north of malibu north of malibu is venice

is uh zuma beach it's funny how i like vaguely know that map because so many people have told me i still have never been like when people describe this i'm like i've seen the google images we go out there just throw the frisbee all afternoon and this shit would just record and then i go back and transfer it from one machine to the other and edit the commercials out of it as it was going along how much how much you're making now i was making i think i made 225 a week all right well back then that was well this was in 78 pretty good yeah pretty damn good money in those days hanging out with sammy davis i didn't have to pay rent i didn't have to pay for food i got a you know i had a car a rental car that was given to me oh so they gave you all this stuff all this shit we're talking sammy dude you had

you got like a lot of crazy little opportunities in your life i'll tell you well yeah i mean you know i i every now and then i i let out that out that the story that I tell sometimes is a bit of a Forrest Gump tale. A little bit. I just trip from one thing to another. I had another guy like that in here. We called it that. It was like the real life course. That's a whole – there's a couple hours of story just about L.A. and Hollywood and those people.

Were you friends with any prominent people out there? Yeah. Like who? Sammy and his wife. At the time, Aldavis was his wife and his two kids. And I wound up taking one of his younger kids to a place called Magic Mountain in L.A. It was a theme park.

And his bodyguard took us, and I took him to Magic Mountain and shit. I knew at that time there was a retired NFL player by the name of Rosie Greer, Roosevelt Greer. He was on the list of people I was making videos for. Milton Berle, comedian, old-time comedian. That name does sound familiar. This is going way back now.

These are old-timers, man. These are Hollywood royalty. And I was making copies for these people, and they'd invite me in, and I'm talking, you know, bullshit. And then I'd leave, you know, and sit like that. And I ran to one day going to Topanga. We were driving through Topanga with my buddy Sean to throw the Frisbee in. You run across moviemaking all over the place, you know. And we're driving to the canyon, and we see the lights set up in the cameras and all these cars parked on the side of the

road. And I said, cool, they're making a movie, dude. Let's look. And I got my, my cutoff jeans on. That's it. And Sean, him too. And he says, what do you mean, dude? Wait, whoa.

I said, well, they can only tell us to leave or something, you know, they can't eat us. So let's go check it out. Right. So I walk over, we walk over there and sitting in one of these tall director chairs was one was the star of this particular film that we're making him her name was kim darby her i'm not if you ever have you if you've ever seen true grit with john wayne i have not seen john wayne's original one no well you've seen the i've seen the newer one the newer version okay the girl mad. What was her last name? Darby.

Darby. Kim Darby. Yeah. She was sitting there in a chair, and we strolled up there, and I didn't know who the fuck she was. Particularly when you meet somebody like that that you've seen on the screen in person, there's not an instant connection. You kind of kind of, oh, okay. After a while, you recognize who they are. And I said, what's going on, man?

She goes, well, I'm just chilling back, waiting on my, you know, the crudity reset and like that. And she said her name was Kim, and I'm Tim, blah, blah, blah, like that. And I told her, well, we're headed out to Topanga to throw the Frisbee for a while on the beach. She goes, come on out with us. She goes, well, maybe I can come out when we're done here. You know, we'll see. Well, a couple hours later, here she comes strolling out on the beach. She goes, come on out with us. She goes, well, maybe I can come out when we're done here. We'll see. Well, a couple hours later, here she comes strolling out on the beach. Oh, my God. You know, and she had come out and hung out with us for a little while.

That's pretty cool. But what made you want to leave? Because you were there for like a year or so? That was for a couple of years, yeah. You know, the whole Hollywood thing, that bubble had long since burst for me. You know, you have this, everybody has their own expectations about a certain thing. Like my story, for instance, you know. Yeah. People, in the story about the dimly lit, smoky back rooms kind of thing, people have their own vision of motion picture and television and things like that. Well, I actually saw how it was done.

And it just, the bubble was popped for me. You know, it didn't mean the same thing to me anymore. And I just got bored with it. And I said, you know, I think I've had enough. And that's when I drove back to Wisconsin. I wasn't there for maybe a couple weeks just hanging out and fucking off. And that's when my buddy called me and said, dude, I'm going to Florida tomorrow. You want to go?

And which buddy was this? Mark is his name. Clark, I call him the book because I could very well have used his name. And some of the names are real names, but some of the names are made up. Sure, sure. And the reason for that is I have too much respect for the people that I grew up in this industry with to just throw their name out there and throw them under the bus like that without their permission. Some people had gotten permission from, like Todd Bigelow and Bam Bam, Scotty Bigelow, I told you about. I could say them because I had the permission to do so.

Well, I couldn't get a hold of Mark, so I called him Clark in the book. Clark was who I- You've talked to him now, obviously. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They've since, I mean, they're just blown away by the whole thing. You know, and I could not, by law, and, you know, when I was publishing with St. Martin's Press, I had to do the, you know, through the editing, blah, blah, blah, and stuff. And I had to get with their legal department and sort through some legal issues. And one of those issues was that very thing, the naming of names.

And not everybody went to prison. There was just too many of us, man. I mean, there was five crews working by the time I took shit over. And I'm working five crews in southwest Florida, and there's anywhere from 40, 50, 60 people on a crew. So they're focused on the guys who are more run, the senior people. The bigger guys, more visible, you know, guys that have been around. And the whole town was in on it, too. Everybody was hauling powder.

The rest of the whole town. And the thing about it, too, in those days is nobody gave a shit whose job it was. You know, like when I was sent offshore with Captain Bailey and Mark and I, there's only three people in the boat, the captain and Mark and me. Sure. And, you know, you don't get paid right away for the job that you did. That stuff gets sent to Miami and they have to start selling that off

before you get paid for that load. So consequently, two, three weeks ago before I get paid for that particular job. Since then, I've done probably five or six different ones and then I don't know, I'm getting paper bags slid across the table at me and I don't remember getting... And this isn't like a corporate account

where you're keeping track of everything. There's no ledgering going on. It's all up here. You're like, wait, did I do a job then? Oh, wait, did I make... How much money was on that one? There's a lot to keep track of. And it was just, you know,

paper bag, shoved, shoved, shoved for a job that I don't remember even having done. But you weren't going... He called you to go down there because he's like, I'm just going down to Florida. We didn't go down there at all, Bob. We didn't even have a clue. And so this was Chokoloskee Island.

Chokoloskee. Chokoloskee. Chokoloskee Island. I'll put the map again in the corner. It's a 129-acre paradise tucked away right in here. On the west coast. On the west coast of Florida. It's the last city south that you can go before you get to the everglades national park and the big cypress preserve from there it's straight east

or straight uh west or east of miami and how like how many people live there at the time total population of that town was just under 500 and it still is that today this article says 600 at the end there but they just they just threw that in And is it just like, is it a couple trailer parks? It's trailer parks. It's trailers. The houses that are there typically are, you know, founding families or families that have been there for a long time. You know, and the trailer part or aspect of it was, you know, snowbirds and, you know, people vacationing and coming vacationing and coming down for fishing and that sort of thing. Because a lot of the guys' fathers at that time were fishing guys, backwater guys and things like that.

Some of the best fishing in the world is found right here. I'll bet, yeah. And presidents and senators have been known to come down and fish these waters. With a couple people ripping a joint right next to them. Yeah. George Bush comes down every year to Captiva. Of course he does. Sanibel and Captiva.

Yeah. And when you're talking about moving night after night after night, and there was a chapter in the book that I wrote here where we had worked 28 nights in a row. And some of the guys would have thought, would say it was more than that, but I left it at 28 nights. And every night it's, you know, 20 tons, 30 tons. This was crazy. 35, 40 tons. One night we did 55 tons just to see if we could do it.

I mean, it wasn't about money anymore after that. And what year did you go down there? I went down in 1979. And how old were you? I was just about to turn 21 and a half, almost 22. So you were a kid. Yeah, I was just a kid. And you guys, you just went to, your to your buddy clark mark whatever was going down there

going down to work on a crab boat okay so he knew he was going to work on a crab boat yeah and he's like i can get you a job there well not at that time it didn't turn out like that i just went because um he invited me to go and i said i was that kind of a guy and i was never one to and i still am not one to pass up an opportunity and then you know a week or so or whatever later kick myself in the ass for not having done it sure i can say i did it you're you're the guy that i could just see like i could call you up with the crazy maybe not now i'd call you up with the craziest shit you'd just be like bet cool i'm in let's go let's go man that's how i wound up in hollywood you know my cousin said come on out. I'm there. Cool. I'm going. Be there tomorrow.

Yeah, but we went into it hearing bits and pieces of stories about smuggling going on and stuff like that. Ghost stories. And you never see it. You don't very, very hear about it. Nobody ever talked about it, ever. Even when I was involved in it. You work one night and you get with your buddies the next day and go into town and go party at a club or something you never spoke of it never brought it was never brought up ever did someone ever ever like have to tell you that nope it's just

understood it was just understood because i mean had you done something like that you you're just done man yeah and that falls over into the spending of the money that you're making because we're making like i said i'm averaging $100,000 a week as a kid. But again, you were going down there and catching fucking crabs. Well, I went down there. Mark went down there to work on this boat. He had a job secured.

And his brother-in-law that was running the fish house, the only fish house on the island, was building, him and his sister were building their new house. I went down to kind of, I had a job when I got there. I was going to work carpentry or laboring, helping them build the house and stuff like that. The house got built, and I was kind of doing a couple of other different things around town. And the Captain Billy was itching to get into the pothole and thing, apparently.

So there were – the captain, captain like i said there's a captain and two crew that's red right red captain captain red billy captain red i couldn't find him to get his permission he said i don't care you know after the result said i don't care go ahead tell him but my um my publisher at that time said i didn't have his permission to do so so i couldn't i can't implicate someone who had not ever been implicated and billy was never implicated oh he never he skated right through and a couple of them did what kind of house is he living in today he's got a huge freaking two-story he had that even at that time you know he built this big ass fucking house man you know my god but that's just how it was you know i mean I mean. And his family, he came from a, you know, his family had some money.

He ran the fish house that we were working for, that we brought our cats to, was called Ernest Hamilton Stone Crabs. He married Ernest Hamilton's daughter. Oh, wow. So he was their father-in-law. Oh, he wasn't missing any meals. They were one of the founding families in Everglades. So Ernest, you know, coming up in that business, he had property all over the place. I mean, they had some coins.

Probably how he got off, too. And they teach you how to spend money to not have anything to show for it, but you could live within your means. And stone crabbing is a very lucrative business. I mean, I was making $700, was making 700 1200 a week sometimes during season oh because they're still paying you to go catch crabs you got to do the crabbing to do the pod hauling man it's just you know you just can't do one or the other because you got a story you got to go out crabbing and it's not unusual for a boat to stay out late or you know into the wee hours in the morning should some of unfortunate weather event take place or you break down or whatever

like that it's a lot of unfortunate weather out the morning should some unfortunate weather event take place or you break down or whatever like that. It's a lot of unfortunate weather out there. A lot of unfortunate weather was happening, man. And breakdowns and what have you. But we would do it, you know, we would go out there, but we wouldn't pull that day. You know, we would just sit out there and, you know, dick around until, you know, late afternoon.

What are you doing? Just turning on music and smoking weed and chilling? Smoking weed and diving off the boat, swimming around and shit, you know. You're going swimming smoking weed and chilling smoking weed and diving off the boat swimming around and shit you know and you're going swimming oh yeah 30 miles offshore in the gold no no no no we're we're not quite there yet we're still just you know we're probably 15 20 miles out yeah you're going swimming 15 20 miles out yeah sure you're not getting eaten by a shark no the water's clear enough i mean you can see them if they show up that's very they like to show up and hide under the boats.

You fucking Florida people, man. Well, it's not only sharks you got to watch out for. It's gators, man. Oh, great. All that shit that comes with the Everglades. Gators out there, too. Not in that setting, but on the water it's sharks, on land it's gators. But that being said, we just hang out there all day and fuck off.

And a lot of times, depending on the size of the load, my first time out ever when I got Shanghai'd, as it were, Captain Billy and Mark had this guy from Michigan working on while I was doing the house and working other things at that time. Well, Billy kind of didn't want this guy around. He didn't know him that well. He didn't trust him. He didn't trust him. He didn't trust him.

Well, Clark and I, or Mark and I, rather, were, Mark was Nancy and Thorne's brother-in-law. Thorne was a native. Who's, wait, who's Nancy and Thorne again? Nancy was Mark's brother, sister. Thorne was Nancy's wife, or husband, I'm sorry. And who was Thorne? I'm just trying to keep the name straight. Thorne was Mark's wife, or husband, I'm sorry. And who was Thorne? I'm just trying to keep the name straight. Thorne was Mark's brother-in-law, his sister's husband.

He ran the fish house on the island. Right, that's what it was. He ran Ernest Hamilton Stonecrab's fish house. So what's his face? Captain Red. Captain Billy, Captain Red, and everybody on the island who caught their catch went exclusively to that fish house. Got it. And went over to Miami fish house got and went over to miami

fresh every day so mark is wired in through the owner here with all the cat any captains and stuff yeah so billy knew he was coming thorn introduced him that so mark they had an opening and they had a guy on the boat and the boat has two what they call pullers on them you're pulling these traps and it's very similar to how the guys up in alaska pull king crab traps it's a very similar scenario rather than having a grapple or hook and a line that they toss out between two bags floating and catch that line in between and they're pulling up a thousand pound000-pound-plus trap depending on how full it is, we're dealing with traps that are only 50 to 60, 70 pounds. And they have a single, instead of a 5-8-inch rope, we've got a 3-8-inch nylon rope and a buoy about the size of a soccer ball. So all the captains that go out take two people.

And then how big is the boat usually? Ours was a near 50-foot marine management, it's called. It's a wide open deck vessel designed for hauling the traps. Right. And at one point in time, we would go to a line of traps. We had 7,000 of these traps, just our boat. How far out? Like 15 miles? From right on shore to 15 miles out, 20 miles out, depending on the depth of the water.

And in that area here in South Florida, if you were to go northwest, the water gets deeper quicker. If you were to go straight out west or to the south, the water remains shallower because now you're in the Bay Area, now you're getting off to the keys and the marquesas and the tortugas so that's relatively shallow water in there and we gauge the depth basically by every mile you go out it gets a foot deeper so we're 20 miles out you're in about 20 25 feet of water or if we got a little bit north we would deal with traps lines that were 30 foot long and some that were 80 foot long, depending on the depth. And every day we would go to a different, we call them lines, we go to a different line of traps every day.

So when we got to 7,000 traps, we're pulling 700 of these fuckers a day. I'm on the port side stern, he's on the port side stern, I'm on the starboard side stern. Mark. Mark is. stern he's on the or he's on the port side stern I'm on the starburst side stern mark mark is and he's left-handed so he can reach over and with his left hand to catch the buoy on that side of the boat I'm right-handed then as a buoys coming up to me I can catch it on my side of the belt science and the way it works is as I as I pull one he's dropping one I'm clearing and cleaning and just that and rebating mine and when i get ready when he gets ready to pull his i'll drop mine so we always put one back where we take one out and

this is what you thought you were going to be doing this is what i thought i was going to do so he doesn't trust this other guy they get rid of him and mark says i can get you the job well they got rid of him yeah they worked him like for a week they worked his ass to death and he quit quit because this is like i mean this just the work this work alone will make a man out of you dude i mean fuck yeah and most of the guys would last one maybe maybe two seasons and they've had it that's it but i worked you know probably six seasons you know because you got to do that work in order to do the to stay with that boat if you're gonna hop you know that crew's working yeah so long story short yeah

i mean the uh in the scenario by which i explained to you is very similar to what they do in alaska and as far as you catch the buoy with the catch pole we call it mine was most of the guys custom made their own poles mine was like a six foot piece piece of one-by-one lath, pressure-treated lath. And I would rope and fiberglass a shark's hook on the end of it when I grind off the barb so I could grab underneath the buoy and grab the line, pull that in, and go through a block and tackle. And around that thing, that big thing on the boat you see on Deadliest Cats, it's spinning. They put the rope in it like that. Well, it's essentially two pie plate plates together like this spinning you put the rope in it and it cinches the rope and catches it and down here in the bottom there's a little piece called a knife that's sticking out that kicks the rope back out keep it from winding

all the way around it they take theirs and put in a coiler and coils it up because they're dealing with, you know, 100, 200 fathoms of rope, you know. That's six, that's, you know, as much as 1,000 feet of line. And like how big is per trap again? How big did you say that was? Like each trap that you put out? Each trap is anywhere from 50 to 60 pounds or so, like that. But like size, is it like five by five? About the size of two or three milk crates together.

Maybe like this, by this deep, by about that tall. So you leave one out there for a few days, you're expecting to pull up 50 pounds of crabs or something? No. No, we put them in a line. We drop out 350 of them going one direction. The first half of the line can run anywhere from you know 12 to 17 miles then you stop and have lunch and then you skip over 50 yards or so and

you pull another 350 back the same way you came so you're not twice as far away as when you started then you go the next day to another set you've got sitting somewhere else. That begins to soak. Those are catching. By the time we make it all the way back around, come back to this one, they're full of crab. Hopefully they're full of crab. And out of 700 traps, we're picking them out of there and throwing them over our shoulder like this. And as fast as we can pick them up and let them go, just singing through the buoys. A couple little tricks that we learned every now and then to speed the process up.

But you have the unknot ropes. You're having to fix the boards because the stone crabs will sit in there. And these fuckers are huge, man. Yeah. How big do they get? They are, gosh, I've seen claws. I've seen crusher claws on crabs as big as my hand. Let's try stone crab Florida. I got it here.

Oh, shit. Yeah. Wow. Look at that. That guy's holding it in his hand right there. I've got that picture right there. Yeah, that was taken by one of our guys. Oh, wow.

No shit. That's like the third one on Google. That's what they call a bull crab. Now, if you notice, all crabs have two different claws on them. I'll stick that in the corner of the screen for people. They have two different claws on them. That one is called the crusher claw. See how big it is?

Yeah. Now, that goes together like this. Yep. The other one is a cutter. It goes completely together like this. See it? Yeah, they're different. One's for holding it.

One's for cutting it. Fucking evolution, man. it yeah they're different ones for holding it ones for cutting it fucking evolution and then they use their thing to scoop it into their mouth like that these are what we're breaking off now you break them off here right there because that's what you're selling for real right and we sell the claw and throw the crab back alive alive and within a year and a half or so it'll grow a new claw big enough to take again so we're farming these

we're re-harvesting these crab wait I never knew this is how it worked that's fucking insane imagine that a crab lives for whatever it is 4 or 5 years if they actually make it but every year you're like, oh, I finally grew. Fuck.

Here it goes again. Well, that was the sustainability of it. And this is the only place in the world where this delicacy can be found. And there was just so many boats out there working in those days. And some had bigger operations. Some had smaller operations. We were one of the bigger ones. Some of them only pulled 400, 500 traps a day.

Had you pulled, when you went out there the first day, had you, before it actually happened, where it's like, oh, we're going to do weed now, had you pulled any traps yet? No. No. So how did this go down? It had just been imparted to me. This is what you can expect when you get out there, okay?

We're going to leave the dock usually 3, 4 in the morning because it takes some time to get to wherever it is we're going. And as soon as the sun is up light enough for you to see that first buoy with a stick in it, we call it an end buoy. When you see that first buoy, that's when we start. As bright and early as we can because we've got 700 of these fuckers to get through and if you get out there and the tide is running this way and you're running at the tide or with the tide like this and you grab that buoy there's no slack in that line there's the trap right there so the captain has to back down the boat so you can pull in the tide against the tide so you can pull enough rope in to get it get it start to pull it what we wound up doing was like wait why we just run to the other end of the line and pull slack

lines back the other way so now you're running against the tide as soon as you pick that buoy up there's all that slack to take up you can just right and the boat doesn't stop it can just zigzag through it it doesn't have to ever back down. But again, you still hadn't even done any of this. No. So this is the scenario that was imparted to me. And I get on a boat and we get out there and, you know, and the bunks were in the wheelhouse, right where the captain's sitting. And I kind of wake up and the sun's up already.

I'm thinking, damn, we should be working by now. And I roll over and I look out the bunk and Billy looks down at me. He's got this big shitty grin on his face. And he goes, Timmy, we're not going to pull traps today. He says, we're going to hang out out here all afternoon and unload a pop boat from Columbia tonight. And I said, cool. There wasn't even like a moment pause? Just like, I'm in.

I didn't even, yeah, fuck yeah, shit, yeah, why not? I love how they basically just took you hostage out there, and Mark must have been like, he'll be cool with it. Yeah, because it was a huge tongue-in-cheek thing for them. They figured they would just surprise me when I got out there. So my first day ever working on that boat was the first night I ever hauled pot. That was 15 tons. Okay, so this was the morning when

you woke up. He tells you that. When does the boat, well, first of all, how far offshore are you at that point? At that point, we're probably maybe eight, 10 miles, something like that. So you're still headed out there and captain tells you we're going to be hauling some pot. What time did that start and how much farther out did you go? Well, when I got that word, it was probably just maybe 7, 8 o'clock in the morning when he told me that. Yeah. And we went and met up with another boat because the load was – we were anticipating maybe the load would be bigger, but they wound up sending that boat home. So another boat like yours. Another boat like ours.

And we went off and just did it on our own. We did that job by ourselves. But that was 15 tons. I never... Like at night, though? Yeah, like the scenario I'm part of. We'd wait until three, four hours before sundown, make a call sign, whatever one's associated with that vessel.

So like I said, so they know that the boat coming and approaching them is the one that should be. So no surprises on anybody's part. And pull up there and, you know, depending on the size of the load and how many people were on the big boat or whatever, it depended on whether we had to get off of ours and help them bring it out of the hole and get it on deck. Then jump down on our boat, and they would start throwing it down to us so we could start stacking it. So how big was the first boat you ever saw in this one? It was a shrimp boat, probably 60, 70 foot.

Okay, so did you see the packages right away? The bales were down below. They were all down below. They were under the deck, hidden. And a shrimp boat's big enough, it hasn't been going to hold that they can do that. Whereas yours can't. No, ours has got just, you know, minor hole area for, you know, inconsequentials, you know, like preservers and, you know, spare equipment and shit like that. So how many tons was on this first one?

15 tons. 15, right. I think you said that, sorry. Right. And then was it like how was it packaged was it was it sea resistant already or did you have to work oh it wasn't well it was packaged in in in the way that they were packaging it at that time now we i grew up through the evolution of what is now bail apart back in those days on the earlier days we were unloading boats when we call them

pillow bales they weren't in any way shape or form compressed bales of weed like you see today you know that people see pictures of today they were more um maybe hand crank pressed or somebody it was like somebody stomped this bag with their foot and then duct taped that bag and stuck it in a burlap bag and then stitched that thing shut. And they were all different sizes. There was no rhyme or reason to this shit, man. Some of them were 30 pounds and some of them were 100 pounds. And you just grab it like this and throw it in a pile. That makes it hard on the back end, too.

Dude. And it was messy because by the time we get them, they've already been handled. Who knows how many times they've been handled. And some of them are starting to leak and get holes in there coming apart and shit. So the weed's going everywhere when you're, because they're throwing them down. I mean, it's, you know, and if we're in the hole helping them get their shit out before we can get tossed down to us, you know, you're sweating through your clothes and it's just ball-ass busting work, man. Yeah. And there's shit and dust and shit and seeds are flying everywhere and they're just sticking to you.

All this shake is all over you man plus you know it's it's the resin dust is floating in the air down below and it's turning us brown i'm i'm stained for like months on end you know a permanent tan it doesn't come off until we stop hauling pot for you know two or three months for the next not Not even in the shower? The next growing season. No, fuck no. It's not water-soluble. Pot resin is not water-soluble, so a shower ain't going to get it off you. And it just—eventually, you take enough showers, it starts coming off in patches,

and you begin to see your skin, and it looked like we had some kind of fucking disease. Right? like we had some kind of fucking disease right but um you know the the the very second day that we loaded up to go out to pull traps again he's like we're doing it again no trap pulling happened that day so we went unloaded another boat that very next night was 22 tons did he so you do the first one on the ride back are you asking them questions i mean we're loaded where'd it come from what are we are we doing this every day there's none of that no you were just going with the flow our job as the crew was to load the boat regardless of what it is captain's job was to drive the fucking boat and watch the radar and when we pull away from that mothership with the load,

he's busy doing his work. You don't fuck with him. He's watching radars. He's listening to radios. And we have what's called a Polaris scanner. Very unique piece of equipment in those days whereby you didn't even have to say anything on the radio. You could just key the mic like that. And the Polaris is scanning 360 degrees.

It has LED lights that are blinking, scrolling like this. And when you go like that, it stops, and it tells you the direction in which that radio signal came. So we never had to talk on the radio. If there were two boats doing the job and one got out of sight of us at night, because we're running without lights, of course, and we wanted to know where that guy's at. That's it. Oh oh he's over there wow you wouldn't have to say anything this is wild yeah so um how many here's a question because i don't sure i'm not a deep sea fisherman or anything i always kind of wondered this but like are there how many coast guard patrols even are there out there like there can't be many it's all it's what think about it you get off land it's all spread out now like it gets wider and

wider the water just stretches wider and wider so like you know it's not like driving on a highway where you got a cop car every like five miles if they're feeling like they're giving tickets today you know it can't be there's not not that many Coast Guard, I would assume. No. In the early 80s, before the cocaine cowboys screwed everything up for everybody in South Florida. Goddamn you, Louisa. Muggers. You know, they were drawing so much attention to themselves, and they got a government involved because the city of Miami and Broward and Dade County, their officials couldn't handle what was going on. so they begged the government to come down and intervene and you know help and that's when the

whole started going in miami you guys had a great little system that's when the uh they had awacs flying the flying radar you know they had they had a blimp uh they called it the fat boy down in marathon key that they'd tethered up on like a 500 or 1,000-foot piece of cable. It was like a small blimp that had a radar device under it that could see any vessels coming through the gap, they called it. That was the Yucatan Pass. We call it the gap. That's the area between eastern Yucatan and western Cuba. Come up through that and get into the Gulf of Mexico.

The only other two accesses to the Atlantic or the Gulf in that time were the Mona and the Windward Passes. The Mona and the Windward Passes were bogged down with cocaine smugglers trying to get their shit into the Bahamas and into Miami.

So we decided we're coming around through the gap through that way and approach Everglades from the west. I'm putting a map in the corner right here is this where you're talking about like right here that's the gap right there got it come through there now we're now we just make a hard right and come right over down to there so you your boats would be all right here though this is where you would go pick it up but they that would be on that you're saying it's on them to get to they have to get it to us got it where we can have you know and a lot of times we like to get that boat to come in as close as we can sure give us enough time because how the scenario works is

we'll go out and unload the load whatever it is our boat or two boats or even three boats depending on how much shit there is to get and we we'll get loaded. And we try to load, like I said, before sun goes down so we've got some light to see. And that gives us an advantage of more time to get into the shoreline by midnight or 1 o'clock, at best, if we can, and pull into that little place you just put the finger on right there in the 10,000 islands, get up into shore as close as we can get kill the engines and that's when the little boats come out from the hiding places in the islands 15 20 other little smaller drafting boats that can get through this because there's no taking that big ass boat through there it's it's pulling baby 8 10 draft drafting 10 feet. Right. So let me pull up Chokoloskee. How do you spell that again?

C-H-O-K-O-L-O-S-K-E-E. C-H-O-K-O-L-O-S. Okay, got it. All right, so let me just grab a map of this real quick so I can follow. But which one were you pointing to? That one. This one? Yeah. Okay, so you guys would come back in.

You'd basically get out of the Gulf and then into this bay area. Yeah, we get out to here. Yep. The smaller boats will come through the pass out here and take it from us. 15, 20 smaller vessels. Right now, for people that are listening, we're looking at a picture that's on the table right here. Where is this? Like, relative to that picture that I have in the corner now.

Like, where's this part? Where's this? Yeah. You'll have to go to the larger. Right here? The South Florida version of it. Show the whole South Florida coast. Okay.

So I'm going to pull up a map. Let's try that. A lot of imagery today. I like it. Right there. Okay. Look at what they got. Oh, yeah.

Wow. Look what we got. So where does your boat stop here's the right out here okay all right i'm putting this picture in the corner now you're gonna see i'll put a little dot right there too so it's in the bottom left corner right we stop out there and now through all that labyrinth of shit all these little boats all these little boats 15 20 25 of them depending on how much we're gonna get comes out and starts taking it from us there's a there's a driver and a crewman on each boat so your first night you unload i'm just recounting here because i want to go through your first experience sure you unload 15 tons off this boat captain red says okay we're done we're going in you go in it's the middle of the night in the dark you stop right there you get it there and then

does he say like everyone chill they're coming or they just start to kill the engine they already know where they're waiting on us we had and we're using at that time a lot of the counter surveillance technology that the government was using against us because we had a cube and a couple of partners in miami that was we're selling the shit to the government. We're buying the same shit, if not better shit, than the government had. And one of those things in particular is what they call a parabolic mic, microphone. Like you see if you watch an NFL game, you see the guy with the big plastic, looks like a radar dish. Yeah, yeah.

But it has a microphone in it, and it's picking up the voices that they're whispering in the huddle out on the field. Oh, my God. So we don't have to say anything. We just pull up there in Killianja, and these guys already know. They can hear us. They already know when to come out. Oh, my God.

Because they're listening. They have that thing. And if you're offshore waiting on the boat or something like that, and a customs agent or a DEA or somebody farts a mile down the coast, you can hear it. Oh, man. And this is in 1979. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were reusing at that time a lot of technology coming out of Vietnam era, the starlight scope. This was before infrared, and this was the night vision.

Yeah. And what it did was it accumulated the light the ambient light at night in order for you to see what was going on and you turn them on it's like it's like the flash bulb on a camera it goes that little whining noise you turn that thing on it winds up now you can see just like broad daylight but someone where you were looking at someone light a match it blinds you because it's it's's keying, it's drawing that light in. So these are some of the toys that we were working with. And how many boats pull up?

Depending on what we're doing, how much we're doing, anywhere from 15, 20 boats, 25 of these little boats. Half the fucking town. It flies on a garbage can, man. Half the town. Half the town half the town and some of the people from from goodland or even marco get involved because it takes anywhere from you know 50 to 70 people to make one job work did anyone like make a joke like oh the new guy how you doing none of that no just all business no nobody ever said anybody's name if you knew them you just don't talk about it just not they're using the same shit we're using if they're listening to us you're gonna hear names and no it's just like hey man what's up what's going on bro it was just work how long is there's no

time for conversation and bullshit man you just they pull up to us our boat like flies on a garbage can they just sticking in there any which way they can get it is it one at a time or no they're all just crowding around that boat five or six of them on the stir and they're bumping their bows up against the boat and the guy off, and he starts throwing them on their boat, helping us unload. How long does this take? They make as many trips as they can through that labyrinth into Chokoloskee as they can until our boat's unloaded. Oh, it was that much on there? They couldn't even get in one shot, all those boats?

Yeah. How big were their boats? 23, 21, 23 foot. And they're coming back. They're wide beam, shallow drafting boats, typically with twin 235 Evinrudes on them. And they had a whole ass dude. And they had vertical and horizontal trim.

So as long as that prop would go through the water, the boat's going to go through the water. So we can get in excess areas where if somebody were following us, they'd be running the ground so once once they offload the stuff your job's done right you got nothing left to do what are these people doing it taking into stash houses or what they're taking it to somebody to one of our buddies houses on the island that we've literally taken all the furniture out of the house and start stacking this shit from the back of the house the bedroom kitchen dining room living room from floor to ceiling of the house, the bedroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, from floor to ceiling until the house is full.

So there's not like the competition of like, ooh, I fit 12 on my boat, you only got 10. It's just they're all going to the same place anyway. Take as many as you can take. They're all going to the same place. So they're just employees, cogs on the wheel here. Well, they're part of the chain of employment, you know, and the hierarchy of how everything works

is simply that the guy's running offshore like us three. The captain, you know, he's getting paid a hefty sum. Yeah. Probably 200 grand a night. Us as crewmen. In 1979. It's 1979 in the 80s. And the crewmen, us two guys, the reason for the amount of pay that we're getting.

And I'm, you know, after those first two loads that I did, the very first two days I ever worked on that boat, I got rookie pay. What was rookie pay? Five grand a night. That's probably more money than you've ever made in your fucking life. Dude. You know, when I got the money, you know, when I got that paper bag shoved across the kitchen table at me with 10 grand in it,

it was like, holy crap, this is fucking awesome. Because, you know, in those days 15 12 15 000 was a good blue collar wage after day one though they unload all the all the stuff off the boats all the little boats do they take it away do you guys go right back out we go offshore and clean up clean our boat off and did you come back in before the next day or you stayed out there next to a to a line of traps wake the next morning pull that line of traps and bring it in okay so you'd never gotten off the boat before you got paid at a kitchen table somewhere no no no so you're just chilling like all right pay doesn't come for weeks

after oh my god because that's that load that you brought in has to start getting sold before they'll get paid from that load right okay we'll get to that but you have to clean this was the other thing yeah because these Because these pillow bags. Pillow bales. Okay, pillow bales. Nasty fuckers. Because they were so bad and loose, the weed is getting all over the place. And you can't just pick it up and smoke it.

It's all like seeds and shit. We're shoveling. We're brooming it into piles and taking an ice shovel and throwing. I've thrown more shit. I've dumped more shit out of my boots than any 10 guys could smoke in their lifetime i'll guarantee it was that nasty but the thing of it is is because it was so nasty we're down there with knives and screwdrivers getting it out of the little cracks and everything like that because if something were to grab somebody's attention

and they come out looking they board our vessel one seed you're cooked even if you could say oh i just smoked that no because it's a seed yeah fuck there's no there's no assumption on their their only assumption is that you were involved with whatever it was we're looking for and they seize your boat and that's the end of it on a 50 60 foot boat you got to get every single thing like every the smell's got to be everywhere too oh yeah dude we smell like constantly where we're smelling how do you get rid of that you well the boat itself you bleach it rinse it down and bleach it what about your fucking arms and shit okay oh well dive off the boat smell like it you don't see it though you know yeah but it's just how i smell nobody ever questioned that for you know it's something that i that i'm part to as of the story, but it was never a concern.

It never went, oh, God, I look like a bucket, you know, a ball of resin. I guess they assumed that. I got a resin tan, man. You know what? But as dirty, as nasty as it was, that was the reason why we go offshore and clean up while the shore crew continues doing what they're doing. And all this stuff has to be put and locked away in this house before the sun comes up oh this is still all before the sun comes all before the sun comes up so you're cleaning in the dark we're

cleaning in the dark offshore we got deck lights and shit like that you know but the guys are putting the shit into the houses and while they're bringing it there's a shore crew there's a whole other shore crew man there's 100 like i said there's like 50 60 people that takes to make these this shit work Fuck yeah, and we're only a small part of the cog in the wheel We take it from the mothership and bring it and give it to them Now the shore crew works they get into the houses and what doesn't get put in the house is Some of the guys that are you know have vehicles that are gonna be driving with her to be a car a van or a truck Or a bus or a motorhome or you know, can stick a bale of pot in we were using.

That's when the women in the town get involved in it because they're drivers the next day. Oh my God. And if it didn't go into the house, the driver of the vehicle is never the owner of it. They'll bring it out while we're loading the house, load that van, car, truck, or whatever it is, drive it into town and park it in the driveway. Go in the house and leave it sit there all night the actual moving it to miami happens the next morning when the sun comes up so it's never in their home but it's still in a car that they own right we bring it all in during the night we ship it all to miami during broad daylight the next day now how long

did it take to clean the boat three it could take a couple hours, three, four hours. I'm surprised you could get it done that fast, to be honest. Well, we got good at it after a while. And then Billy's dad came up with a great idea that we ultimately wound up doing, was taking a couple rolls of plastic, of viscreen and duct tape, lined the whole entire deck of the boat with viscreen, draped it over the sides and duct tape it down like a big bowl. Then we go out and load the fucking thing with all this nasty shit.

So when we get the load off, we go offshore, we just pull all that plastic together and tie a chain and an anchor to it and throw it off the boat. Oh, that's fucking genius. Clean. Just what you have to do to make it work. Wow. So he came up with that eventually so that took a lot

of time screw this cleaning up shit man yes you know every night yeah so we were working two three nights a week how fast you did the first two nights you get the rookie pay 10k 10k now how fast is it you're 21 years old still like you're 22 whatever like how fast does this ramp up? The very next job we did. Now I'm getting paid according to the size of the load. Now Captain understood he had a crew that was willing to do the work and then could do the work. Boy, we jumped right in, man. How many nights a week? Oh, God.

Anywhere from two to four nights a week sometimes. Holy shit. And it's $50,000, know 50 75 grand a night for me cash eat cash now where were you living i was living right on the island in a trailer home in a trailer what are you doing with all this cash anything you fucking want to do you know and that's a great question because uh we were instructed and pretty much taught by the adult generation how to spend money to not have anything to show for it because if you started buying stupid great question because uh we were instructed and pretty much taught by the adult generation how to spend money to not have anything to show for it because if you started buying stupid shit

like porsches and ferraris and you know he's out dude you just don't work anymore because you're a liability yeah so they taught us how to spend money certain ways without having any shit to show for it was there like a class like did you go to a classroom somewhere sit down take notes like how do these understand like what's not explained is understood but like it's not like how do you when does this start like this red happening you down or no it just happens as a yeah yeah he does he says no no be careful he says no and this is why because if you start looking stupid and sticking out then you're done you. You won't work anymore.

So we could spend a fairly decent amount of money because stone crabbing and pulling traps and selling the stone crabs to the fish house, and that's a very lucrative business. Good job. I can make anywhere depending on how good we're catching, and it's ups and downs and shit like that, as much as $1,200 a week in those days. During season, the catches were that lucrative. So I could live according to that means of income.

And anything over and above that, you know, was done by subterfuge. And when I say that, it's simply if you drive out onto the island and go around the loop on the island, it's only a 129-acre island, and you see the trailers there's just nothing very out of the ordinary about these trailers until you open the door and walk inside and then there's the plush berber carpet and there's a leather furniture there's all the new electronics and all the new appliances i mean it's just decked out inside you know nobody can see it this is how this is how you spend money and not show if someone comes in your house and nobody comes in there i'm saying like if a customs agent or something like says,

house call for some, oh, what's that? The latest TV? No, but it never happened. Never? No, because they didn't have... At that time, the United States government had no fucking idea to the extent to which this was taking place. They had no fucking idea.

I mean, in retrospect, it kind of blows my mind a little bit when i think back about it you know but jesus christ and some of the shit that i did makes me go like you could have cut a cigar with my fucking ass you know but um that was part of the you know the spending thing you know i mean um go to miami and you you buy out a club for the night you pay you take the tab you take two and i'd take 200 grand to miami to party a club for the night. You take the tab. And I'd take $200,000 to Miami to party for Friday and Saturday night in the hopes of coming back with like $11 in change in my pocket. Oh, my God. Just buying drinks for everybody. And that's, you know, there's no receipts.

There's no, you know. All cash. And the managers of these clubs in South Beach and Miami know who we are. They get it. Yeah. Come on in, man. We take over the champagne room or whatever like that. Everybody, top shelf, whatever.

No, don't limit the drinks. Whatever you want, man. I'm trying to get rid of this cash, so help me out. And if my cash runs out, then Jimmy takes $200,000 out of his pocket and throws it out there to the manager, and we just continue. Now, who were you hanging with doing this? Because your one buddy, you said he was married, right? Mark? Was that Mark?

Yeah. Was he married? Well, no, he had a girlfriend at that time. So are they coming out with you, too? No, they party a little bit differently than us other guys. Mark was a few years older than me. He was like four years older than I. Subdued.

Us younger guys who weren't attached in that way, you know, we go off and just do some craziest, I mean, the craziest fucking shit, man. Like some of the other guys in the business, you're saying? Yeah. I mean, because like I said, there's, you know, of a town between two islands, the entire population was just under 500 people. Half the town was doing this.

Because you can't take the same 50, 60 guys and gals and work them day after day after night after night. Yeah, you gotta have a lot of people in on it i mean just unloading just to go off the off offshore to get on one of these freighters and you know i've seen freighters and we're talking about 400 plus feet of boat of ship out there with as much as two three hundred plus thousand pounds on them at one time and we would go out a couple nights in a row, three or four different boats and unload

these things. How did you guys do the money? Like, what did you charge per pound? Well, I didn't understand that until I got older, until the first and second generations of them went to prison and that was left an opportunity for me, a very particular sequence of events took place in order for me to

become what i did and have the connections that i did um it turns out that um having this information imparted to me when it came time for me to say hey um it was about 175 a pound we get paid and so how you're doing so that first that first night you did oh we're turning we're turning 15 20 30 million a week cash when the jobs start stacking up so there's 2 000 pounds in a ton so you did 15 tons yeah there's 30 000 30 000 times 175 bucks that'll do it's about 7 million so what happens is they pay the crew whoever's job it is, whoever's in control of it, one of the brothers, the Daniels boys,

whose ever's job that is, they pay everybody that needs to be paid, and they keep what's left over. Now, who are the Daniels boys? You and I were talking about this off camera. You talk about it in your book, but can you explain this whole thing to people? Sure. The Daniels brothers were a group of brothers, five brothers, that had come from Fort Myers down to Chokoloskee back in the early 70s, mid-70s-ish, like that, to fish.

They had come from being, they were masons and mason tenders. They were block layers. They came down to change a pace, to do fishing and stuff and whatnot. And the youngest of the five brothers, Craig, befriended and got to know very well the original pothaller, the first generation pothaller. His name was Loren Totch Brown. He's a legend in the Everglades. Just a wonderful human being, a beautiful man. You know, I talk real slow without Settler and Tom. Nothing got him going.

Nothing shook him up and poured him out. It was just like that. And he brought Craig into that little fold that they had going on. Tosh was the original. He went down to Panama, around the corner into Columbia and up the rivers to find the river wheat, the grasslands, to find the Colombian red that everybody was wanting in those days. And it took him a lot of trial and error to get the shit figured out, and he finally got it figured out to the point where it was, you know,

he could do it without, you know, sweating it. Well, Craig got involved with him and started to make money, and he comes and approaches his other four brothers one afternoon with a suitcase full of money. And he says, look at that guy. And, you know, he told them what he was doing and they they actually shunned him they didn't want to have anything to do with him he said dude you know that's ridiculous that's crazy that's stupid they were just fishermen you know just if you're not stone crabbing you're catching bait for the stone

crabbers which involved mullet and you know they're pompano fishing or they're net fishing or something like that something to do with the fishing industry because at that in that early stage of the game they were under the misguided assumption that you work with these guys they'd risk to soon kill you rather than pay you well again nothing could have been further from the truth they needed us because of this you know there was this it started in miami Totsch and the Cubans, but when the cocaine cowboys and the cocaine started coming through the Mona and the Windward Passes and mucking up that shit, he said, look, there's too much shit going on over here between the Bahamas

and the Miami and that. Let's come over to my place on the other side of Florida. Nobody's over there. There's nothing over there besides. We got this. Well, here was was and this is the other unspoken thing like obviously weed's always in demand and at the time it was very very illegal so it's all black market but the cost of a pound of weed versus a pound of cocaine

oh it was just a business decision because they're like right well we can make fucking a hundred times as much moving this. You know, like if you look at the original, even like the Mexican cartels for people that like watch the Narcos show, like Narcos Mexico and stuff, they do a pretty good job running through the real history, how that went down. They're just like, they're strictly like, all right, one day they're growing pot. Next day they're like, nope, we're going to move yayo just because it's better. And there was a reason for that. It's more dangerous though. There's a reason for that paradigm shift in the industry with regards to cocaine.

And marijuana, ultimately, was that when the cocaine cowboys started, it was all precipitated by a woman by the name of Griselda Blanco. Griselda. The godmother of cocaine. She was a bad mother. Now, if anybody out there thinks they know the history of this woman, they would also understand that between her and her husband are the ones that brought Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lader out of the gangs in Medellin. They were selling weed. Taught them how to gather the coca paste and set them up to be their conduit between the Colombia cocaine and the United States. She and her husband immigrated to the United States. That's aumbia cocaine in the united states she and her husband

immigrated to the united states and that's a whole other story in itself but she ultimately wound up in miami of course she did and escobar wound up being the killing murdering backstabbing son of a bitch that he was because she taught him how to be that yeah but she was all those and she turned miami into a fucking hellhole. I mean, a killing ground. That's when the government and the authorities finally realized they had a problem when the Dayland Massacre occurred at a Crown Liquor store in Miami. This was covered in the docs, in Billy's docs, I think, right?

Yeah. Billy Corbin. Yeah. Billy Corbin. Yeah. Did that in his cocaine cowboys. What happened at that again? In the Crown Liquor store? It was two Colombian groups.

Now, everybody's selling cocaine. Everybody wants to be the guy. But Griselda had a hand on everybody. And if she didn't like you, she'd kill you. Yeah. If you had cocaine of hers or whatever and didn't pay her, of course she'd kill you didn't she kill like one of her husbands or two she killed them all yeah and even if you paid her and got her shit and paid her and she didn't like you for whatever reason she'd kill your ass just like ordering a pizza and that mentality took place

all over miami and turned mi Miami into a paradise lost, as Time Magazine called it. Big front page Miami overview, paradise lost. She precipitated and caused all of that because of who she was. Well, when that started to, you know, the government started to intervene and take that over, you know, and trying to subdue and get rid of the cocaine problem that was happening in South Florida. If you have seen the movie Blow. Of course.

All-timer. Who hasn't, really? Phenomenal. I mean, if it's the genre you're interested in, you've seen Blow. Well, in the movie Blow, George Young's partner diego is actually carlos slater yes based off carlos slater right so when you see the the part about norman's k in the bahamas and that's what ended george young and carlos's partnership because he started going off on his own norman's k is actually norman's k in the bahamas that's what it's called. And if you fly over that island today,

you can still see planes that didn't quite make it on and didn't quite make it off, dotting the waters around that island. It's insane. Like, what these guys did, flying in in the middle of the night. Like, you talk about this whole boat thing. At least, like, it's two boats.

You're like, hey, what's up, bro? You're going back and forth. These guys are fucking dropping fucking bales of coke onto the water and then someone like luisa was going out there pulling the bales off the water right driving it back in coming back out with the donzi pulling them driving back in coming back out with donzi pulling them it's like this is insane how this had to go down and how organized but like how many things could go wrong you know what i mean to get out of that scenario is why he bought that island so they could land the planes put it on boats and run it to miami on boats nobody's looking for airplanes and the boats these go fast that the government

called them we just run that shit you know into miami yeah like that and you're right and they opted for the the smaller cargo with with same amount of profit, if not more. Oh, more, yeah. And the marijuana aspect of it was so big and bulky and clumsy. There's no hiding this shit. When you go offshore in a boat like ours and get 15 tons of that shit, there's no hiding that shit down below deck. You've got to put it up on the, you know. You're just driving around with a stack.

This shit's everywhere. You're fucked if someone drives by. Yeah, we're just driving around with a stat you're shit's everywhere yeah we're screwed but the thing about that is is if you are looking to search the web privately and not have all these websites track you when you leave check out my friends over at privato vpn privato is the vpn company that gives you full privacy while losing you no speed and it allows you to use the vpn on up to 10 different devices at a time we love that so if you check out the link in my description you will go to my landing page with the company privado and you will see a plan there for $4.99 a month it is the same one i use you're gonna love it so

check it out whether it's beyond the boat on the big boat coming back from the mothership or in the cars driving it from the house that we put it into Miami, there's always a safety valve built into that. How so? Well, if you're offshore like we were running offshore, we always had what we call a chase boat running alongside of us. Now, this is a Scarab or a Chris Craft 313 with enough horsepower to do 70 mile an hour before your ass could even hit the seat.

So you would always go out with one of these? We always have a chase boat with us. So you had a fourth crewman essentially a fourth crewman and he would stay right there with us follow us back in now captain billy's the captain's job is watch the radar listen to the radios and get that boat to shore now if something on the radar picks up if we pick up a target that looks like it's coming toward us, the radar goes to 50 miles. And as it gets closer, you can shrink it down to 30. You can shrink it down to 10 so you get a better view on it. And if it looks like it's coming to us, we just leave that fucking boat in gear and get on that chase boat off into the night we go.

Just leave the wheel out there. Let them fucking have it. Give them a payday. Because the boat wasn't in Billy's name. He wasn't the owner of the boat. Oh, my God. And it's never that way. The owners of He wasn't the owner of the boat. Oh, my God. And it's never that way. The owners of the boats or the cars or whatever is being used are never there.

They're always somebody else's. So if, you know, for a chance we get stopped or we're going to get busted or whatever, you know, which never happened. This boat was always right next to you. Always there. So we could see if this shit's coming, we'd get off onto that fucking thing off into the night. And you didn't think that would look

a little sketchy on a radar if the Coast Guard looked at that? They wouldn't see it. They wouldn't see that there's two boats? It would look like

one blip on the radar. Really? Yeah, he's right there. Because he'd stay that close. Right there next to us. And the radar isn't that sophisticated enough to pick up a small vessel

like that next to a target like ours. And you're not, gas isn't a problem because you're going, you know, 30, 60 miles out so it's nothing crazy no wow no and it's all it's all a time thing and that safety valve was our chase boat we had a way out we're not getting caught with this shit no fucking way we're gone we're off from the night now let's talk about the other end though where they take it

to miami okay in the cars because you said there's a safety valve there too yeah yeah but how would this work like they you said they would take it in in rvs and stuff would they would it be obvious if i open the door that there's we all look yeah particularly an rv you get within i always got a great story about an rv i had i had the opportunity i say opportunity but i was given the the opportunity or or was asked rather to drive a Winnebago full of this shit. And why were you asked for that one? Well, for that one reason. Well, let me drop back a little bit and give you this driving to Miami scenario.

Now, this all takes place during the day. These cars are backing up to this house during the broad daylight. It starts as soon as the sun comes up. Load thatcker kick it on the bumper and off it goes now these people and drivers are hired by whoever the owner of the car and um they would drive they would know where to go in miami and typically it would be somewhere in western side of miami off of chrome avenue somewhere around um kindle or someplace like that how long is the drive across u.s 120 miles so they got to drive call it two and a half three hours right in an rv right so if an rv a car or truck or van or whatever they got and they go to this go to a pre-designated spot which is typically a plaza of some kind like that where there's a lot of

people shopping a lot of cars in the parking lot and shit like that and they would get out they would park their vehicle get out and go window shop and we would have one of our people with the cuban counterparts that owned the material we never owned the shit we were called we were what the government called service providers we were getting paid just to bring the shit to them and put it on their doorstep logistics guys so we created at that time what government what the law enforcement now calls a dead drop that's our guy who parks in the parking lot he gets out and goes in window shops and our guy says that's ours that's our car that's our another guy who's in cuban would get in it go take it and empty it and bring it back. Empty.

So he'd take it somewhere else. Take it somewhere else and unload it, bring it back. So you never knew where it was. We never knew where it was. And the Miami, and the guys in Miami never knew where it was coming from in Everglades. So that was a bit of a safety valve in itself. Now, what was this? You had another safety valve, though. Yeah.

Like you would just get out of the car well that and the fact that we typically had hired anywhere from eight to ten spotters we called them they're paid five grand a day just to drive from everglades to that plaza and back in front of the car in staggered positions no all over the road everywhere to see where the cops are and stuff. Well, no. We already had somebody else knew that. So what were they doing? If there was the Marine Patrol Sheriff's Department, there was a sheriff and two deputies in Everglades. That was it. Yeah.

So this is what the spotters were looking for. And there were Everglades National Park Rangers. There were Highway Patrol. Yeah. And when you get south like that, those departments kind of thin out a little bit. They've got maybe one or two Highway Patrol that patrol that area like that. We have a guy sitting outside their house watching. We know where they are.

We know their home. Watching the sheriff's patrol. We have guys tailing the highway patrol so we know exactly where they are because there's not there's literally like not many at all there's not hundreds of you know guys out there that are doing these rounds there's so many people to pay here you're paying all these guys five grand to watch that's why it's such it was so lucrative so you knew we knew where everybody was it wasn't that nerve-wracking. And, you know, even sometimes in the sidebar, the Marine Patrol guys in Everglades, there was only two of them. One worked day shift, one worked night shift, and then they would transfer back and forth. Well, depending on who was working night shift for the first two days or that night or whatever,

we would begin calling him about three or four days ahead of time at night saying, you know, there's some strange stuff going on over here. There's like boats going around on the river without lights and whatever. And he'd go run and check it out in the middle of the night. Ah, fuck, there's nothing going on. He'd go back home. We'd run his ass ragged for two or three nights like that where if he got a call, he'd say, ah, he wouldn't even leave the fucking house because he's been done. But we got a guy sitting out there watching the house.

If he leaves, there's all these people. We have what we call a two-meter radio. They have a five-digit combination on the top of them that everybody knows the number of. And every couple of hours, we switch to a different number. Totally unscannable. We had hundreds of these radios. Everybody had one. How long did it take you to learn all this, all these details?

Years. Because my first experience, like I said, was just going offshore. All I knew was freighters and unloading. I know you're not, but it makes it sound like you knew this in three days. We had a radio guy over there. We got this. Oh, you know, Frank rides down the road all day, checks out all these people. It's like a community. This is an accumulation of wealth of knowledge over a period of years of being involved in this industry as a kid growing up in that.

And when it came to the Winnebago, like we said, you don't take that thing to a plaza because you can smell this fucking thing if you get within 30, 40 feet of it. And it stands out. It's an RV. So just to give you an idea about how things changed for me, but serendipitously and unbeknownst to myself, was that because of the dead drop scenario, none of our crew and the guys and anybody in Miami running this shit ever saw the other Cubans in Miami. Could never identify them because they never saw them.

Your spotter saw them? No. The guy who would point out that's ours? Well, yeah. He knew this one guy. Right. They were only introduced to this one guy. But you're window shopping, so you don't even know what's happening.

These other guys are window shopping. They don't care. As long as they go back to the vehicle and it's empty, take it back and load it if there's time to do another run. Well, that's why nobody knew anybody. Deniability. Right. Only people that knew who the Cubans were and who the honchos were that owned the shit were the adults.

One of the five brothers or whoever else's job it was, these were the visible characters. These were the guys that went and shook hands and kissed babies they're the ones that made the deals and worked us people you know and we like i said i earlier i don't care whose job it was it was never my any of my concern about whose job it was as long as you shed that paper bag at me you know it's all cool well when it came time that in this scenario of having worked 28 nights in a row one month and some some of the guys, you know, when I was putting this together, some of the guys would have said it was more nights than that, but I left it at 28 nights.

And these were the nights we're doing that. That 15 tons I did as a kid, that first job, I never saw a load that small after that. That was considered a small job. Now we're into the 25, the 30 ton. And one night we did 55 tons just to see if we could do it i mean it wasn't about money anymore is the boat sinking almost every fucking house on the island was stuffed full of pot was the boat sinking well when you take when you go on take on something like that two or three of our size boats would go out. Got it. Get loaded. Each of them get loaded and bring it all in at once and then just start throwing it into houses, man, and sealing it up, you know, like that.

Well, it was such a large amount that a couple days prior to that, I happened to, you know, we worked a few nights and we were off a couple of nights. Because you can't, like I said, you can't work every night, dude. It's just. But you did 28 nights in a row well it wasn't us every night it was our crew worked two three nights and then another crew these three everybody even the shore crew guys you know that's how half the town gets involved with it because you can't keep working i mean you're talking about moving anywhere from twice to three times a night anywhere from 800 to a thousand 70 pound or so bails you can't work guys like that every night you burn them out you kill a man how many

total years again did you do this i did it from 79 to 89 okay 10 years so for those 10 years what was the longest time you went in between trips i don't know maybe three four days but it was kind of a thing even with the you know the shore crew and people like that so so busy no vacation willie you guys work tonight and then you take tomorrow night off and we'll let these guys work you know and it was We're just passing out around the work. Everybody's making money. Oh, my God. But you get a respite in the meantime.

So one day on my day off, Daryl approaches me and my buddy Jimmy, and he hands us a chainsaw and a wrecking bar, and he points to this brand new Winnebago. And this is the head brother who runs all this stuff. One of the five brothers and uh and this thing probably had 100 miles on it and he said i want you to go into this thing and gut it out strip every thing in there from the windows down we even took the seats out of this thing because if you look up at if you look at it you see the curtains in the cabinets and shit like that but if you got up and down below

it was nothing in there that's where the party is so they take airbags and put them in the springs and inflate them so the this thing's not sparking the fucking highway when they take it to Miami

because they put over 11,000 pounds of shit in this thing wait wait wait where do they put the airbags in the springs down below so the shocks and the springs so it makes the car oh my god you tighten the springs up so it doesn't squat when you put this shit in then when you get it to wherever you unload you let the air out of it so it rides like you know like it should when it's coming back well we stripped this fucking thing out and even took the seats the captain's chairs and shit out of it and when they loaded it they had to pull one out so the guy could sit there between the bales

sure to god so um a couple nights later we do this 55 ton job they load this fucking Winnebago up. So the next day, you know, I worked that night. I made 75 grand that night just running offshore and coming back. Good night. So I'm walking up to one of the houses. I mean, we had like every house on the island was stuffed full of shit at this point. Of course. So I walked up to the house just, you know, kind of see what's going on, you know, what's happening, like that kind of shit. And there's Daryl standing there, and he goes, Timmy, come here.

He says, I got a favor I need to ask of you. He said, I see that Winnebago there. He says, I need somebody that I trust that will drive this thing to Miami and stay there all day till the load's done coming that day. But you can't go to the plaza. You got to go right to the house.

Wherever they're taking this shit, you got to go straight to that house because like I said, you get anywhere close to this walk, I think you can smell it, right? And he needed somebody he trusted because I was going to that house, first of all, and I was staying there all day until the vehicles quit coming so I could bring a carload of cash back to him that night. And so the Cubans were okay with this?

Well, yeah. They had to be. Because normally, again, that was the whole point of the spot. If I was sent there to do that, as trusted by them to do that, they trusted me to do that. So only rare people would get to do that. I was the only one that ever did that.

Because that was the only 55-ton night we ever did. So this was a very rare time. It was a very rare scenario that this had taken place. Because now you know where that is. You know what I mean? You know where that is. and the whole point was they had blind deniability somebody he could trust that's why he needed somebody he could trust but i'm saying on the cubans end their whole doing that at the plaza meeting you with the spotter was so you never knew where they were but now one of you well i guess the brothers may have known too they all knew that the older generation do that because they were making the deals with these guys.

So if they sent me over there to do that, that meant that there were no trust issues, that I was rock solid guy, the right one chosen to do this. I'm just thinking out loud, though. It doesn't mean necessarily that they made the deals that they're at the place where they stored all the stuff. They could go to a restaurant. They could go to a safe house. They could go somewhere. You they could go to a safe house they could go so you know what i mean exactly exactly but you were going to be going into the actual place so this is like i'm surprised they agreed to that it was a it was a big responsibility in hindsight it was a huge responsibility for me to take on something like that and i really didn't want to do it because you know i just made 75 grand he says

i'll give you 35 grand just drive it over there it's a two hour drive two hour and a half drive and just stay there and do and blah blah blah so how old are you now 22 23 this is only like a year into you doing a couple years into it okay got it and uh so i get in this goddamn behemoth, man. And I didn't like it at all, but I knew there were spotters out there. And all the drivers are instructed as to how to proceed should you get pulled over or it looks like you're going to get stopped. Who cares who it's by? It's not important who it's by. It's over in a second.

Right. Well, you have a two-meter radio at your disposal. And we've got 100 of these things are better. Everybody that's working has one because communication in an organization such as this is key. So if it looks like the car driver is going to get stopped or whatever like that, and a lot of the cars and trucks and the vans that we were using had the Reese hitches in them. They had the pickup truck low-slung Reese hitch that goes down and up, has the ball on it.

Well, they pull those out and turn it over. That's where it goes over and up, like this. And you stop. If you get stopped, the first thing you do is tell them you're getting stopped so they can call the owner of the vehicle. And he can call the law and say, Hey, I just looked out and noticed my shit. Somebody stole my fucking, you know.

He reports it stolen, or even the boat, if a boat gets stopped. They report it stolen, and they'll eventually get it back because that relieves them of any responsibility for what that thing's been involved in if they reported it stolen. There's another little trick that was integrated into this whole thing. Not only that, the drivers are told told, okay, wait for whoever stopped you to get out of the vehicle and get between you and your vehicle,

throw that fucking thing in reverse and stomp on it. Now your car doesn't weigh a ton, it weighs two tons or whatever. And you smash the holy living fuck out of the front end of his car and he ain't going anywhere. He's going to be sitting there

with his shit steaming all over the highway, right? What if it bounces back and you don't totally total it though and he can't going anywhere he's gonna be sitting there with his shit steaming all over the highway right what if you don't stop what if it like bounces back and you don't totally total it though and he can get in there well you make sure you hit him hard enough you know you make absolutely no doubt that he ain't fucking going anywhere man and but you're not gonna out you cannot run him but you're not gonna outrun the radio right the trick is to get out of his sight and one of the spotters that's driving and already knows that you're in trouble will stop you get in and you go you're gone you're

out of there they can have that fucking shit the owner's gonna get his truck back and if the spotter's not there spotters were always there but if they're not always there well then he keeps driving until one of them has a chance to catch up with him because like i said law enforcement in those days was very far and few between it wasn't like there was going to be a cop there in 10 minutes you know you had some time and because of the staggered formation in which these spotters are running there's always going to be somebody within a couple minutes of you on 125 on 120 mile road Stop it dead in the middle of the fucking road. Leave it. Get out of it. Get in that car and go home.

Throw on the flashers, right? You got to be respectful. Yeah. Yeah. Watch out for the other guy. You know, but. Well, that's a fingerprint actually. You can't do that.

Are you wearing gloves while you're doing this? No, because none of us had ever been fingerprinted. So what the fuck's good is it? I guess that's true. But some of them that were, and the guys that were unloading, you know, loading the vehicles, would close them with their trunks with their elbows like that. And then kick the bumper. They wouldn't even touch that fucking car, you know, regardless. I'd be wearing like the thick leather gloves.

I wouldn't fuck around. But, yeah, so during that day, I got to know who was in that house, you know, that day I drove that Winnebago. Oh, yeah, so you didn't get popped. You drive it across. I get it all the way across, and I get out. The minute I get out, they start opening the cellar door to this place, and they start unloading it like this. And you went and had lunch with Griselda? Yeah.

So, yeah, no, I go in, and these guys are, you know you know they're playing poker and they're drinking and whatever like that i played a little poker but i didn't drink you know and they're doing rails i mean they got a big sack of coke all over the fucking house right so um i stayed so stayed straight but the the whole day of being there i got to know a couple of these guys you know like that so ultimately when you know the shit came down in 1983 and then again in 1984 and they wound up taking the adults and the other guys that were doing these and giving us all the work like the brothers pretty thorough job the brothers yeah um nobody they didn't know anybody except they knew timmy and they certainly my face. It took them a little over three weeks, they said, to find me.

The Cubans didn't know anybody. Because of our drop scenario, nobody ever knew anybody other than the older generations, and they are on their way to prison. But now they knew your face. Right, and there's no work going on because these guys are not there to make the deals to put us to work so this guy jorge that i met in that house he said he scoured the fucking naples and in everglades for me for almost you know four weeks to try to find me and i one day i get up on my door i open up there's fucking jordan standing there the cuban who you met okay now i all right i was confused for a second you're saying that when the brothers like daryl and them got wiped up now there's no deal

so the cubans are like where'd the gringos go now they're like wait we knew that one gringo who came here let's go across the state let's go see what's up with that how can we get in contact with you know whoever else is involved in this thing now how did this happen how did the brothers get caught because that's what you're talking about right now 1983 1984 right just they uh the government with whoever else is involved in this thing. Now, how did this happen? How did the brothers get caught? Because that's what you're talking about right now, 1983, 1984. Right. The government had, at that time, had infiltrated Everglades with a guy and his wife who had lived there for several years before anything was ever done about this. So they kind of embedded themselves into it.

They didn't know. They never saw what was going on but sitting at the tiki bar and you know just being around eventually you know who's who you know i mean come on i mean we're talking about 500 people in this town and half the town's involved but somebody's gonna you know eventually somebody's gonna show you know whether they want it or not well they had enough information having had these this guy and his wife embedded for several years or so in everglades that they had enough to indict them on so when they took those people away the work quit

that's when george winds up finding me he knocks on my door i open the door he goes to me dude he says i said george what the fuck man he says man Timmy! Dude, he says, I said, George, what the fuck, man? He says, man, we got work to do. He says, the shit's packing up. Can you do this? And I just went, yeah, fuck yeah. You know, because I didn't give it a second thought, you know, because we were actually the infrastructure, all of us younger guys. So you just went from, like, prime deckhand to godfather.

I went right on to making the deals with some Cubans in Miami. And now I'm the guy that's flying to Columbia and to Jamaica to Central America. Holy shit. And I only knew two guys in Miami. They hooked me up with Carlito and Leo. And I named them in my book. Where are they today? I have no idea.

I don't care. They wound up being, after digging into my own past they wound up being a two soldiers of griselda blancos and word happened to get around all over the caribbean of people that were involved in this business whether it was cocaine or pot and noriega found out about it about how how the shit was coming in and how easy it seemed he was the president of panama he was the president of panama at that time i wound up working with him three times well okay all right let's let's hear who we're branching off yeah no no no let's let's step back for a second so you become the godfather at like 24 25 well keep in mind now you know um the brothers are in jail i didn't do this

alone i'm just a facilitator there's yes hundreds of other people involved in this i'm not the i'm not the only guy but now you're the guy like now i'm making deals on my own yeah right oh on your own on my own but the other people they're still going to be doing the stash house stuff so you're oh yeah you're the hand the food's back to work again and the brothers are in prison right and like i said even when i was doing my thing as a kid and growing up in the industry as i did i didn't care even know whose job it was it wasn't my job to know who it was i didn't care and that scenario spilled over onto me out of the hundreds of people in southwest florida that were pumping bales in those days very few of them even know who's in control of the shit.

Only a handful of guys ever knew that it was me. But, you know, you do it long enough, and eventually, you know, it will get around like that. But it kind of permeated the industry a little bit like that, you know? So George, Jorge, knocks on your door. You start making these deals. And now, like, when's the first time you're going down to Colombia? How does that work? Cuba,a wherever how's that come together yeah so i get introduced to calito and leo and they said you know let's let's do a test run let's do you know 15 tons let's do a small one

like that and i had to get with several of the older generations whether they were from everglades or goodland or marco or the fuck they were from, I'll never say. And I had questions about, you know, how much do I charge? Where do I go? Because I always knew the other end of it. I didn't know. You knew the paper with the money. I knew the paper bag on the table kind of shit scenario,

but I didn't know the other workings of it, the upper echelon aspect of it. Now you had to go to graduate school. He taught me that. He told me me and i inherited these connections from them because they're one you know their shit's backing up over there too you know wherever the fuck i've been to jamaica i've been central america i've been to venezuela i've been to south america i mean carlito and leo had a corporate lear jet at my disposal at your disposal That I would fly anywhere in the fuck I wanted to in it. From what airport?

From Miami. So you drive over to Miami and they just say you're going to be home? I drive to Miami, hop on the jet, and I could fly to, say I was flying to Columbia. That's a five-hour trip. All right. I want to make sure I follow, and people out there are following, too, because there's a lot of moving pieces. Yeah, because there's a lot.

There is a lot. These two guys, soldiers of Griselda that you later found out. You didn't even know that. Probably Thuleo. Right. Then they were nice guys. They weren't like holding a machete up to your neck? No.

All right, cool. No, none of that shit. Nice guys. Because, you know, we'll call it what it is. Let me just do a sidebar real quick. The reason for that is because they can't control this. You can't come into town and figure this out. This is generations of fucking doing here. You just don't come in and take over something like this so they needed us sure

you're not gonna stick a gun in the guy's face that you need but they're they were cubans working for griselda and you're talking about all these other places though too colombia venezuela these are the sources where i get the material. Depending on who... So the Cubans were working with them. Right. Okay. Well, no. No. I work with Carlito and Leo. Yes.

They had any one of the cocaine... Hundreds of cocaine cowboys in Miami that wanted to get into the pot industry, the pot business, would give them the money. Give it to me. I would buy whatever you want. You want Jamaican? You want Panama Red? You want Colombian what do you want I can go get it you're controlling the freighter now that you guys I have the Caribbean

connections they don't oh because you have the connections because of the senior people you went and talked to exactly because of the third two generations before me doing this and the generations of families in Jamaica and South America and Central America that they worked with were all generational two generations before me doing this and the generations of families in jamaica and south america and central america that they worked with were all generational so the cube got it all right now it's like you know the cubans were just relying they're ordering up yes they're calling and ordering there you go the people on top are then calling you guys in to connect it where they send it from and now you're going to be the guy that's actually at the top of that chain to

figuring out where it's coming i'm going to go buy the shit and I'm going to get it weighed and send something to go get it. And hopefully not a freighter with cows that you have to put at the bottom of the fucking Gulf of Mexico. But I fly down to Colombia this first time and I meet the boss. Which boss? I won't say. He was one of the main characters in northern Colombia in those days whose range went between Santa Marta and Cartagena in the northern coast of Colombia on the lowland side of it where the Colombian red was grown. If you wanted gold in Punta Roja or something like that, there was a strain in the highlands inland. You go by plane to get that shit. You don't get boatloads of that shit

because you can't, you're going to truck it, you know, 100, 200 miles through the jungle to get it to the coastline. Plus the Colombian gold in the Punta Roja was more potent, so they commanded a higher price. So you could haul less of it and gain a significant profit enough for that, for like 6,000 pounds. That's as much as you can get on a DC-3. That's it, 6,000 pounds. So at $175 a pound,

I'll do your job for you, and I'll get whatever it is you want for it, and I'll put it on your doorstep for $17 pound give your money give their money to me i don't want to meet anybody else but you two carly to and leo don't don't bother i'll work through you and you handle whatever your part your people want i'll give it to you and you deal with it like that now if i do one or two jobs you know while i'm waiting for the first load to get paid for i'll do maybe one or two more now i'm in the hole now they're in the hole for me for like you know 15 20 million or so and now you're handling you're handling the right top end of the thing now how this works is and we're gonna

us as the service providers are guaranteed to get paid and the reason for that regardless of what happens and the reason that is is the scenario I'm about to unfold for you. If you owe me, say I do 40 tons for you, and just, I'm not going to do the math in my head, it's fucking stupid, but say you owe me 10 million or 15 million dollars. I'll send all this shit to you into Miami except for $15 million worth of it. Because I paid $10 a pound for it in Columbia. I get 30,000 pounds of shit for 300 grand. And between 8 to 15 days, depending on any unforeseen weather patterns coming up through the Caribbean or whatever, that's how long it takes to get from South America to Southwest Florida,

I've turned that $300,000 into $10 million, or $15 million. Because I've taken $10 a pound shit, now it's worth $500 a pound when I drop it in Miami. I don't know why Wall Street wasn't investing in this. It's a great business. If you owe me $15 million, I take $15 million of that shit of yours and put it in Naples, or in Golden Gate, and send the rest of it to you.

So when you start selling off that shit, you give me a million, $2 million. I'll send $2 million or a million dollars worth of your shit to you. You give me all my money. I'll give you all your shit back. Because if you lose your shit in Miami, we didn't risk our fucking asses to not get paid. I could sell that shit with a phone call and we get paid. So we're always guaranteed to get paid in that. This is why you had them by the balls.

Exactly. They can't come in here and do this. They can't do this without you. This is what I'm saying. You guys had the leverage to, know the gringos over here and sit who aren't carrying guns or anything you guys are just normal people hauling pot to insist i never saw a gun the only time i ever saw a gun about it uh uh leo of the carlito and leo yeah um partners leo was always uh walked around like magnum. with a flower shirt on and shit like that.

He had a pistol always stuck in front of his pants. That's the only time I ever saw anybody carrying a gun. And you guys never carried nothing? Never. The only time I ever picked up a gun was just by happenstance and by chance, and I wasn't forced to in any way, but I felt obligated. Everybody else was picking one up. It was the first time I went to Columbia and met the boss on this first run for calito and leo for 30 000 pounds i flew down there

take about five hours to fly down the columbia in a jet and we're flying out over the jungle in a sea of green and then you see this little strip out of the middle of fucking nowhere and that's the landing strip we're going to land on you know in the middle of all of this fly right over the trees and drop it down and land on this little airstrip how long you know maybe a hundred yards or so and how big 150 yards it's a it's a small leer a small business layer still maybe a 12 passenger jet it's tight yeah and it's and it's a dirt runway what's the pilot saying like oh you coming down here for vacation he was their guy i you know fuck him got it got it they

they trust him hola and adios that's it we're good yeah because it was all a matter of trust in those days yeah and a simple fact that if you know you fuck this up your shit just doesn't happen anymore you know and with us you're almost guaranteed you're going to get your shit just because of what you're seeing right here you know um i never lost a load let's just put it that way i was never involved with anybody that did and there were guys that you know we like i said we weren't the only pothollers i mean there was so much work for everybody to do that there were five crews up and down southwest florida in those days and there's like i said 50 to 70 people on a crew guys and gals and you know we're unloading this shit offshore like there's a they're out there like

a parking lot you know it was fucking ridiculous and um so once you land on on the plane when you go to meet this guy like how quick are you in and out? What happens? I'll spend the day. Because I'll drive to Miami in the wee hours of the morning, get on the plane, take a five-hour trip, get to Columbia about 10 o'clock in the morning, 11 o'clock in the morning, spend the whole day there. Doing what? Just chilling?

Drinking coffee? No. No. No. I meet the boss, and the first time out, meeting this guy, we didn't meet him the minute we got there. I took a Cuban buddy of mine with me to translate, because this guy doesn't speak a lick of fucking English. None of them do. So I got to know what's the fuck, you know?

You still didn't speak Spanish? I take my buddy Ruben with me no to translate and they bring us to the house and we land the jet we get in the bronco and we drive to the house and flying in we could see this thing this big mansion on the side of the mountain that was built by his father was handed down to him by his father his father ran all the growers there's many pretty much all the growers between like i said cart, Cartagena and Santa Marta, which included the Bronquilla Peninsula and Bronquilla City, almost the entire northern coast of Colombia. They're taking growers, they're bringing in their shit from these growers, and meet the boss, you know, and he comes busting through the door. And there's this little, I mean, it's actually a little stubby Cuban or South American looking dude with a black hair greased back like this.

And he comes walking in like this. And I noticed he's got army fatigues on with the pouch pockets and shit, and he's got a gun belt on, he's got the leather boots on, he's got a T-shirt on that has a smiley face on the front of it. And underneath it, it says, in Spanish, have a nice day. Some breaking bad shit right here. He walks past us like this, and I see the back of his shirt, that same smiley face with a smoking bullet hole on it's in his head and it says or else

and i'll always stick in my brain i'll always stick in my brain and seeing this fucker come through the door right oh man and it's just so how you doing blah blah blah introducing it and got right to it he says i guess let's go see what you're here to see so he opens opens the door grabs an ak on the way out the front door down to the bronco and gets in his buddy grabs an ak rude and ruben grabs an ak and i grabbed one everybody's grabbing a gun that's the first gun you ever have ever an ak only ever and only oh my god what do you are you like are fuck, is this going to go off? Yeah, I'm like, what the fuck is going on, man? You're sitting there like, yeah, no problem.

We get in this fucking Bronco, and we're driving. It's like five minutes go by, and we pull off, and we get out. As soon as the boss's partner opened the door, it smacked me in the face, that smell of pot and burlap. Oh, God, I love that smell. If they make a cologne out of it dude i'm buying it it was so crazy and hitting them like and can we smoke i get out and and i'm pushing aside these big old leathery leaves i'm going through the jungle and all of a sudden i'm looking at this mountain of shit stacked up that looked like a inken ruin and it was probably 20 feet wide, maybe 12 feet high, and about 50 feet into the jungle like that.

There's a stack going this way, stack this way, stack going that way, stack going that way. And because of the different growers he was pulling from were different potencies of weed being bailed up. So I would walk down between these mountains of fucking shit with the boss and his people and using his pipe and he'd give me a piece of bamboo

about six feet long with a pipe on the end of it cut like a syringe. And I could stick the bails like this and pull some shit out and use his pipe and I'm like, dude, give me how many of those you got? Kick them down down here and these guys are up on the stack they're kicking this shit down and i'm spraying a mark on them there's a reason for that too because you're

spraying what do you mean you're spraying them well so when it finally gets to us when i send somebody to come and get it and it gets to us offshore and we go to unload the boat we know that we got the right boat because there have been times where we've unloaded a boat and they were like dude that was our job well okay well then go unload this one that's ours oh my god we're unloaded the wrong boat it's disorganized on the high seas it was so fucking it was out of control man i mean it was just like i said then they were parked like the parking lot out there so we knew when it got there that that mark meant that was my shit that i that i found that i looked at how old are you on this first trip to columbia um 23 24 this is so fast you came down there to crab a year and a half ago now you're talking with diego whoever the

fuck down in columbia this was in late 1984 after the operation everglades 2 took place so a few years in this is like 84 so yeah you're maybe like 25 26 either way it's still like fuck man like was there a point where were you like just had a quiet moment to yourself like in your house or whatever just like this escalated quickly or like should i stop doing this yeah no no there were times when I, you know, could, you know, wasn't killing myself, you know, because there were a lot of people that I entrusted to, you know, to take care of a lot of different things and delegate. Right. I mean, I can't micromanage a job like that.

I can't micromanage three loads coming in the same night on three different crews. I arranged for it. Ultimately, I'm going to get the majority of the pay for it, but I still have to pay the crews out of whatever I'm getting paid. But that being said, there was never any reflection upon what it was I was doing. I quit. I'm not going to have enough money. It wasn't like that. We worked under the assumption that it was never ending.

You never consider at that time that there's ever going to be coming into it. And people always ask me, weren't you afraid? Weren't you scared of going to Columbia and meeting these people and going to Jamaica or wherever the fuck I was going? I'm like, no. You probably didn't think any. It never occurred to me to be scared about it. And when I think back on some of the shit that I've done now. Yeah.

My ass goes like a cigar cutter, man. You could cut a fucking end of a cigar off with my butthole, you know. Well, it's also, I'm trying to think about this. This is pre-internet. It's 1980s. There's not movies about all these guys. It's just like, ah, this is business. That's it.

There's a nice man down in Columbia. We're going to have a coffee, smoke some weed, and make a deal. Right. And that's exactly all it was, was business. And as a business, doing a service as we were providing, if there was any part of that pot hauling scenario that I gave to you that I could cut out of the picture for example i had one of my dearest friends um um was um had was with the everglades national park ranger he was one of my crew right and um he's the one that turned me on to this counter surveillance technology expert in miami that we were buying all this crazy shit did he ever get caught no no and i'd never say his name i never will got it but um being that there was another

gentleman who was also you know very high up and in the political arena and in those days um who was privy i would stash a lot of the money that i was that i was keeping in lieu of payment at his house the politicians yeah at his house and um i i one night i i just cut almost ever cut everybody out of the picture except for the load boat bringing it from the mothership i brought him right into town two boats 47 000 pounds of colombian fucking weed right to the dock at the everglades national park ranger station in the middle of town and unloaded it into two tractor trailer trucks right there in the parking lot and drove them straight out of town into Miami. And I cut all the people in between out. The little boats.

Wait, so not even going and picking up? Oh, yeah. Well, to the mothership. Pick it up. Okay. That would still happen. Bring this through the deep pass, which is... I thought you were bringing the full boat in there for a second.

I'm like, Jesus Christ. No, no, no, no, no, no. I would have that part of it covered. You know, go out and get it. Those guys would never come any further than we could coax them to get in because they'd done their part. So the two mother boats, or the other boats like the one I worked on when I was younger, bring them through the deep water pass,

the main pass into Everglades because you could bring a heavy boat like that through the pass because it was deeper there. Bring them right up to the dock. I'm right at the National Park Ranger Station and unloaded them into tractor trailers and drove it right straight out of town. And I cut out the boats. I cut out the house, the bail handlers, the drivers, and all those people I would have had to pay.

I kept that. Now, these are... Because this is business. These are the residents of the town, though. Doesn't matter. Well, now are they pissed off? Oh. Why not? Now they're not making any money. Doesn't matter. Well, now are they pissed off? Oh. Why not?

Now they're not making any money. Doesn't matter. They're going to make money tomorrow night. Oh, because this would just be for, like, one thing here and there. This is one job that I managed to be able to work it out with these guys that were in these positions in order to do this. You know, and one of the guys on the crew, actually, Everglades crew's father was one of the sheriff deputies in town i mean we you know there isn't anybody that we didn't know you know so i could do something like this and pull it off and like i said this is business in whatever scenario i could eliminate from the whole picture i keep whatever i'd have to pay them so i make two and a half million dollars

rather than pay out that two and.5 million to those guys. How much money are you making a month right now? Oh, God. Well, when I'm working the whole crew or whatever like that, and everybody's part of the whole from A to Z, I keep whatever's left over. And anywhere between $1 million to $1.2 million. A month. A million. A month.

A job, a night. In a month, dude. We did 28 jobs in a month one time. Where is all this money? Where is all this money? Where did you bury it? Well, see, there's another myth, too, about the burying of the shit. I've been asked that many times

where you bury your money fuck you don't bury money money molds and mildews and and rot listen i got a few friends up in north jersey with vowels at the end of their name they would argue that point they definitely bury somebody well you know what good for them you know god bless their ass if they can remember where they buried all that shit you know we're talking about the coordinates you know i don't get too far off track, but I had one of those burying the money things stories given to me by Craig,

the younger of the five Daniels brothers one time. He said he had a PVC tube that he put like 150 grand of hundreds in and then capped both ends of it and took it out and pasted over this way and buried the fucking thing. And about three weeks later went out there to find it and he's looking all around

and he can't find the fucking thing. So he goes and gets Darryl, his older brother and come out and help him look for the fucking thing because all the growth and the shit I got. This is amateur hour. Coordinates,itude come on so he's thinking did maybe did somebody fucking maybe watch me or follow me and see me because he can't find it so they go back and they get a piece of rebar now they're out there juking in the ground you know instead of

digging holes and shit and he's like fucking sweat he's just fucking shit he sits down and leans against the tree puts that bar on his knees like this knees like this and he looks and he notices this little curly cue on the end of the rebar it's black muddy breaks it off like that it's white PVC holy fucking shit there it is right there he found it but he never buried it again because of that and i never buried money because of that because if you start burying this shit and you know a lot of times you know in the amounts of money that we're getting paid and the millions and you know tens of millions of dollars ultimately that's getting paid out some of this money doesn't even come unbanded you know you get um 50 60 70 thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars in 20s or in fives nobody wanted the fucking fives

because you know when i started doing my shit we had a money house in coral gables in miami that was just for going and getting paid and when they they sold the shit, the money would come to that house, and they'd have hundreds in this room, hundreds and fifties in that room, twenties in that one, tens in that one, and fives in a six-car garage. Because if you've ever seen a million dollars in fives, it'll fill this fucking room. Because a five and a hundred weigh the same fucking thing. Well, every bill bill no matter what

denomination weighs a gram yeah and in those days it took us it took me a little while to figure that out when i would spend you know after we got going i would find myself you know in miami still counting money when i should have been off to columbia again or i should be helping my crew unload but i'm still counting millions and tens of millions of dollars because now we got jobs that are stacked up and starting to get paid for they're bringing out you know different denominations from each room in the laundry basket setting it in the kitchen and we're pop the rubber bands and put it in those three money machines going yeah i was gonna say around the clock and we're ledgering and we're counting and banding and throwing and sitting and they got to mix it all up because they have to get rid of the fives well you can't take any one denomination

that was the rule you had to take so much of each denomination even the fives this is something the movies get so fucking wrong because they show everything like they just open up a box or like they're taking the hundreds and they hand you a bunch of benjamin franklins and it's not like that because you it's not like you can just just walk down to the bank and be like, all right, I got 1,000 fives. Can you change me out of hundo? Exactly. It's not like that.

And it's not like in the movies, as you're saying, when you see a guy running with a duffel bag or a bag full of money, he's not running and slinging that fucking bag around. That shit's fucking heavy. How much does a million dollars in hundreds weigh? 22.2 pounds. Almost a kilo. In $100 bills.

$100 bills. It's 22 pounds in $100 bills. 140 pounds. It's a big briefcase. 140 pounds in 20s is a million. So that shit weighs. It starts weighing. It starts adding up.

And we didn't realize that, didn't come to that realization until you know a year or so into this you know doing this with carlito and leo and i'm i'm not being able to get up because now the loads are not pillow bales anymore they figured it out because we told them look the older generation said look we're going to handle your shit you got to get it together down the shitty ones that would spill the shitty pillow bales now they're now they've learned to compress them now in the early 80s when the advent of the commercial and household compactors came on the scene, they started taking them down to the jungle and putting them on generators. Now they're packing the shit.

Now they're coming out all the same size, the same weight, and they're easily stackable. They also had to really figure that out when cocaine rose too because you can't have powder flying everywhere. No. They're hand-pressing those, by the way. They're using a hand crank to hand-press those. So they did that differently they did it differently ours being bales weed throw it into compact compact compact and then slip that bag into a burlap sack and stitch it shut now the now it's more uniformed now the loads are getting heavier because they're taking up less room. We're doing more per job, more amount per job, and the cost and the pay is getting greater.

Can you imagine if you guys took all this time and tried to cure cancer instead? No one would be sick. Who knew we were all messing around? Just saying, like the genius, the details of all the little, like all the shit the movies don't make you think about. You had to worry about all of it. Well, this is a bit of a scenario that most people aren't privy to. That's why I wrote this. Yeah, let's hold this fucker up.

This is called Saltwater Cowboy. You published this in what, 2015? 2015, yeah. It's fantastic. I'm halfway through it right now. I started reading it yesterday. I was thinking, all right, let me get through like three or four chapters, and then that'll be enough for me to start. But then I'm sitting there like two hours later, I'm still reading.

I'm like, I got to put this down. It's too good. Phenomenal book. And there's nothing more satisfying to an author than to have his work turn out exactly how you intended it. And by moving that prologue scenario from the middle of the book to the front is is how i grab you and pull you to the edge of your seat and then i keep you there until the last word is read and that's that cal story most of the 118 reviews that are on amazon speak the same words i picked it up and couldn't put it down yeah well keep in mind that you know of course it takes a literally a village

to do to do this i'm i don't want take everything, all the pats on the back myself. I was just one key in the whole scenario of the workings, and I couldn't have done it without these other people. It just couldn't have been done. So I'm not going to toot my horn with that regard, and I'm not going to say that we were the only pothollers anywhere doing this. I mean, there were pothollers all over the fucking place. You know, the guys would get together, they buy their own loads or whatever. And

whether they got it in or got it caught, you know, good for you guys, man, you know, all I'm saying by imparting this story in this book is I'm telling you how a group of individuals were able to integrate it into a way of life spanning over 40 years and three generations and running those, these Southern waters down here in the caribbean with impunity and you and that's it we we keep forgetting that but as you said at the beginning you were just a kid at that point from the midwest from wisconsin coming in and telling you weren't born there you weren't from there i didn't come there with any aspirations of doing that it just like like i said it's a it's a forest gump tale i just tripped over one thing and into the next and it's not like this isn't like this dark underworld it's not like that it's a very

it's like a way of life and they're just they're moving this plant we deal with some people we don't ask questions about them they deal with their shit but like this is it you know it's family yes it was generational and like i was saying earlier and you you you're you know you're talking about these um people's um misguided conceptions about um dimly lit smoky back rooms with guns on the tables and the deal being made with you know rough guys standing on the perimeter in the dark in the shadows like that and a little light over the table. Nothing could be further from the fucking truth, man. I made $100 million deals standing on a street corner in downtown Miami

in front of a Cuban cafe, dunking Cuban bread into Bustero Cuban coffee and doing a $100 million deal with a handshake. That's how it was done. Were you still living in a trailer? Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. You don't change your lifestyle.

Seriously, though, back to the money, though. Where are you putting all this money? Like, what was the spending like? Because there's no way you spend in all of it. No. Yeah. And that's the reason why it, you know, the fives in particular and sometimes the tens get moldy and mildewed and shit like that.

Because they're banded in clumps of 50,000 or 10,000 or whatever, depending on the denomination. Those never get broken from that. They get paid, and then he pays with that. Money by its very nature is designed to be distributed yes used yes fingerprints all over and they don't use banks don't use rubber bands they use paper bands so the bands fuck with it the rubber the bacteria on the money fucks with the rubber bands and it turns them to gel and they start falling the fuck apart that's why that's why banks use um you know temperature controlled vaults and paper yeah wrappings you'll never see in the ass but bank will never hand you a stack of money with a rubber band around it for that reason i used it because i was a caddy growing up so i was always in cash

business i didn't have a credit card until i was 23, I don't think. I just always had a lot of cash on me. And I never had a wallet until I was also 23 and came in the real world. My boss looked at me funny, but I would keep my money just wrapped in a rubber band with a debit card in the middle. You know what I was using as a wallet? What was that? A shaving kit. A shaving kit. Yeah, a big shaving kit with money in it.

You're carrying around like a fucking pocketbook? wallet yeah but as far as the spending goes you know like i said earlier we were taught you know by the older generations how to spend money and be able to spend money without having anything to show for it because even today if you spend more than ten thousand dollars at any one place you're required to fill out what's called a CTR, a cash transaction report. In cash, right? In cash. And then they in turn report that to the Internal Revenue Service. That's the law.

Yes. So $9,999, you're good. Right. If we didn't actually know the people I was buying from, I bought cars and boats and shit and paid cash and all kinds of shit for them from people that I knew that owned the dealerships or owned the, you know, whatever like that. I bought a chase boat, $90,000, one of those fast go-fast boats that rides along offshore. Did you do it in tranches? I did it in, I come back each day with $9,900, $9,900 until it's paid off, then I go off with my boat.

So that was an agreed to under the table. It was agreed to by the owner of the marina, who was actually the owner of all the Nissanissan dealerships in southwest florida at that time so i could pull in and buy a truck and say thanks and drive off with the worker you know he knows he's gonna get paid good for it oh fuck yeah you know we go into town i go into town with a buddy of mine in this piece of shit truck pickup truck and say dude oh dude pull in here. Pull out with a, give him a brand new truck and we'd go to the club. Good day for him. Oh my God.

You know, but, you know, and as far as burying and securing your money and, you know, and like that, we would from time to time have a couple of the girls on the island, my buddy's girlfriend and another gal on the island, would take paper bags that we would have a certain amount in them written on the bag and our name on it they would take these bags to miami to a cuban gold dealer and buy gold at that time they had what they called a troy ounce cougaran south african cougaran gold coin change the money for gold coins now you can do any fucking thing you want with them in my case i had you know four or five, I can't remember right off now, big money chests full of these coins. And I would have a chain wrapped to it, and I'd just throw it off the dock next to our boat right there in town.

And if I ever needed money, I'd dive out in there and follow that chain and open the box and take a handful of coins out and go to town. There's all my cash laying at the bottom of the fucking bay. There any still down there? No. No. But it's just stupid shit like that. I'm going into town one day to grocery shop

because any significant grocery buying had to be done in town because we're 30 miles from any Publix or Winn-Dixie or whatever was happening at that time. Oh, this is like that? Far away from shit? 30 miles from any you know Publix or Winn-Dixie or whatever was that happening at that time Oh, this is like that far away from shit 30 miles from Naples. We're out in the middle of fucking Everglades, dude So you want there was they had a local grocery store, but if you wanted to buy stock up and you know get you know I didn't realize it was like that far from civilizations You take a take your ride into town and put your shit in a cooler and buy your groceries and drive back. Well, I'm on my way into town one day, and I pass the Chevy dealership. I had a Cobra, a Mustang Cobra, 76. And I see this awesome-looking Corvette in the Chevy lot.

I pulled in there, and I'm checking it out. And it turns out that the owner of the dealership, that was his son's car. He just turned it in and got something new. But he had it all nice flared and ground effect and tinted windows and big tires and shit. And it was a cool-ass looking car. And I said, I don't want that fucker. So I wound up buying that car. I'm going to have it.

But I got my Cobra still. So I'm on the phone. I'm going to call a couple of buddies to come up and get my car and drive it back for me so I can take my Corvette home. And while I'm on the phone, I'm looking out to the window at the lot, and they were selling Jeeps, too. Oh, you want those, too? Ragtop Jeeps.

Brand new ragtop Jeeps for $87.95 or some shit. Under $10,000 for a brand new Jeep. So I'm going to answer the phone said hey dude grab these grab you know johnny and teddy and tommy and you know whoever and six of them shows up and you know we all bought jeeps good day for the dealership we left our shit we left our car sitting in the dealership parking lot and we took these jeeps out to a place they're called bad luck prairie and we had one of the most spectacular fucking demolition derbies you'd ever seen in your life with these ducking jeeps man we were just fucking flying jumping them and crashing

banging into one another just beating the fuck out of these jeeps because they cost less than 10 grand we just have a day of it you know go buy some jeeps and go fuck them up so i've got mine and i got my dingbat girlfriend blonde bartender girlfriend sitting next to me and she sees the roll bar and she's thinking you can roll this thing it's got a roll bar oh no and she's screaming roll it roll it roll so i just cranked that fucker over and i turn it over i'm spitting sand i got sand in my face and my eyes and shit you know i, I just totally that fucking Jeep. And we did that all afternoon until we had like one that would get us back into town.

And we drive the fucking back and pull it onto the lot. Just walk away from it, get in our cars and go home. They're coming back. What happened? No, never even got questioned about it. Oh, man. But that's how you spend money and not have anything to show for it. That's still, but here's the thing. You just took a full day of that, right?

And you spent... I only spent $8,000. Yeah, that's per car. So let's say you bought like four of them. You bought seven of them. Okay, $70,000. At this point, you made $200,000 the night before. Just saying.

You're not making a dent. Right, so where's the other $130,000? Well, then you go to the club that night and you spend $100,000 and you take the club over. Well, now you still have $30,000 left. You go into Miami. No. Well, you go into Miami and hit one of those clubs from South Beach to Miami and we would go down the line. I would take a couple hundred.

Five of us would take a couple hundred grand each. We had a million bucks between five guys and take on a club. Walk in and say, take the tab here. Here's here here's 200 grand let me know when that's gone if it's gone so you're not like was your goal just like spend the money as fast as you got it pretty much it was again it was fun it was something to do you know it was my 25 years old every intention of taking a you know a million dollars between us to miami 100 200 300 grand a piece with the uh with the idea of trying to come home with like 11 and change and just you know do whatever you want but still like you you're working two to four nights a week

there's no way you could even go that many nights at the club like it's still coming as much as you're trying to spend it dude i'm putting it in i now i'm buying houses okay i bought my first house i bought from a cuban partner of mine and you're really ruben the guy i took ruben hey i took to columbia he was selling his house and in place called golden gates he's buying a new one where is that where's that relative just just um well it's north in naples okay i'm living in a south side and outskirts of naples at this time are you buying it in your name no yeah well yeah yeah actually i am but the mortgage was the money was lent to me by a fictitious individual matt cox from panama yeah yeah you get that matt he's throwing you under the bus dude well listen listen listen listen mr red is gonna buy this house don't don't worry about it

tim shut the fuck up i got it i got it right right right no the attorney that i had who was introduced to me by ruben he was a shady guy he knew what the fuck you know the jig was up you know an attorney that was shady he would help me he would write these false mortgages for me and and and make them a matter of record in a courthouse i borrowed this money from a guy named manuel cuimbea who lives in panama and we're such dear friends that i just pay him every now and then when i can when i have money to send to him you know it was no big deal so you weren't worrying about the government finding their way into that somehow well eventually they did i mean ultimately you know i wasn't going to get away with that scenario, but that's what I was told at that time.

So he was an attorney, so it worked for a number of years. But that being said, I would take this house that I bought. I paid $75,000 cash for it from Ruben. I just, there you go, go get your house, like that. And I moved right in and i'm starting to put this boxes and bags of this money in the attic well i'm go up there one day and pull the thing down and climb up in the attic and i see i had a hundred thousand dollars in hundreds maybe 150 grand in hundreds chewed up by mice oh no they made a cool little condo out of this shit man and

they didn't just i mean it wasn't like you could just take it out and tape it back together i mean they minced this fucking shit into confetti jesus and i look and i start laughing i'm laughing until i about pissed myself because that's the funniest fucking shit that's a cool little house they made i just grabbed it like this and tossed it back in with the rest of the insulation, set the other bag down on top of it. Oh, my God. But it started to stack up that way. And you're just storing it in houses. I had to buy the house because the condominium that I had at that time,

I started making money. All the air conditioning vents had so much money in it, the air wouldn't come out. Oh, my God. So I had to buy a house in order to start putting the money in. Then I bought another house. How many houses did you buy at the peak? I had six altogether. Four of them were around the Caribbean.

Like I said earlier, that I never went back to when I got busted. You'd store money in the Caribbean? Yeah. Did you have to put your name on those ones too? No, same scenario. They were written up by, you know. So they, hold on a minute. You could virtually do anything you want in the Caribbeanibbean in those days that's what i'm saying even in pan particularly

in panama because noriega was a crooked dirty dealing bastard son of a bitch yeah what was that we we skipped out on noriega you started to explain about that when was the first time you came into official contact with him and how did that go down i never actually met him face to face he was privy to what was going on through through blanco i can only assume because carlito and leo came to me with a 60 000 pound job i don't care i never ever once cared whose fucking money you're giving me it's not my concern that's yours i don't give a fuck don't introduce me i don't want to know they don't want to know and the 60 000 pound job now um i bought the 60 000 pound from my from my connection the boss down in columbia and um um he had told me at one point in time he said um because we were you know discussing about where to to put money and where could you put money in offshore bank accounts, like in the Cayman Islands or in Panama in particular. And if you remember in the movie Blow where George and Diego or Carlos take their money to Panama and they put $30 million each in the bank.

And he says, I give you $30 million, you give me this little book. Remember that part yeah well you also remember the part where he goes back after he discovers norman's k he goes back to panama to get his money and the guy said well you should have called because you know the government of panama has appropriated your funds he told me the boss man told me don't ever give that fucking guy your money because he'll take it don't ever do business with him that way when he knew ultimately after the first job whose shit i was buying was for Noriega just to make money. So the first 60,000, and that's an interesting tale right there. Well, let's hear it.

What happened was, again, I'm not privy to who owns it because I don't care. I'm just a middle guy. I'm just going to go buy it and do what I need to do, you know, do my job. And so I said, 60,000 do what i need to do you know do my job and um so i said 60 000 pounds a big job you know that's um and that's 30 tons and um i said um typically we would never approach a boat twice we would get it all in one night you know in the earlier days you could do something like that with a boat that had you know 300 plus thousand pounds on it you could go out there night after night until it was empty, and then he could take off and like that. And now you don't want it sitting there.

As the years going by, we don't want him sitting there. We don't want him loaded like this. And I said, well, show me. They were going to use their own boat. Now, there was two different ways to do this. I'd do the whole scenario. Go pick it out and buy it and shit and send a boat and get it and put it on your doorstep for $175 a pound. Now, if you wanted me to purchase your material for you and you want to send your boat to get it and bring it to me, that's $145 a pound.

So you're getting a bit of a deal. But most of the time, they always option for you to do the whole thing. Well, in this case, they had a boat of their own they wanted to use. It was a Panamanian registered vessel. And I said, well, show me what the vessel looks like give me a drawing a schematic or something you know what's the what's the hole look like well in this particular ship there was a uh um forward and behind the folkshole which is the forward section bow section hold it's called the folkshole there was a um access to the builds for maintenance compartment

down there was big enough where you could put 30 half a load 30 000 pounds of that was huge right this was a big size boat well in one of the maintenance uh closet that takes you down to this um maintenance hat the maintenance compartment had a floor hatch that you go like this and pick up like that and you could access that. And I said, well, don't press the bales any bigger, then we'll go down that fucking hole. Put half of it down in there, shut that door, and the door leading into that compartment was a watertight door. Every door or doors that lead to the bilge of the boat are watertight. And if you've ever seen, and I know you've seen like on a submarine or a boat where they open the door and they step over the threshold,

the thresholds are about 18 inches tall. So when you close that hatch inside that room, you could put, it only stuck up four inches above the deck. I said, well, put all that first 30,000 down in there. And the room wasn't even maybe a quarter size of this room right here was all the bigger that maintenance compartment was wow and i said put five inches of concrete in there and cover that hatch up and throw the buckets and mops and sponges and rags and all that back in there and shut that door and leave it in there and we'll come the first night and get what you've got in the main ship's hold we'll get that the first night

and then when we come back the next night i'll when we radio you were coming you jack hammer that hatch open and start bringing that second load out of there right so we get in and get the first half in there and we're you know we're buckled down for the night we're sending the next day we're sending this shit and i get word that the you know the the boat's been seized by the coast guard because it got approached and boarded as a matter of course but the residue and debris from the first 30 000 pounds was all over the still inside that boat so they took the crew off the boat and brought the boat into the tampa bay into the ports into the port in tampa now were you worried about being burned

well what happened was after they got that boat it still had that second 30 000 pounds in it they didn't they didn't know it was there oh shit it's sealed over and this residue from the other first 30 000 hit any kind of a smell or any kind of they couldn't detect anything they couldn't take a dog on that boat they couldn't take it on there they all have the whole fucking boat smelled like pot because of the debris and the residue from the first 30 000 well they get this boat in the next night i guess here here comes george again he says dude we got to go get what happened he said do you know whose that was of course not who the he says that was that was a president i said the generals he said general president who he said noriega and i went my knees went i said what no shit but that's not your fault

that it got caught no no no and there you know and and again in those offshore scenarios and going you know to south america and whatnot for other people's shit whoever the owner of the shit is that we're going to purchase for always had one of their people on that boat, riding with my guys. So he could count the pieces as they come on board, with my guy counting them. When it got to shore, and it got to Miami, they count them again, so when the counts match up, everything's cool. If the boat gets boarded on the high seas,

and gets taken over and taken, he goes with it. So he can come back and tell them exactly what happened to that fucking shit. What do you mean, he goes with it? He rides with the boat. If a boat gets busted, he's busted with the crew, and the Cuban guy they put on the boat goes to jail with everybody else. Right, right, okay.

So he can tell them afterwards exactly what took place. We didn't throw it. We didn't take it. We didn't lose it. The government, somebody took it. We got busted. Which then exonerates everybody. Which is all cool because that was our safety valve built into that end of it

so always somebody that belongs to the load goes with it always one guy paid soldier right so in this case he comes to me and says tells me who's it is and like what the is like okay well you know what so what he made more money on that first 30 000 you know at ten dollars a pound that you know and and i'll do the math for you on that in a minute to explain why there's no violence at that level absolutely none because it doesn't have to be um what happened was the the boat was held in in um confiscation for three and a half almost four months till the months, until the trials and all that stuff got taken place. But being a Panamanian registered vessel, they couldn't keep it because the owner of the vessel wasn't on it.

The captain says, and a single sideband radio back to Panama, and they reported to the maritime authorities theolen. Yeah, to the maritime authorities. The boat was hijacked at sea and stolen. Oh, man. So they get it back. So the boat gets deported back to Panama. It's a whole crew of pirates, man. They came too fast. Check this out, though.

The boat gets deported from Tampa back to Panama. With the weed. With the weed still in it. Oh, man. Turned over to the owner of the boat. Noriega put another crew on it and sent it back. We jackhammered that shit and got the rest of his shit out of that same boat. And about four weeks later, George shows up at the White House again with a handwritten note from Noriega.

No. Yeah. A handwritten note. Do you still have that? No, dude. I wish they had kept it fuck man you know i mean what an idiot why would he ever do that you just don't keep shit like that you know and all it said was timoteo gracias in spanish how in the fuck did you do that

oh shit yeah so and i did two more jobs after that and he didn't let you open up a nice little bank for yourself over there for that i still wasn't going to give him my shit you know give him the opportunity he would have took it i mean he was just a piece of shit you know i mean had i not known who the guy was or who i was working for originally like i never knew all these other scenarios who the shit belonged to and i just didn't care and so what it was a fuck but when it came to say you losing a job losing a load which a lot of the guys did hence the coined the term square grouper now square grouper isn't just gonna have that it's an average bale of pot it's a pot

bale of pot floating in the water so what would so if you guys couldn't pick up the full thing from a freighter boat the boat would then throw over what was left. And you called it a square grouper. Square grouper. Or if another pothuller from wherever and whoever was doing their thing, and they happened to just get spooked for some whatever reason, they start throwing their shit only to find out there's no problem. And we went out one morning, and this has happened i don't know how many times we were going out to pull our trap lines one morning and you know square grouper baby captain

he's kicking the bunk going there's there's bales out there boys we get up put the boots on and run out onto the deck and and the sun's just coming up and slick calm glass like you know water's like glass and they're okay as far as you can fucking see there's bales floating in the water they're okay floating on the water they'll float for a time being until they get saturated and sink i mean like the weed is okay well most of the majority of it like i said depending on how well it's packaged some are floating low some are floating high and now it's the professional pet the pillow shit's done but it's it's free yeah it's whoever gets it owns it so we're plowing on our way through the to go pull to go work we're plowing

through these fucking things and all of a sudden he's like we're using our catch poles and we're driving around grabbing the highest ones that are floating because those are the better ones right and we start loading the deck with these fucking things and all of a sudden i don't we must have had 100 pieces on there or something these are 25 grand each and so sometimes people would go out there if they found out they were square grouper and you'd just be like it's somewhere by that latitude longitude dude free man's game captain get on the radio square grouper square grouper anybody in town with radio in a boat dude they're gone so we're throwing this shit on the boat like it was christmas and all of a sudden the captain, Billy wasn't on.

It was his dad running the boat. He says, that's enough. He says, no, no, no more. Don't take any more. He says, we can't take as much as the little boat coming out to get it from us can hold. So we had to throw some of them back in the water. Billy, the owner of the boat, Captain Billy, he comes out with his other boat, and we throw it on him. He takes it into the 10,000 islands and stashes it somewhere in the woods, and we go on about our day.

We head on down and start pulling traps. Here's another question, then. Like, Billy had been doing this for a long time. When Jorge ran out of the brothers because they went to prison, why didn't they go to, like, the captain? He had seniority over you. He didn't know them. Oh, because they knew your face. That only reason only people they knew were one of the five brothers that was that was the most lucrative rv drive of all time yeah that's how i stumbled

on to this if it wasn't for that day me driving that shit those cuban people wouldn't have known who to go find and you're looking at red going, I'm the captain now. Well, we didn't communicate after that. You know, we kind of, because after this happened, Billy kind of took a, you know, back step back

and got out of the business because he was never implicated. He was never, never went to prison for any of this stuff. God bless him. Fucking Billy. Besides,

two years later, the statute of limitations had run out, had long since run out and he wouldn't have had, he never had anything to worry about anyways after two years.

Oh, he's the dude, he's the dude with the movie. He's the dude that sailed off into the sunset he's the cops can drive by his fucking mansions right now no they can't do fuck all about it right genius except for finding this shit right so he takes it stages it we go about our day pulling traps and all that throughout that morning little boats are coming up to us where's the shit at it's over there about four miles dude that way so just keep running you'll find it you better get to it because it's been there a while right so everybody's getting free fucking money yeah it's

a seven figure day my cut out of what we took was 350 grand i made three hundred thousand dollars that day and i didn't do shit but pull some bales and this happened now and then and it's nobody's gonna come looking for it nobody cares because those fuckers whoever they were through it that's the square grouper that's what a square grouper is square fucking grouper what a world man so but you're still it's just crazy that like you're still doing all this while you're now making the deals and flying. You're still the crab guy going out there, grabbing and collecting. Well, this was a little bit before that time.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. All this, still being out on the boat, doing the whole deal, making the deals now down in Columbia, making deals with Norie. You're adding all these layers to it. I mean, I know there weren't a lot of cops down there and you had a couple paid off, but is there at some point you're thinking like, all right, they're going to start poking around on this? No. Never occurred to us. Never occurred to you. And, you know, along with, you know, the amounts of money to be made was the simple fact that the sentences that were being given out in those days were pre

mandatory minimum okay mandatory minimum um sentencing guidelines across the federal board didn't happen until september 1st 1987 prior to that the magistrates had discretion on the how onto their sentencing and that's why when the five brothers came before the magistrate in miami and he's they're being arraigned and he's reading off the list of seizure or they're being sentenced and he's reading off their list of seizures how were they caught again i don't know if you said that they embedded a man and a woman and a wife in town for two years for right right in the bar and whatever and accumulating this this wealth of knowledge about you know who might be who and who might be when.

That's when they started focusing on certain individuals. Who embedded them? And then putting the government. But which agency? Who knows? Okay. Could have been DEA, could have been Customs, could have been CIA, could have been FBI, could have been Secret Service. I mean, every branch of law enforcement that there is was involved in the operation that took everybody down.

So even though this had all happened, you still didn't think? We kept going. And you're like, I'm not going to catch this. Well, they took all the adults and everybody was making the shit. The infrastructure, the guys that were doing the work was us kids. These adults aren't out there humping 70-pound bales, you know, 800 to 1,000 of them two and three times a night. You think the adults are doing that shit? Fuck no.

You didn't think the government was going to be like, okay, well, who's taking over now? Because now basically this little island, now there's a reason to have a spotlight on it because they're like, well, we just got some big ones from right there. They considered the slate wiped pretty much. They figured they got a handle on it, but they didn't have any clue to the enormity yeah clearly the the the sheer volume of shit that was going on they hadn't have a clue so what was they had a bit of a hint because when the five brothers became we're going to sentencing the judge he's reading off the list of seizures yeah that's that now they've got you know a netherlands antilles holding company worth millions of dollars in cash and properties around the Caribbean.

Here in the States, they had houses, motels, timeshares, apartments, boats, trucks, airplanes. Government took all of it. Daryl had an airplane that he didn't even have a pilot's license. He just paid some guy to show him how to fly the fucking thing. He's out there having a ball, right so but it was all taken right well yeah yeah and they seized on top of all of that they seized 580 000 pounds of weed half a million pounds five brothers are in court who's got that laying around well these guys do five brothers we do on a little island so the judge is reading this and he he throws his glasses down, and they're standing here in front of him on the bench.

And he says, you know, he was at his wit's end. He literally looks at them all and says, I have absolutely no idea how to sentence people like you. He says, there are no precedents. There are no guidelines by which to sentence people like you he says and he looks at craig who's the younger of the five brothers the youngest of them all and craig had been busted before so this would be his second time around he had gone busted for he had gone to prison for pot hauling before really yeah he did his 18 months or 12 months or whatever the fuck it was and got out got home came right back started working again that whatever the fuck it was, got out, got home, started working again.

That's just how it was. Well, Craig agreed. Yes, sir. I understand. This is my second time. So the judge, you know, he's rifling through the paperwork and shit like this. And he says, looks at this, looks at his four brothers and he says, gentlemen, you are now sentenced to a federal holding facility, Miami Correctional, for a period of 36 months. Two and a half years.

Thank you, sir. Have a great day. Two and a half fucking years after all of that shit. And we're flooding North America with weed. And he turns to Craig and he goes, now remember, Mr. Daniels, this is your second time around. And he looks down at his paperwork and shit. Now, I'm reading transcripts and I'm getting Craig's vocalization of how how it took place right and he says the judge fucking looked at him again he took his glasses off and threw him down the table he says again he says i have absolutely no idea what to do with

somebody like you he says i have you know and he looks him dead in the eye and says does five years sound like a long time and craig goes yes sir that sounds like a like a real long time five years he was out in two and that's when everybody went and everything stopped slowed down and that's when enter you know Timmy and George and his buddies he met at the house that's how I took over and that's that's the whole the violence thing let's circle back around yeah and at that level and I've always told people this because again there's this misguided understanding and misconception about the violence in that industry. Well, at that level, there is no violence.

And the reason for that is simply because it's dollars and cents. If I can go to Colombia with $300,000 and I can buy 30,000 pounds of shit for $10 a pound, and in 8 to 14 days, like I said earlier, get that into the United States territorial waters, now it becomes $500 a pound. And you're making $15 million off of $300,000. Minus my fee for a load that size, which is about $5 million-ish, like that. So they've cleared, they've made $10 million. They've cleared $9,700,000 and their investment returned $10 million. If you take and do the math a little bit further

and you take that $300,000 and divide it into $9,700,000, it comes out to $32,000. $32,000 is your number. Okay. What that number represents is the number of times I have at my disposal to get another load in. I can lose the first 31 loads, but I get the last one in. If I get that 32nd load in, they've still made money. But they would tolerate because they only paid ten dollars a pound for it i know but still i that's just that's just a for instance

scenario it never happened right but i'm also saying like these people in businesses like this like the colombians like they're greedy so they want all 32 you know what i mean like they want to get them of course they do so if someone gets too wrong it's that's been the thing in the drug business they pablo escobar was making billions and he still killed people if they did something They want to get them all right. Well, of course they do. So if someone gets two wrong, that's been the thing in the drug business. Pablo Escobar was making billions, and he still killed people if they did something wrong. That's the difference between the cocaine industry and the marijuana industry. Because it's just lower. That's the difference between idiot sons of bitches that want to be that guy who are really nobodies, that have no family association with any of this.

They're not linked to one another. And they've got all their money invested into that pile of cocaine if you lose it you're going to pay for that fucking thing in our case the numbers tell you that even if we did lose one it's like go get another one fuck it they still made fucking money they still got money to burn they've got nine million seven hundred thousand dollars of free money to go back and spend another $300,000 to get more shit with. You know? But like I said, never lost a load that I never gave them.

And what I mean by that is, I could take $170,000 of my own money and buy $17,000 worth of fucking weed. 17,000 pounds of weed. Put it on an old rickety-ass boat that belonged to some of my friends up in Naples, set it adrift offshore, and have one of them call the law on it. They ran out there, score! Everybody's paying attention to that. Well, I moved 60,000 pounds in down here in the Everglades. Well, they're out there fucking around with $170,000. Dude, I've spent that in a bar in a night you know just keep them busy with it you know that's how that works it's a numbers game it's a dollars

and cents game when it comes to that but of course we never lose the shit you know that's just a scenario by which i can explain to you the significance of what it was it was regards to dollars and cents and no violence until i you know even if i lost all 32 of them it still was never a big deal because go get another one but you know in the scenario like that never took place we never lost this lost this shit all the years that i did it and pot hollers were always losing shit like i said we've stumbled across that shit all the time you know the square grouper thing you know and it happened you know it wasn't frequently but it did happen occasionally from time to time you know and that's when all the other you know the kids that you know didn't work on the big boats offshore we're only making you know 15 grand a night or something like that

that's score man you know because um there was one uh one day in particular where we found some shit coming in from a day of pulling traps. We found some bales, and we must have threw 25 or 30 of them on the back of our boat. Good day. And we're cruising toward home, and we're getting closer to the pass, and Captain Hubert opens the wheelhouse door, and he's got binoculars, and he's looking out the stern like this, and there's a boat coming up our stern. All you could see was the bow of the boat and the wake. And he's trying to call whoever might that be, and we're not getting any answer, and it's getting closer, getting closer.

And he says, you know, boys, we've got to make a decision. Are we going to go in with this shit or just throw it? And it wasn't even worth the risk because the money we were making you know so we just threw it off right there we go into town we go back into our dock and we get to catch off from the fish house and we hear in town that you know one of the other boats coming back from crab and found 25 bales of fuckers that was our shit man you wouldn't talk to us that was that was them right there behind us you know so we gave our shit to them you know and then there was a day where we go out and you know and gather up some fucking bales and shit and and on our own me and a couple

of buddies you know and we fill my uh my buddy martin's trailer in a double wide we fill the almost the entire trailer knee deep with this shit because we're gonna dry some of it out right yeah so while we got the fans going and we turn the shit over we decide we'll go ahead and run off you know we're out there and see how everybody else is doing because all the everybody and even the kids i mean there's an 18 19 year old kids out there running around looking for this shit right so we pull up to one of the outer islands it's called rabbit key and um we see two guys you know in a little little small boat nosed up on the beach and they're you know waving at us like this we get a little bit closer

to them and you know they should have been out there for a while now you know and they're like you know they're yelling where is this fucking shit and we're looking and we're laughing at each other and we say look down at your feet the city come apart and the high tide had brought it up on the beach and ty went out and left it on a big row a big ring all the way around the island of weed not seaweed dude you're standing in it it was everywhere they started scooping it up off the beach and throwing it in their boat you know but you could rinse that stuff and dry it out and it was you know it was still all right it was seaweed everybody knew it you know it wasn't fresh like you know the stuff you would get out of a bale but it was still all right it was seaweed everybody knew it you know it wasn't fresh like you know the stuff you would get out of a bail but it was still sellable you weren't going to

get top dollar but it's money you know so everybody's out there getting their own little shot of free money man god damn man i mean the stories the number of stories you have from this is beyond comprehension obviously i again i encourage people to actually get your book because there's a million in there and i'm'm still halfway through it. I've got more to go. But when did this actually start coming down? You said you were doing it for about 10 years before you got arrested. Did you see it coming when it happened? And if not, how did the whole case happen?

Right. Yeah. And that is where we will leave this one off for part two next week if you're watching this podcast in the future the link is already in the description or the pinned comment hope you guys enjoyed tim know you'll enjoy part two and other than that you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace you