Locked In with Ian Bick - Professional Drug Smuggler Reveals How He Became a DEA Informant to Escape 25 Years in Prison | Ken Behr

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

Ken Behr, a former professional drug smuggler, shares his incredible story of how he transitioned from a life of crime to becoming a DEA informant. Facing 25 years in prison, Ken made a choice that changed his fate and his future. He opens up about the dangerous world of drug smuggling, the risks he took, and what ultimately led him to work with law enforcement #DrugSmuggling #DEAInformant #TrueCrimeStories #FederalPrison #DrugCartels #CrimeAndPunishment #PrisonLife #SmugglerExposed Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Connect with Ken Behr: https://onestepovertheline.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwgL-3BhDnARIsAL6KZ6-hBd9SVanJBA1jUzrx-NWUk3577EDbH7IftzKFPrTUy_TuLSSAUIgaAq_fEALw_wcB Thank you to our Sponsors this week: Magic Mind: They have a limited offer you can use now, that gets you up to 48% off your first subscription or 20% off one time purchases with code LOCKED20 at checkout You can claim it at: https://www.magicmind.com/locked Presented by Tyson 2.0 & Wooooo Energy: https://tyson20.com/ https://woooooenergy.com/ Buy Merch: https://lockedinbrand.com Use code lockedin at checkout to get 20% off your order Powered by: Just Media House : https://www.justmediahouse.com/ Creative direction, design, assets, support by FWRD: https://www.fwrd.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ken, welcome to Lockton, man. You made it happen. You got all the way to New York City and then out here with a little bit of car problems, but you made it happen. And that's great to have you. Yeah, I was really excited about coming up here and doing your show. And I was determined. It all worked out. I ended up driving up to Henry Hudson, you know, the beautiful day.

I had been up and down the Henry Hudson a bit because I'd run some dope up and down years ago. Actually got busted the first time coming down from Massachusetts. I can't say that so she says. And we were going to go to Bedford Hills. That's where we're going to stop the load for the night. So I was on my way to Henry Hudson, Iowa before I got busted the first time. That was a long. Brought back memories.

Oh, yeah. I was like, oh, man, this is where we would have ended up. Awesome. Well, before we get into it, have you ever had these magic mind shots? Do you ever have one of these? What are they? There's one next to you. It's like these matcha energy, like clarity type shots.

I've been doing, like, I do five interviews. a week now. And I put them out Sunday through Thursday. And then what I'm also doing is all the new episodes I'm recording, they're like an hour and a half to two hours to two and a half hours long to get more in depth because I'm really trying to notch up and, you know, get out there and compete with the competition and get these stories more in depth. So these things, I take one of these, like, when I go into an interview and they're great. You could try it if you'd like. If you like it, we could get you some more, but there are these like matcha, energy magic mind shots. So is it kind of like

Red Bull or is it something like healthy for you? Not Red Bull. It's healthy for you. I don't want Red Bull. No, not that I dislike Red Bull. I love the Formula One team. The guy's story's cool. It's just I've had two open heart surgeries and a pacemaker. So natural works for me.

No, this is natural. And it really, you'll see it. Like you'll feel it like it's good, right? Yeah, yeah. It's got like a nice tang. Exactly. And they have a really big promo code for the listeners. We'll have that in the description. It's almost got like a twang with a hint of apple.

It's nice, right, yeah. Like a green apple kind. It's good. Maybe like a vinegar, I don't know, a little bit mixed in there. But Matt out there has been loving them. He takes them, I had like a case of them, and he's just been drinking these puppies down. What's the name of it again? Magic Mind.

Well, I was hoping it was mushrooms. What are? Mushrooms. Ah, man. Oh, I took 20 milligrams of the Mike Tyson bites last night. That was my first time doing 20 milligrams at once. and I, me and my cousin were in Long Island, we were dancing in the kitchen at midnight,

and I was eating a bag of popcorn just high as a kite. It was what, he has some magic mushroom bites? They're actually right next to you. They're shaped like an ear, with the ear bitten into it. And yeah, they're the Mike Tyson bites. They're one of the sponsors on the show. Is it CB, THC?

Yeah, THC. THC. He has CDD products. THC. No, it's straight THC. Yeah, those are the real deal. Those are gummies. I know a thing or two about THA.

Yeah, I'm sure we're going to learn about that today. I mean, even though I'm retired, you know, come on, we don't go quietly in the night. So I have friends that grows in Oregon. I've spent time in L.A. I've slog some CBD in the past. I've, you know, like, this thing's not on, right? Because the gray market's kind of my, like a place I like to play, you know. I've been a pot guy my whole life.

You can't give up now. Yeah, so this is fine. I tell you what, the highest I've ever been, and I've shot heroin, I've shot Coke, I've done LSD, I've done, God, I hope my wife doesn't hear this. I've done every, I've never done crank. I just never saw it. What the hell is that?

Or speed. I've done speed a little bit. Yeah, I've done speed. But only for working, not for pleasure. But eating. Speed for work? Yeah, we were doing a big offload in the Everglades, 300 kilos of cocaine, and we were up for days.

I think it was more to get us all so we were so high. We'd do anything, including killing somebody. You know, that's a story we can go into. It's in the book. So this is his THC edibles. Wow. This is his edibles. Mike Tyson's?

Yeah, yeah. Those are his in there. Yeah. When I was working in L.A. pre-COVID, one of my partners had went over to Mike Tyson, to see Mike Tyson because she was a big player in the cannabis space. And when she came back, what was it like? He goes, he was such a nice guy. He is the nicest man.

And I've met him a few times now, like three times. And just he's so friendly. We brought him some of like the pictures and the logo, Mike box, because here's his logo right here to sign and he happily signed it, put it on his Snapchat. It was really cool. Yeah, I remember.

I was like, oh, you went to Mike Tyson's today? You know, just the nicest guy. So you know how there's celebrities you kind of want to meet? Like, you know, like, I think that was my stomach. Oh, I didn't hear anything. I don't know. I don't good. He would be one.

interesting. The other one I always wanted to meet was Jimmy Buffett because he sang so many songs about smuggling and about life in Florida and about every song has a story and actually in my book we've took part of his music, re-figured

it in the audio version. So you'll hear some music like two or three times in the book and one of them is a pirate looks at 40 which is his story about smuggling and everything. So matter of I was on a boat we were moving a boat offshore to go do a smuggling trip. I wasn't going to be on the trip. And the owner of the boat, we went through a heavy storm. The storm, I mean bad, we went a little sailboat, storm hits. All of a sudden,

I'm like down below sleep and water's pouring inside the boat. The captain who is a good smuggling friend of mine that I'll tell a lot of smuggling stories about. And he pulls me up, he goes, get up there and take down the, you know, the last sail. And I go to climb over and I remember he grabbed me by the face. He goes, he goes, hang on for dear life, boy. And I'm a kid, like, these are these seasoned raw smugglers, you know, and I go to get up, he grabs me, pulls me right in his face and goes, and I mean for dear life. So we get all the spinnaker down, get down below, the wind's whip. And it was, we had hit the corner of a hurricane, Hurricane David. And we're all talking. And the owner of the boat goes, listen, all the hatches are airtight. So what, in a

sailboat, if you're going to go down, you go into the boat, tighten the hatches, and the boat will just roll over. It won't sink. It's airtight. That's why that ship that sunk in Italy that killed all those people in that billionaire, they made a mistake. They didn't batten down the hatches. One hatch was left open. But anyway, when we got done with that, the short story is the next day the sunlight comes. We can see the Bahamas in the distance. And the guy puts on Jimmy Buffett. and he goes, he's been on more smuggling trips than any man alive. So I just took the listeners into a little story that may not come up again, but I just want to... A little prequel.

A little prequel. You're big on the prequels. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of which, you just mentioned the book a couple times if you want to plug in the name of your book and we'll have the link to purchase it in the description. Yeah, so the name of the book is one step over the line, Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. and actually one of my drug dealing friends came up with the word marijuana mercenary, so I told him, well, I love that. So can I use it?

He said, yeah. And it kind of describes what we were. We were just kids growing up in a little town in sleepy Hollywood, Florida. It was a beach town that went to sleep at around 12 o'clock, you know. And I landed there in 1973. Anyway, so anyway, again, one more plug. Why not? One step over the line.

confessions of a marijuana mercenary, and that you can get on Amazon, Kindle, Audible. I read the audible book myself, which I had never done anything like that before. And then you can go to our website, One Step Overtheline.com, and you can see videos and pictures of smuggling things,

you know, my race cars when I went auto racing. There's a lot of extra information on the One Step Overthe line.com website. And then you'll see videos like this video will be on there when it's on. So there's a lot of information on the website that correlates to the book, you know. Awesome. So you were saying you grew up in Sleepy Hollow, Florida?

Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, Florida. Well, so I guess this is a good time to say, who am I? Yeah. Let's take it from the top on your childhood, you know? Okay. Tell us about, you know, who you grew up with your parents, like early life for Ken. So I actually grew up in Wayne, New Jersey, not too far from here. It's in upstate New Jersey. It's a farm. You know, New Jersey's the farm.

you know, New Jersey is the Garden State. I grew up in 1950. I was born in 1957. My family were German immigrants. They had left Germany in 1938 or 39 on the run from the Nazis. They took everything they owned. They just came to America with basically some furniture. And we settled.

Actually, my grandmother's brothers had started a small store in New Orleans, you know, years earlier, that grew into one of the largest departments. stores in Louisiana. And so when we came to America, I guess my grandfather didn't like the heat of New Orleans. And there was no air conditioner in 1930s. So he moved up to New Jersey where the Dutch German kind of immigrant farming was, bought a little piece of land. When I was born, I was born into a house that was on that piece of land. My grandfather was a semi-retired farmer. My dad worked in New York City for the store in New Orleans as an agent. buying, you know, a buyer and buyer agent.

And it was great. I grew up with horses, kind of ponies, you know, cows, cow shit, hey. You know, it was, and that was the same time that the cowboy and westerns were on every day. So how could you not relate, you know? You were, you know, there was Rowdy Yates and Clint Eastwood and, you know, all these, um, we grew up on cowboy and western. And that was the jondre of TV before even sitcoms. And one of the things that always affected me,

I always said one day I want either be a cowboy, a race car driver, or a secret agent. Little did I know I would do all three in a sense. Yeah. So, but in 1969, well, one of the most traumatic things in my life, kind of strangely, not traumatic, but eventful, was I failed first grade. that put me

As a matter of fact of, I tell the story I got into the Cubs Couts and I have a picture I found of me all dressed up, happy to go. And I go, and I never remembered this story completely until I wrote the book. I went to the first Cubs Cout meeting. It was the Den Mother's son's birthday.

And I remember it beat him up. Like I beat up the den mother's son in his own house on his birthday. And writing the book, I remembered why. He made fun of me for failing first grade. And, of course, my mother called the next day, oh, you know, can't we work this out?

She's like, no, click. And what happens is when you fail first grade, you know, when you're not accepted, you start slipping away from the norms, I suppose at some point you start finding another place to land. I don't know if that's quite my, you know, the whole story. So anyway, we moved to New Orleans in 1969. My dad was transferred down there.

and all of a sudden I'm going from like the Norman Rockwell northeast to the deep south what I call Sodom and Gomorra you know I land in 1969 there's hippies bell bottoms there's the age of Aquarius Woodstock was that year and you know just a whole hippie world you know New Orleans a whole different place than I had you know than Lane New Jersey and then right after that my dad died, like six months or maybe a year later. I was 13.

And, you know, he had had the drug talk with me. You know, I remember being in the pool. We lived in an upper, you know, nice middle class area. And at that time, I hadn't done drugs. And the whole summer I was alone. I mean, every day I would get up and just get dressed and just, I had no. I guess my friends couldn't connect to how to hang out with somebody that's father's dead. I just was alone.

So we go to school. School starts again. Next thing I know, someone offers me to smoke some pot. So I do. And, you know, my friends are back. They see me. But all of a sudden, I'm socially in the world again, you know. And, of course, it turned out I was the last to find out.

Even at 13, I think the debutants, as I say in the book, were smoking weed, you know. And I start smoking weed. And back then, if you had bought it, bought a joint, sold a joint, you have to deal to get high. Right. You have to find somebody. And I sold some weed to get some money to buy weed. You know, it's kind of what happens when you're, and back then, if you got caught with a joint, you could do a year in jail. It's not like it is today.

And even today, there's some places they don't have a sense of humor. So didn't really sell drugs there. Oh, my second, I smoked a joint. The second thing I did was a four-way hit of orange sunshine, LSD, you know, acid. So I go, that was my gateway move, you know, like boom. And then, but in 1973, my mother decided, and this was the turning point, to take us from sleepy, from New Orleans to the town of, you know, Hollywood, Florida. Just, you know, nothing going on.

Bars closed at midnight, you know, two-lane rooms. roads and the beach and when I get there but that's the epicenter the date this is ground zero for the drug the future drug wars right I mean when I moved in 73 people were bringing you know a couple hundred pounds in maybe they'd fly some in or they put one hide some in their boat and by 1980s you know we were doing freighters you know hundreds of thousands of pounds and I got caught up and all that. The first thing that happened is me and my younger brother move into town and we start finding out there's just these great buds.

It's not like the Mexican ragweed that were smoking in New Orleans. And people in New Orleans are more into secondalls and pill. You know, it's a different vibe, city vibe. Florida was like, man, just gold and red buds and Jamaican lamb's breath and really Colombian weed. So for the listener, why is Florida ground zero for the drug wars? Why did Florida become because it's the closest tip to South America? Columbia and South Florida are 1,500 miles away.

So you can fly a plane or, you know, it's point A to point B is the shortest distance. That's why it ended up happening. California was another, you know, obviously through Mexico, but the Mexican weed was just so bad, just hard-pressed bricks of weed compared to the Colombian, you know, sweet red and gold buds, which the country, America, wanted. So me and my brother start selling drugs out of our little bedroom and my mom's house.

We had our own little business. They used to call it the B, B&G, Bears Bar and Grill. You could actually knock on my bedroom window in the middle of the night and get a gram or a couple joints passed out through the window. So we started selling, like buying, you know, ounce of weed and breaking it down and it got into pounds of weed and started out with like a quarter ounce of blow got into ounces of blow and we would buy drugs to meet the need of the

clientele so let's say it was a lead zeppelin concert load up you know and uh or holiday weekends or you know fourth of july or something and we just one time my mom's found we were kids we're like 16. 17, my mom found four pounds of weed in one of the bedrooms. She flushed it all down the toilet. We're like, mom, why don't you just throw it away, you know? And then we tried to make her a business partner. You know, we're like, I'll tell you what we're going to do. You don't let us just use the house, you know, we'll cut you in. Of course, she was having none of that. You know, my mom, anyway, while I was doing that, it was, you know, kind of building that little business. Of course, my younger brother got out of it, went to college.

That's what most people would have done at 18. Because we knew back then there was a thing called juvie, right? So if you're under 18, you go to juvie. It sucks, but you're not going to jail. You're not going to prison. Going to some work farm. Still sucks, but you might get six months or a year in juvie. But over 18, you're going to jail.

It doesn't work like that anymore. I put anybody in jail. And, I mean, there's money in them themselves, you know? the more people you put in jail, the more privatized prisons make as I digress. Anyway, so I didn't quit. I kept going. As a matter of fact, the last chapter in the book is the epilogue is called Two Steps Back, when I realized that, shit, what I was supposed to do is take two steps back and not keep going.

But I did it for another close to 20 years. And while I was building my little drug business, you know, my, my, My good friend in high school, Terry and I were selling weed together. We were the partners in that. Terry moved to Ohio because the construction industry had collapsed in Florida. So his family moved back to Ohio. Terry got a job at the Ford plant, you know, kind of miserable and calls me up. He goes, hey, man, I think I can move some weed up here.

This is like, I don't know, 1980, 78 or something. I go, hey, come on down. I'll give you a couple pounds. Now, he's 19 out. He jumps in his car. He's got a black transams like Bert Reynolds and Smokey and the bandit. You got to be, remember that movie, but jumps in the car and drives 19 hours to Florida. I throw the two pounds to him, gets back in the car and drives home.

He had a three-day weekend. Calls me up like, you know, three or four days later and goes, man, I sold it. I think I can move more weed. And at that time, I was working. for, I'll bring up the name Donald Steinberg. Donnie Steinberg was one of the largest smugglers in U.S. history. And at 18, I was kind of starting to get involved with his group. And I'll explain how that happened.

But I ended up getting a bail from Donnie. Bail's about 50 pounds, about the size of a big suitcase. Most bales were 40 to 60, not much more. And Terry comes down the transit. Sam. He's out in the front of my house and this little neighborhood I had rented a mobile home in. And can't get the bail in the trunk. It's that big. I mean, you know, it's a little, we get it in. He drives home. 19 hours each way. Calls me up and goes, man, I sold that thing. And that would probably be the last day that Terry worked at the Ford plant. Because all of a sudden, you know, and what we ended up doing, it got to a point where I drove up with a load of weed, a load of

we would be 300 pounds, usually in the trunk. We'd hold about 300. We bought three old big cars like grandma cars, like, you know, Caprice Classics, Bonnevilles, because they had huge trunks. And each trunk held 300, maybe even closer to four, but not much less than 270, 20, depending on how it was packed. And we started running trunk loads up there, trunkers. And we had three cars.

I ended up hiring drivers, guys from high school. They would be driving for me. and we're removing thousands of pounds, when we can get it. Don't forget, what people don't understand about the drug trade is, just because you can sell a thousand pounds of weed, doesn't mean you can get it.

And what happens is, when I could get it, so could everybody. Because maybe one of my other friends, like Randy Lanier, who was one of the largest smugglers in history, bought in 170,000 pounds of weed more than once. Everybody knows everybody.

So, you know, I'll give you an example. I could buy 1,000 pounds of weed or whatever, 300 pounds for 240 to $245 a pound. If I wanted to sell that weed in Florida to another one of my associates, one of the people in the game, I might make $5 on it. So I sell 1,000 pounds of weed, pay a quarter of a million dollars roughly for it and make $5,000. Not a great deal. Yeah, you do it in a day. But to put things into perspective, 240,000. $1,000 in 1978 or 1980.

It's like a million dollars today. It's like, you know, $700. It's two or three times that 50 years later, 40 years later. Why was it so cheap back then? Because when I was in high school, the prices shot way up. Ryan Reynolds here for MidMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.

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Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile.com. When people were able to flip it into even more money. How much was it when you were in high school for weed? For a pound, I think they must have been paying like $12, $1,500, and then they'd flip it for $2,500 to $3,000. Yeah, but that was green pretty bud. That was like Tex-Mex or was it California green?

I'm not sure. What year were you in high school? 2000 and this would have been like 2012, 2013. Yeah, I was just good weed being growing outdoor in Oregon and California. And that's what I ended up getting to in the end. Like my last trip was only 80 or 90 pounds because it was high-end green, you know, not the, the, and it's just a way, and supply and demand. I mean, Donnie was bringing in freighters of like,

they would bring a 200,000 worth 200,000 pounds in a freighter off the shore. And then we'd send cigarette boats and fishing boats and stuff out to hit the freighters, bring it in. I mean, I remember being in one house to go buy, grab a thousand or whatever I was trying to get out of the load. I had a special pocket knife that they used to use just to cut bales. I still have it. I have everything. I sit for a second. And I'm on a pile of about 45,000 pounds,

climbing it up. It's like a mountain of bales and I'm climbing up and cutting them open, looking at it, marking it. This is mine. This is mine out of the, you know, hundreds of bails. And the same thing happened to cocaine. You know, not to go and I'll get to this, but when I started selling cocaine,

conversely, the opposite effect, right? well, the same effect, but not a kilo of cocaine in the 1970s was $57,000 a kilo. And that's pure cocaine. And think about that. In the 70s, that's like, you know, quarter of a million dollars today. But if you cut it in half and you can easily cut a pure kilo of cocaine in half, you'd get another $57,000. And if you sold it on the street, you know, broke it down and gave it to little soldiers to sell,

you'd even get more. So in the very beginning, these guys were making, you know, think about it. You buy a kilo of Coke for 57,000. You might sell it and make 70,000. When I, at the end of my drug smuggling episodes, or I was paying between 10 and 11,000 for a kilo.

And now I'm on the runway catching the, I'm in the deal. But that's what it was. If I bought 10 keys for, if I was going to sell like I did a deal for 10 keys with a friend of mine, all I can make was $1,000. If I went in, if it was 11 and I tried to get 12, it would be hard to get. He'd find it somewhere else. That's how tight the market was. But as an example, when Reagan came in, he crushed, he put up a big berth of the blimp, the radar blimp.

They brought him the Coast Guard. They put a ton of money into it. They went to stop drugs. And the price of pot, I went from making $5 a pound to $40 a pound because they squeezed all the, not say idiots, but the guys that didn't know what they were doing out and left only the really smart people to do it. And people that were creative and kept changing the ways. I'll give you an example.

When I first was a kid, my friends would bring a plane low. of weed in from like Columbia, fly it over the coast of Fort Lauderdale, like just right off the beach. Each bail would have callium sticks on, you know those glow sticks. You open the door and there's a kicker, and the kicker just kicks the bales out.

Waiting for the bales, they're lined up. They know the line up between like the smokestacks and like a certain hotel, flashing lights on the little 24-foot speedboats, the bales would land in the water. The speedboat guys would have two, two guys, a driver and a pickup guy. So the pilot had a kicker, kick him out. He'd pick up the bales, put him in a boat, just drive them right in Port Everglades, put them on a trailer,

pull it up behind your, and just to clear things up, there's 168 miles of canals in Fort Lauderdale alone, not including Hollywood, pomp and on Miami. So once you get in, there's a lot of places to hide. But as it got harder, none of that worked. They had radar blimps following. You know, they could see you coming from Columbia, from the Bahamas. They followed every plane. They knew where all the boats were. They, it became, people started doing, you know, it became really hard.

Started going into other areas like North Carolina, Boston, you know, try to bring the ships way up the coast to get away from the Florida. Heat, you know, the, the, the, the, the customs and all. But, um, so anyway, that's, oh, so the reason, that's why. And that's why, if you've ever heard the term square grouper, that's a term that talks about a bobbing bail, you know, to the point where my friends in high school, I go, what are you guys doing this weekend? Oh, we're going to the keys. I go, well, for what? They go, looking for floaters.

That's what we used to call them floaters or square groupers. And I go, you know, maybe one would just be on the beach. and two friends of mine that are friends, we're all friends to this day and we're in our 60s, met as, you know, kids on the Hollywood beach

with strainers because the bail wasn't meant to, you know, maybe the cops were chasing and they threw the bail out and maybe it wasn't, when you're going to throw them out of a plane, remember you have a 50-pound object doing 140 miles an hour.

You really got to tape it up with duct tape and, you know. So pot would just float on the water and you'd just scoop it up with your, like, tea strainers. That's wild. That's the way it was. I mean, it was the wild, wild west.

And one of the reasons I wrote the book was because I said to myself, you know, growing up on Cowboys and Westerns, you know, someday someone's going to want to know the story, the stories of the original cowboys, that

the original smugglers, the original guys that built the, you know, what we do today. And look, cocaine's, you know, It's a bad drug. I mean, especially if it's cut and it's, you know, I mean, I say in the book, two things. I say, what if there never was a drug war? What if they were just sensible laws and not?

Because what happens is war begets war, right? It always does. And to get a little historical in this whole thing, the drug, marijuana was made villainized in the 1930s. marijuana is not even a real word. It's cannabis or hemp, sativa or indica. But the government, from what I read, they had this one politician

who wanted to make his political bones on marijuana around the same time as prohibition. So they made up this word marijuana to make it sound like Mexican so they could blame the immigrants and, you know, for bringing it in.

Some things never change, I guess, and sense. So then that was the first at making potty legal. But the real war on drug started with Nixon in like the early 1970s, mid-70s, because there was riots about Vietnam War, and I go into all this in the book, and Nixon wanted to take the public's mind off his political problems.

So he made a big thing to crack down on marijuana and called the hippies that were, you know, rioting against, the Vietnam War and a bunch of drug using hippies, you know, they're all smoking pot. And Middle America bought into it, and nobody loved it more than the politicians, the lawyers, and the, you know, and it was all going, you know, that it wasn't, it was done to, as a marketing thing, you know, I mean, then when Reagan put the big crush on it, I got that a little more because that was when cocaine was destroying America. So then you might say, well, Ken, what else happened in your life?

While I was building my little drug empire to drive weed up to Cleveland, to Terry, I met at about 18, in the very beginning, I met a friend of mine's, his father had a partner, and this guy was named Harlan Sanford Perkoff. And I like to say if my dad taught me how important it was to be good, Sandy told me how good it could be to be bad. he was a professional criminal kind of if you've ever seen the movie Tin Men with Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfus is an old movie about these guys in the 50 that sell aluminum siding

and they went to a Senate subcommittee they were forced the three-day right of rescission law which means if you buy anything like a house you have three days to change your mind that law came out of those Senate subcommittees So this guy was like, he was smart, and he liked me. So next thing I, and he was selling boats to smugglers. So he was a yacht broker.

So the next thing I know, like my expertise is forging titles at 18 or smuggling millions of dollars to the Cayman Islands. He would say, he took me one time on a trip. He was really, so like, and then once I did it with him, he'd say, hey, I want you to go to the the Cayman Island is going to pay you $1,000. You're going to take these two suitcases. Drop them off at the bank. You know how to do it. They'll meet you at the customs and fly back.

It's a million five in the suitcases. Right? I'm 18. At one time I brought my girlfriend along. We dress up like we're rich kids. And I remember being in the plane. I tell the story. The pilots go, oh, care for a bottle of Dom pairing on?

And by 18 or 19, I've drank in a lot of bottles of Dom. I was already in the, that was part of the cool drug thing to do, drink expensive champagne. But we're like, it's like 8.30 in the morning. Not a guy, I'm like, okay, never occurring to us because we're kids that they expect us to pay for it.

But they could have given us root beer. I mean, if they would have said, care for two glasses of chocolate milk and some cookies, we'd be like, yeah, you know, but we were kids. So I was flying money back and forth for Donnie Steinberg and meeting other smugglers and at the same time building

my own little drug empire. Where were your parents? How did they not, you know, notice? Well, remember, my dad died. Yeah, your dad died, but what about your mom? How is she not taking a notice? And even your brother in college, he's not saying, hey, why aren't you going to school? Why aren't, you know?

Yeah, I went to college. I made it about six months. And I had learning disabilities. I never really graduated high school. I did go to college, went away to school in Tampa, and just kind of like got lured back to, like, this is boring. I'll tell you a funny story. I'm in economics in college. This is, I swear to you.

And I'm sitting in the front row because I know I'm not a good learner, so I always sit in the front row. And the economics teacher says, what if prostitution and marijuana were made legal today? What would happen to the price? And he had a hypothesis.

And he says, well, he says, you know, if prostitution became legal, the price would, I forgot it's hypothesis because, I guess because it's, legal, the price would come down because more people could do it without fear of going to jail. And he said the same thing about marijuana. I raised my hand. And I go, no, no.

I go, first off, you're not going to need four cigarette boats. You don't have to pay people $20,000 a night to drive them. You don't have anybody crashing. There's no legal bills. You don't have to get planes and chase planes. Because any time you have a boat, you want to have a backup plane and all this. And I got my hand up on saying this. and he goes, excuse me?

How do you know all this? And I look around and the entire class is looking at me. And I just go, never mind. It's like, so, you know, and then, so Donnie has me smuggling money for them. And another time they have me, you know, one day I find myself flying to New York City to buy three ham radios that they need for a Thai trip they're doing in San Francisco.

Then I fly out to San Francisco. I'm a kid. And they go, okay, well, we're staying on Rodeo Drive. We've rented a Rolls-Royce and a couple Mercedes and, you know, go out to Rodeo. I didn't have any clothes. I never, you know, I just kind of like did a mission. Go down to Rodeo Drive. Here's some money.

Go buy yourself some fancy clothes. And, you know, I mean, like all these movie stars and I'm like driving around the back of a Rolls-Royce. It's pretty cool. But no big money in it yet. But one of the things that happened, my first smuggling trip, you know, get down and dirty. Let's talk about the real stuff. How old are you, that first trip? About 19 or 20.

So what happens is my best friend growing up in New Orleans is a kid named Frankie Montalione. If you ever been to New Orleans, the biggest hotel in New Orleans in the French quarter is the Montalione Hotel. He's a really, really wealthy people. And Frankie was my best friend, and he was a child diabetic. He was hooked on shooting coke because the same needle that was keeping him alive. was killing him. And he made some, you know, he died very, it's sad, you know.

So what happened was he got busted, and this is the way it works. Some, he got busted selling a DEA in New Orleans two grams of Coke. And the DEA agent says, can you get me two ounces? Frankie just says, yes, probably not. You know, he's a good kid from a good family.

The DEA charged him federally when moving two ounces of Coke. That's a major crime, especially in those days. He goes to trial, and he says, they said, where'd you get the Coke?

So now my name comes up. And it's in the book. I go into detail because it's a little more complex, but, and I'm like, me, I have nothing to do with it. I didn't even know he got,

but I'm the guy in Florida. Everybody wants the Florida guy, because where are the guys, where the drugs are coming from. So Sandy Perkoff, who was partners with Frankie's dad, the boat stuff says, why don't you go leave the country? Go to Jamaica.

I have a friend that owns a hotel. I was doing a lot of blow. Everybody was. He goes, dry out, hang out, live for free. And I think what the story was, I think Frankie's, Sandy's daughter, Kat, who I went to high school with, was possibly part of what Frankie was doing. And I was Sandy's right-hand guy. I was his lieutenant. I was the guy that moved the money to the islands.

I was a guy that forged all the titles for the boats. If they had to move a cigarette offshore, I'd get a phone call in the middle of the night. We need this boat to go offshore. I want you to go with them. Not to run the drugs in, because he knew my mother, so he didn't want to get me in trouble with my mom.

But, you know, just I was his right-hand little gopher guy, kind of lieutenant. And so that actually, cat not it's in the book i'll mention it here i never really mentioned it before but cat was actually uh had a girlfriend she was a lesbian the theory is she was killed at 23 by possibly by they called it the they called it the lesbian mafia but she was kind of driven off the road in a single car accident her girlfriend was a girl named ellen who went on to be a major comedian had her own daytime talk show and pretty famous today. So Kat was the one that took Ellen

DeGeneres out of the closet. And that's actually written up in a book and Ellen doesn't argue that fact, but little name dropping, you know. So she was a part of that whole, that era? Yeah, well, she wasn't, but she wasn't, I don't think she was involved in drugs, you know. She just happened to be in the facility. Well, she grew up in New Orleans. She went to my brother's high school. And Kat went to my high school. Cat was a cute blonde.

And Ellen had never, you know, had basically taken her out of the closet. So those early years that you were describing, you were just watching your friends do all the smuggling or being around that you hadn't really made that first move. Yeah, because, well, one of the things is smuggling's not easy. It takes a lot of moving parts. You have to know the right people. You have to have connections offshore. And the other thing is, as I became more and more profitable moving my one major gig to Ohio, it's like a fool's play.

Why do I want to get involved in something I have no control of? When I can buy weed in Florida, put it in a car. I'm not driving it anymore. I'm paying people to drive it. My partner's going to sell it. Send me the money. And I can do it from my living room, as we basically call it doing a drug deal by remote control and go jet skiing all day and play rocket ball.

It's still not easy. Look, I ended up in Miami one time because there was no weed through a friend of a friend, never do a deal through a friend of a friend, even a really good friend. And I'm surrounded by three Latin guys. And I'm looking at like $100,000 worth of weed laying on the ground. And they're like, I go, this is shit weed. I'm not buying it. And I guess he was Colombian looks at me.

He goes, I don't know exactly know what he said. But it translated to you don't have to take the weed, but the money's staying here. And when I try to give him a look, one guy opened up a duster and there's an AK-47. The next guy has an M-16 and the third guy I wasn't paying attention to. I was loading the weed in the trunk of the car. Right? So I don't want, you know, it's a really difficult business, the drug business. One day you can make $100,000 and you can get killed the next.

And, you know, paralyzed for it. I have a friend of mine that's in a wheelchair for the last. 40 years. He did one Coke deal with a guy. Guy shot him in the back three times. I have another friend of mine, a really good friend of mine, a Cuban guy. He was a fisherman, and he would find the floaters. He worked as a sport fish guy off the piers in Miami. Bring me the floaters. I'd cut them open, take them out to a farm in Davy, dry them out, wash them out with fresh water to get the salt water off the weed. Then we spray the weed with Coca-Cola to get it sticky and you know, and then pack it all back up and resell it.

But not usually you sell it as top-tier weed. We would sell it as like filler or something. But when the bales were floating and he found when he'd bring it to me, he got killed. He fronted some Italian guy, two kilos of Coke in Manhattan for about $70,000 with a product at the market price, went up to get it and the guy just took him to a warehouse and killed him. Wow. So what do you think was safer, being the smoker?

being the smuggler or being the dealer? Being the dealer. Why is that? I feel like you're more exposed as the actual smuggler. If you're a smuggler, you can, listen, I'll tell you some stories. You know, people that's most deal, I know guys that are dealing, you can last 20 years. Smugglers don't always, you know, they either, you can get killed in the boat or the plane. You can, you know, it's hard to put a deal together.

Most smugglers don't get a long, you know, it's like a football player, right? Quarterbacks last forever, you know, linemen and running backs three or four years. It's the volatility and the moving parts, right? Like my gig to Ohio, how many moving parts did I have? All I had to do is buy the Wheaton, Florida, give it to the three or four guys that I went to high school with, put them in the cars, they drive it up there. my partner, who I went to high school with, sells it, sends the money back, and I go to all my connections and find another load. I'm not really near, I'm near the product. You know, man, and understand, there's drug, I was a drug dealer, but my real thing was a drug runner, right?

When you brought a load into Florida, you called me, and then I would try to move a chunk of it for you. I was, not that I didn't do retail and sell, you know, sell kilos or, you know, you know, in the beginning I would sell ounces of Coke, you know, but, but basically, there's, there's less moving parts to a drug deal. Now, if you're a guy that's on the street, you know, in downtown Detroit selling grams, I don't know how, that's not my expertise, but hopefully you don't get a drive. buy, you know. Yeah, so you were the connector. You were putting the pieces together once the product came in, that middleman. They used to call guy, the nickname for us was land sharks, right? So once the sharks brought it in, the land sharks were moving.

Because you had to get it out of South Florida. There's no profit. If you can get it up to Middle America, like I was taking it to Ohio. I had a good friend of mine that was moving tons of weed to Michigan, you know, because the profit, where a pound of weed was $245, let's say, in Florida, it was $445 in Michigan. So if you, once you, that's... Ready or not, summer is coming, and Wayfair's Memorial Day clearance is on now. Right now through May 25th, get up to 70% off everything home at Wayfair.

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Sadie is a mochi member compensated for her story. It's a big spread with a lot of people you could pay in the middle. Okay, so your friend drops your name into law enforcement. In Louisiana, right. And then you go to Jamaica? I do. And then what happens after that? I'm hanging out there for like six months drying out.

you know, like working at a little hotel, bungalow place, killing it. I mean, just relax. Learning one thing I learned when you're 19 that age. You know, some people when they graduate high school, their parents let them go to Europe for, you know, or someplace, and then they come back. And, yeah, mine was being on the run from the feds. So two friends of mine could come down.

You of my friends had come. My girlfriend came. Big Jeff, who was one of my drug running kind of, and a guy named Bob Silver Bullet, who was another mentor of mine. I met him through Sandy. He was a really experienced smuggler. He was a boat captain. He taught himself to fly.

He bought a plane. And he had a house in Florida. There's a lot of runways. And there's a lot of roads to nowhere that are runways. You know, it's just flat. And he bought a fly in it. He bought a piece of property on a fly-in, fly-out neighborhood. In other words, they put a runway in.

and they have house tracks, and you can put a trailer or a house or whatever. So he put a mobile home on this little fly-in, fly-out deal, this community, and that it's in Okeechobee, Florida, middle of nowhere, and then he built a coin laundry in the town. So now he had a reason to be there. It made a pretty good living with the coin laundry, and he had a place to land a plane, and he had a plane. So he comes to Jamaica, we all have mutual friends there.

We all see another friend of ours, Hank. and we all agree to put up me. They didn't need me, but I was there. And I had Terry. I could sell it. So we all put up like $4,000 or $5,000 to cover. When you're doing a trip out of like someplace like Jamaica, you never pay for the load.

If you pay for the load, then the Jamaicans don't really care if you get off the ground or not. You put a deposit, you pay for the police officer, you pay for the runway, you pay for the fuel. The fuel's key. and that'll come back. A 50-gallon drum of aviation fuel in Jamaica in the 70s was gold. Because if you get contaminated fuel, you will die somewhere in the middle of the ocean

when the plane gets, you know, the engine shuts off. So it was really important to get good aviation fuel. That's almost as important as having a good runway with, you know, solid surface and plenty of room between the landing tree line and the takeoff tree line. And the other thing is you've got the local cops paid off, right? So I saw when I was living in Jamaica, I saw this truck with a 50-gallon drum of fuel drive down the street with a couple rostas in it. The cops pull up. They tell them to unload the fuel, put it in the back of their truck.

The thing weighs like 300 pounds, so they're lifting it up. Then that happened. They start billy clubbing them and arrested them. And you know what's going to happen to that 50-gallon gas? feel the cops are going to sell it to somebody else so you know um that's how hard you know they're not easy so anyhow bob flies in oh we all leave the country now i i don't know if i'm not wanted so we we both we all fly out of jamaica we sneak out kind in the middle of the night because we don't want the other smuggling groups to know that i'm leaving and they're leaving what does that

tell them these guys are going to do a trip probably so we fly to jama's they go and in front of me. I go through. You know, I'm wearing a flowered shirt, got a drink with an umbrella on it, you know, just looked like a drunken tourist. The bells don't go off. So back then, they had like stoplight, red, green, yellow.

And if you walk through customs, if one of those lights went off, you were being taken in the back room. That means they had a, you run a watch list. So luckily, nothing happened. But you had a passport. Yeah, yeah, not legally. So nothing got flagged.

Yeah, yeah. You know, right. Because one of the things that's happened, you might have, like, heard other smugglers talk about, you fly to Columbia, you fly someplace and you illegally land without documentation. You crash, it's hard, you can't get, it's hard to get back out of the country because you don't have, you might have a passport, but it's not stamped. So that's one of the things that's happened to, we had, you know, to smugglers when they crash or get stuck in a foreign country, they have to smuggle themselves back out of that country. and into America, you have to have your passport stamp. I did. So I get in, Bob brings the load in, I drive it up to Terry's in Ohio, we make our money,

and that was my first smuggling trip. That was about 19, maybe 20. And we did good. How much did you make off of a trip like that? I don't even remember. So it wasn't all our weed. Part of it belonged to Hank, the guy down there. I probably made, well, we probably sold 600 pounds.

I probably made about $40 a pound. And that wasn't risky at all for, you don't think it was risky. Like you already had that heat on you and you decided to go with a group of guys that you hadn't really heard from in a while. Well, I knew they were a good guy. Well, you know.

It could have been a setup. Anything could have happened to get you back in. Yeah, that didn't even occur to me. Not with those guys. They were like my drug running. Me and Big Jeff did a lot. Me and Bob and me and Big Jeff. Well, let's put it this way.

Good thing it didn't happen because we did a lot more trips together. Okay. So that kept happening and now you're going into your early 20s. Right. So I'm doing that. Are you back in the U.S. at this point? Yeah. And I'm starting to build.

That's when I really start to build the, you know, now I'm back working with Terry. Terry had come to Florida without talking to me, went down to Miami with this other guy, Kelly, and got robbed for like $100,000, tied up in a hotel room. So then they decided that I was the best connection they had in Florida. But they didn't have to come to me anymore because by that time, he was coming down buying for me and I was shipping to him. It became just me shipping it up and them selling it. What happened to the guy that got arrested and that threw your name under the bus? Frankie Montlione. He was my best friend.

He came from a family when his dad died. his end of the will was $125 million. That two-ounce charge, Frankie went to jail. He was only supposed to do a year. His father and his number one, his right-hand man, Fred Forrestall, said, let him go to jail for a year.

He'll go to club fed. He'll learn to play tennis. He'll get in shape. He'll clean his act up. And his father was wealthy enough where he could probably have made a much better deal. But maybe he felt it was, best to get Frankie off the streets and give him a chance to, you know, scared straight.

Frankie got out and he had probation and he got violated to every time he got out because he was a cocaine addict. He was a drug addict. You can't fix that by putting a cast on it. That's like having cancer, right? It's a, it's a disease. And Frankie did 25% of his. life in prison. Get out, violated. He ended up doing 10 years in prison, got out, finally got off paper, and died at 44 in the dentist chair of either, I don't know what happened, maybe, I don't know if he was doing drugs and overdosed. It was a child diabetic, but what a crime. You know, this is one of the richest people in the world. He never would have committed, you know, But the system just wanted a body.

They wanted the name, right? They busted the big, the name Montlione. When you pull into New Orleans, fly in on top of the city and says in big red letters on top of the hotel, the Montlion. You know? But he was my first running buddy. I'll tell you a story that I've never told, but that's in the book. So we had money. Frankie belonged to the country club.

his father owned the hotel. We could go to the country club or hotel and sign for breakfast, lunch, and dinner or anything we wanted. My family, my father worked for what was once our family's department store. It was the third largest department store in Louisiana. Seven stories takes up two city blocks

in downtown New Orleans. I mean, you know, and my dad was, we didn't own it, but he was an executive. So I could go there and buy anything. Imagine being able to go to a department store and buy anything you want with a pen. Now, obviously, I'm a kid. I don't want anything. You know, my mother would say, go down and get some jeans and I'd bitch about it. It's not like I'm going to come home with an Amwa, you know, or like, hey, look what I bought, Ma. You know,

I couldn't do that. I'd have to ask permission, but I could sign. And the one thing we couldn't do was sign for drugs. And we're, you know, we're like 12, 13. We want to get laid. You know, we're reading books like Catcher in the Rye and Lay Mizorah and Green Mansions in school. you know, we're being forced to, you know, become society, you know, well-read. All we want to do is smoke, we can get high. So one day, Frankie, because of who he is, knows this hippie in New Orleans in the French quarter named Al Clark. And Al Clark was like a famous hippie. So Frankie makes a deal.

This is one of like 12, 13. It's before, you know, he goes, he's going to trade his hyperdermic needles for his diabetes for some joints. So we get a ride down to the quarter. you know, if anybody's ever been to the French Quarter, you know, it's shady, seedy, the buildings are hundreds of years old. We all go all the way back in the French Quarter. And there is Al Clark, and I go into this room. And I'm a farm boy from New Orleans still. And there's a girl walking around basically with just a midriff top on, with her boobs hanging out in a pair of underwear.

And the closest I'd seen anything like that was still National Geographic. I hadn't even gotten to Playboy yet, I don't think. And there's a guy laying on the table with no shirt on, no shoes on, just a pair of bell bottoms with a piece buckle belt bottom, you know, buckle. And he's got a burn on his chest. And he's got to, his friends are trying to light a cigarette. And I'm looking around and it's like this 1600s or 1700s building all old and unrefurbished. And the girls walking around, you know, half-clad and Al Clark's there. guy, I said, what's, you know, they said, well, this guy was, he's, you know, he's overdosing

on heroin. He's trying to kick it. They sent him to Charity Hospital, which was actually one of the first free hospitals for people. And Charity, they said Charity brought him back and kicked him out of the van in the alley because he was a drug addict. You know, nobody wanted to help him. And the guy was lighting his second cigarette.

And I could see where the second burn, the first burn was like, you know, if someone leaves a cigarette on a piece of furniture, that's his chest. and I see the second one starting on going, boy, I ain't in Kansas anymore. You know what I mean? So Frankie kind of brought me into the whole, like I smoked weed and did the acid before I met Frankie, but now me and Frankie were in trouble.

Fast-floored years later, I get in trouble for some reason because of him and his little cocaine case in New Orleans, leave the country and eventually connect, you know, Frankie died. I mean, imagine, again, 10 years of his life in and out of prison

for one, two grams and the bravado to say I could do a little more. He sold the guy two grams. That's all he had. So, anyhow,

I keep climbing the drug world ladder. And I'll tell you, we did a couple other. And even though I never really got into smuggling because I had my own gigs. You know, like if your mother says, hey, you know, would you jump off the bridge

if Johnny does? Does he live? You know, or is he break any legs? Because I think I can do it without breaking legs. So, you know, I had other opportunities, and I did them. So another time we did a trip. So this is funny.

So I'll tell you two more marijuana trips, I'll do a couple of cocaine trips. Is that all right? Yeah. All right. So I've been, lived in Jamaica. I'd been down there trying to do other trips. You know, I'd been back.

You know, I knew Jha really well. And my friend Kelly, who had introduced me my first wife and comes up, he goes, hey, my uncle Ralph wants to do a smuggling trip, and we got 1,100 pounds of weed lined up in Jamaica, and Ralph owns a twin-engine plane. I go, you got two things out of, you know, you got a place to land. it. No, no, but when... So I said, but wait a second, has Uncle Ralph been in the drug business? No. Has he ever done a drug smuggling trip? No. And you think this is a good idea. I'm like, Kelly, you're crazy. And this is not easy. I've done, you know, he's never done smuggling trips

before, you know? So he, uh, I meet Uncle Ralph. And Uncle Ralph is like this, he's a Puerto He's Latin. He's good-looking. He looks like, you know, like every movie star. He's got like salt and pepper hair, great, you know, dark complexion, tall, good-looking. I go, hell, Uncle Ralph's got some swagger, you know. I mean, you know, he looks like kind of like, you know, a movie star or, you know, a movie star version of a smuggler, you know, I don't know. So I said, I start to talk to Ralph. I go, Ralph, you got to bring a co-pilot. Do not do this yourself. It's a long trip. You have to fly. He's coming out of St. Pete. So that's farther up the coast. in Florida, right? You're going to fly down

in Jamaica. You've got to get fuel. You have to come back. You're going to be in the air for like 18 hours on this whole trip. And he goes, nope. And he goes, I want more weight. Because remember, all the fuel, what we used to do is have wingtips on the planes. Sometimes we'd have fuel bladders. You know, because again, you want to try

not to refuel in Jamaica because the fuel sucks. And if you do, it's also time-consuming. You can unload a plane. I can unload a plane with 1100 pounds with me and one other guy back then in about four to six minutes you know boom boom your adrenaline's kicking you just throw in these 40 50 pound bales I threw one at a guy one time the guy was like six three two big Jeff I throw a bail out on him one time and I look up and he's laying on the ground with his feet I go what happened he goes stop throwing him so hard and he's things by like 40

pounds each and knocked him right to the ground so um Ralph does it he flies down to Jamaica oh so We're going to try to find a road to nowhere in the middle of Florida to land. And we found a road, but we're a little concerned about who else might know about the road who would do it. Sometimes they were going to build those neighborhoods in Florida, and it was all a scam, and they put the roads in. But, you know, I don't know if you remember the old Florida real estate scams and the swamps. It's a lot of roads that make no sense while they're there. Either they were built by smugglers or they were, you know, built by people that were telling people. in the 60s there was a huge thing about Florida real estate scams and that's what it was.

They built the roads, but never the houses. And we find this road and we live in Hollywood, Florida. And I don't know if anybody ever knows about John Walsh and America's Most Wanted that television show about how they look for criminals. He had done that because his son, Adam Walsh, had been killed in a mall by, and he was five. years old, he's abducted and killed. So John, he actually started the show along, you know, to help find, you know, child molesters and whatever. So we've got this road that goes to the middle of nowhere.

And we want to lay on it and see if it's safe and what's going on. So we go by one of these remote control planes. We go to buy that are horribly hard to fly. Like you crash them all the time. You have to wind them up and start them. And back then they didn't have radios. It was like a circular thing. You hang on to it.

They were impossible to fly, which was perfect, because then we could spend hours, have a guy on the road. People ever showed up, what are you doing? Trying to fly this, you know. We go to the mall, and in the mall that day, Adam Walsh, who I knew Raveh, Walsh's mother. I met her, smoked the joint with her once.

And I knew the wall. And I run into one of the guys that works from his mom, whose friends with him. And they're like, hey, Kenny. I was with him my friend Lee, one of my, did a lot of smuggling trips. and shit. And we're there to buy the plane to take to the road. And Adam Walt, they go, hey, you got to help us find Adam. I go, what's the deal? She goes, well, Ravei left him in Sears to play

video games to go shopping and he's been abducted. And for those listeners that don't know the Adam Walt story, it's, I was there the day trying to find Adam. We looked all over for him, drove around the neighborhood. It's a big story. It's, if those that don't, have never researched the Adam Walsh story or know who John Walsh is. And he's still got a show on TV now about America's Most Wanted. His son hosts it. John, actually back 20 years ago when I helped him move from one house to the other, he had spoke at that time in front of the United States Senate more than any single individual.

No, it's non-centered, you know, not politician in the history of the country. So that man and that woman who lost their child to a sadistic murderer, they found him with his head cut off in the Everglades, a five-year-old child went and read. That's what, you know, the NCI, you know, the shows with the, they only look, now they look for kids. The missing kids network, the FBI now has a system for finding children.

All that was created by John Walsh. So not to degress from my smuggling stories, but I just like to give credit what credit's doing for people to understand, you know, it's crazy. It's crazy how my life's six degree of separation of these things. Back to the story. So we get the plane, we go out there, and we decide that the road is,

a car shows up with like four antennas on, at dark windows, leaf flips out, hides in the woods, and we don't use the road. The other problem was the road was, the road was too far for the range of the plane. It was cutting, we had about 1,100 miles of range, and it was cutting it tight to get out the road. And Kelly and they weren't sophisticated enough

to understand to bring extra fuel, and they just didn't get what to do. So they decide that Uncle Ralph decides he's going to fly the load of weed right into what they call FBO, fixed-based of operations, where you park your plane, which is downtown St. Pete at the St. Pete Airport. And I'm like, what?

You know, this is already blimps, customs, you know, military planes. He's coming out of Jamaica. That's a shot in the dark. But, hey, I'm along to get the load. I'm willing to help put up my time because I'm going to take the load and sell it. And Kelly's my best friend and he asked me, you know, and again, you know, mom said jump off the bridge, you know. Right. So I have my crew, my drivers, the guys that are going to take the load.

I have three cars and three drivers. And then we have Lee and another guy, Scotty, who's never done a drug deal in his life. They just, he's a high school friend. Said, hey, I would like to unload a plane, pay you a few bucks. So I'm sitting in. So Uncle Ralph now has to fly from St. Pete to Haiti, load up with refuel in Haiti because he's trying to get as much. clean fuel in the plane, then fly to Jamaica, load the plane. Remember, he's going to land

and four or five minutes later, the plane's going to be ready to go. They're going to load it. He might get a top off in Jamaica probably will, but again, he's got full fuel tank. So if he gets a little contaminated fuel, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a small part of his full thousand pounds of fuel or whatever he's got, takes off, makes it all the way to St. Pete. And now we had separated the crews, the driving, The moving crew was in a little shitbox hotels off, you know, 20 miles out of town. The offload crew and I are staying at the hotel where the Playboy Club is. And they're, you know, these guys are bitching, no, you guys are going to be out of town out of, out of the center of the action.

I got there just in time to go up to the room. I got a walkie talk in a pair of binoculars. And I brought 20,000 cash just in case something went wrong. And then we had a friend of ours that was a college. kid whose parents had given him the grandparents car to go to college. I hired him. He was going to school in Atlanta to come down and be one of the drivers. And I had his grandmother's car parked down below at the hotel with the keys under the mat.

So if any shit hit the fan, you come back, grab the car and go. So I'm sitting there waiting for the plane, trying to listen to the walkie-talkie. All of a sudden, see coming down the third, you know, third, it's like right down. St. Pete, like the water's right there. Uncle Ralph's 240 Volvo. You never seen a 240 Volvo like that. It's always, it was like the commercial point is the safest car ever made,

you know, it's like ugly but safe. It was the old square box first Volvo's one of the first ones. And every time it hits an intersection, it goes airborne. And I'm like sitting there and right behind them is five cop cars and they're surrounding them. They're on there's bumpers, they're on the edge.

All the lights are going. All five cars are going airborne. Sparks are flying out. And as it goes underneath me, I see my high school friend, Lee, I see Scotty at the steering wheel and Lee trying to jump out of the car. The door's open and Lee's going to jump. And Lee was always the biggest ballsy guy in high school. Like Lee was, but I'm thinking, I wouldn't do that. I'm thinking to myself, that don't look good, Lee. You're going to get killed. Lee turns around and they keep go right by me. And I'm sitting to go, shit, I think it's time to go. Right? This didn't work. So I take the walkie-talkie. I wrap.

Wrap it in newspaper, run up a couple stairs, and shove it into like a cubbyhole or something. Grab the 20,000, because I don't want to be caught walking out of the hotel with the walkie-talkie and the money. And here's why. In conspiracy, fear it. And if there's a conspiracy,

they arrest the plane, they arrest the pilot, the pot. They find me three blocks away with the money, and they find the radio. I'm part of the group. All you have to do is talk about it. The American law is set up that even if you and I are talking about doing a drug deal, I do it, you know about it, you're a conspirator.

And you can get just as much time as the pilot. You're all guilty. So I'm not too nervous, but I'm like, I remember walking towards the door at the hotel, like breathing, just like watching the door get closer and closer going, I got to get to grandma's car, you know what I mean? And I get in the car, throw the money in, reach under, find the key started up, out of town to the stash house. Turns out somehow,

Scottie drove the old Volvo that probably never did over 80 miles an hour in its life. Lee jumped out and they arrested Scottie. They finally caught him. In the middle of this, there's a pickup truck parked next to a plane

at Uncle Ralph's hangar full 1,100 pounds of weed. And Uncle Ralph, who had never done a smuggling drip in his life, I thought he had some swagger, didn't know any better, I guess, just got him the pickup truck and drove out. Like he had no way to leave, right?

The only way out was the pickup truck. The crew had taken his car. So he drives it out. We all meet at the stash at the secondary location. And we're all like, I'm sitting there looking at everybody, like Scotty and Lear in jail. Uncle Ralph's, you know, plane's been confiscated. You know, it's like all your high school friends sitting in a hotel room,

realizing you just lost the big game. And worse, right? All your friends are going to jail. The phone rings. It's Uncle Ralph. He's got the load, and we got to go. And we sent the cars, loaded them up, sent them up to Ohio, got Uncle Ralph's Volvo out of impound the next day.

I loaded up the last 200 pounds that didn't fit in the cars, and I drove it up because I had to get the money anyhow, and somebody had to do it. So I called that. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com slash bundle.

Restrictions apply. I want him the book, the one that got away. Did you ever figure out why the cops were after them? Oh, yeah, because they followed the plane in from Jamaica. So did it actually help you guys, that it was a diversion they went after them or something? Yeah, I mean, it was the greatest thing in the world. All the cops chased the Volvo. And what the DEA did was they stick.

or the plane, so they'll come back in the morning. Uncle, what they didn't do is on the back of the plane, there's a little luggage door. Some planes have it. Some place don't. Since Uncle Ralph was in his own hangar, he called his mechanic and said, do me a favor. The one door wasn't stickered. They went over there,

opened the door, got in the plane, vacuumed the whole thing out, closed the plane, and walked away. So when the cops came and searched it, there was no drugs in it. They couldn't do anything. Remember, all the seats are out, which is a dead giveaway. But there's no law about flying a plane. with no seats.

Many people take seats out to put cargo in and stuff like that. But, you know, like, it's not like they don't know, but they can't prove it, right? So did you enjoy personally these, like smuggling, did smuggling trips? Did you like the adrenaline of it? Yeah. Yeah. I'm an adrenaline junkie. Yeah.

It's a lot different than the dealing and the calls and putting things in place. You weren't getting much action. Yeah, I'll tell you what. That's true. You ever see the movie Made in America with Tom Cruise? He smuggles a bunch of co-kews. he smuggles a bunch of coke in. He's actually, it's the Barry Seal story.

In the end of the movie, he's completely flipping out. The shit's hit the fan. He's at a bank of pay phones, and he's holding a bag of quarters. That's a Crown Royal bag full of quarters. And he's pumping $2.25 to call everybody to try to get, right? I can't tell you how many times I've had that experience. And how many bags of quarters?

I used to have video games in bars so I could get enough quarters to, You know, because you're constantly trying to either work on a smuggling trip or a drug run or helping somebody do something or something's going wrong. I can't watch any movie like that. Like if I watch, I can read books. I cannot watch Sopranos. I can't watch. When I left the movie Made in America, I was shaking like this. And the other day it was on cable and I'm watching.

My wife comes and goes, what are you doing? I go, no, no, honey. I'm at home. It's cool. Like I can shut it off. I'm chill. And when it got to the scene with the pay phones, I shut it off. I've been through, well, I guess if you have time, I can tell you some more stories.

Well, let's continue on so we can hear what happens next. How much were you making at the peak of this, of the smuggling and the dealing and doing those transactions? You know, if I said after I got busted the second time, if I knew I made this much money, I would have quit. It's hard to say because I'd lose money on one deal. You know, you make 80. I remember one time my girlfriend came home and she came in the house, this girl I was dating, nothing big. I was out drinking and she found $80,000 in a garbage bag in the closet, not hidden, just laying

there. So maybe I was making hundreds of thousands a year, you know. I don't know, you know. Did you have a way to launder at all? Or were you just spending in cash? I had fake business. I didn't know, bullshit stuff my accountant would do. We'd buy everything in cash.

You know everywhere you went you had a pocket full of cash. I go to a sub shop and I try to pull out a $20 bill and it just be like in two thousand dollars in my pocket I go here you go and you're a young white kid doing all this you're not getting any You know like targets on your back from other So remember everybody's doing I used to go race car at one point I went auto racing it was six thousand a weekend You know maybe more if you didn't wreck I was doing that And, but we got, I got home invaded. I had my good friends, Bobby and Keita, who Bobby was one of my partners. There was a group going around home invading people and robbing them, and they had robbed Bobby and Keita, and they had robbed some other people.

And it was another group going around. In my book, I talk about this people that lived all around me that actually was friends with that were going around robbing people and cutting their throats and killing them and, you know, and it's a big murder story. Actually, they just did a big podcast about it, and it was called the Apollo Jim murders. And these guys were, like, living right next door to me. In the book, I can go into detail. But the guys that actually robbed me actually committed one of the most famous murders in Miami. It's about the Henry Cowan, Stanley Cowan murder, and his wife, Joyce Cowan. And huge thing, books, the dateline, you know, all kinds of stuff that went into it.

but they, they, I was, I knew they were coming. I was looking out from, I was starting a new shell company, and I was walking out the door with my briefcase, and I'm looking out my pinhole in the door to make sure there's nobody out there. I go in to get, um, a roll of toilet paper. I go, I got to get a roll of toilet toilet paper for the, you know, for the office. And I walked back out just as the guy was walking up.

And he's like a kid dressed like a cop. He's got on the black, shiny shoes, you know. So, you know, and I go, and I had a gun on me because I knew they were coming, and I never carry a gun. If you go to my website, there's a picture of the gun. It was a Wother P.P.K., the same as James Bond. I had to buy it because James Bond. Remember, I wanted to be a spy, a secret agent, and a race car driver.

I mean, and a cowboy. So I was already a cowboy growing up. Then I was racing cars. My secret agent might be more into the DEA than the drug dealing. But I go outside and the guy's right there. He grabs his gun. I go to get mine, and he gets the drop on me, as we say in the cowboy days. And I don't care what anybody says.

I don't care how balls he are, how everybody's going to carry a gun and save the day and stop every shooting that's going to happen in America. When someone puts a gun in your face, when they do that, it looks like a 40, it looks like a cannon. You know, and so here's this guy's, the gun's right in my face. I go to get my gun. I'm outdraud, as they say in the old west. So they take me in, tie me up, lay me on the ground, put my head between one guy's ankles,

puts this gun on top of my head. I can feel the gun resting on top of my head. And they're robbing the place. And I have secret compartments in this house everywhere. I have one secret compartment. It was so secret I never bothered trying to get in it. Okay? I mean, I had a place for my Rolex and all my stuff

from my closet. I had a safe in the front room that was open. So if you broke in, I used to leave a couple hundred dollars. and a couple grams of blow on my counter when I went out at night. Figuring if someone broke in, they might grab the little stuff and leave.

And I had a safe in the front room that had some bars of silver and some other stuff in it. I also had another safe hidden underneath my bar. And above the bar, you know, where all the glasses and the lights and all the soffet up there, I had a little tool that would pop a door open

that you could put, you know, 50 kilos or whatever you want. Not, you know, I wouldn't put that many in there, but it could hold it as much as you wanted to put in. So they're robbing me. They find the holster to the gun. So then they find the gun on me. Then they take my Rolex and they go, you know, I'm trying to get the guy.

You know, they're stealing the stuff from the front safe. And I go, where's the money? You know, they got the gun in the back of my head. I go, there's 10 grand in that suitcase there hanging by the, you know, whatever. So they grabbed the 10 grand and leave. They actually had moved like a, an $8,000 piece of art to take a briefcase. But they didn't even know it was probably.

I didn't know what it was, you know. So they leave. My two kilos are still safe up there. That was about $60,000. And whatever other money I had hidden in the house. And so I call my friends, Big Jeff, Nathan, who's, I'll tell you about him later. And Lee and my other friends, Bobby and Keeter, who had been robbed by these people, they all come to my house. So what do we do?

get one of the kilos out, start getting high and drinking and saying, you know. So in the middle of, strangely, in the middle of the night, I guess big Jeff got up, he had an M-16 in his hand. He fired a round off, and I guess I got up to use them. I don't know if he shot the gun because I flushed the toilet, or I don't know what happened, but when we woke up, there was a bullet hole going through four walls in my house, and nobody got killed.

But what we ended up doing is Lee and Nathan went, Oh, so here's another story. We kind of knew these guys who they were. Like, you know, they were robbing enough people where we're starting to get a feel. What are their names? And I had their names written on a piece of paper. And I had the piece of paper stuck

to like a cork board in the kitchen where the phone was, you know, when people used to have phones. And I looked at it one day, go, you know what? Just in case I flipped the paper around so the names were facing the wall, you know, in case they came in and found, sure enough, they never saw that piece of paper,

but we kind of knew who they were. We started to feel them out because enough people were getting robbed. So we go to this, Nathan and Lee go by this house that we kind of felt like the kid was living with his parents, knew those guys.

And they fire like six rounds into the soffat of the house. There's no attics in houses in Florida, so just hitting the roof line. That flips out, the people inside. And there weren't a lot of cell phones back then, right, in the 80s. So what happens?

they call their friends that are robbing us at their houses and their businesses, and everybody's calling, everybody's saying so-and-so's house got shot up. We robbed the wrong guy. Then what we did was I had a friend of mine whose sister worked at the phone company, give her a couple grams of blow, and she gave us the spider web of all the people and where they were. So now we knew they had a business and who they were, who they really were, and they had a business in Coral Springs. It's like a little sleepy town, right?

So then they, at some point, they had actually shot at one of my other friends. They tried to, he was driving that street, was a girlfriend. At some point they shot at him, so they were trying to kill him. So we said, he comes to me, he goes, hey, we got to do something.

Because we don't, we're drug dealers. Rob us, we're okay. I'd rather go make more money. I don't want to call the police. I don't want to kill anybody. I don't want to start any trouble. I just lose 10 grand of Rolex and a pistol. That's a good day, right?

Not too bad, you know, and not like losing 100 grand. There's two kilos and this and that. So he says to me, I got a gun, I bought a gun, and I got these two guys that are going to, two friends of ours. One was a special forces,

and the other guy was a karate expert. So I go, all right, so we go buy a car. We have to find a getaway vehicle. And back then, the license plate would stay with the car. So we find a blind lady, which is perfect. She's selling the car because she's blind. So I go, this is great because this way she can't recognize us, you know. The neighbor comes out.

What's going on here? I go, oh, let's get out of here. We throw a fake tag on the car, give the car to the guys. They go out and they're going to kill these guys. And thank God of all the stupid ideas. And I didn't think they would. It was five grand up front, five grand when they were done. And I'm like, these guys aren't going to kill it.

I had no way did I buy into this. But I did buy the car and I did put up five grand, put up half the money. It was 10 grand up front, 10 grand after, I think. And that was it. And they corner the guys, but nothing happens. Luckily, thank God, right? Because I don't want to kill anybody, not for any reason. and luckily for us two things went good or bad the guys that were going to do the hit they got arrested for something else

and then the guys that we were going to the robbers got caught and they ended up calling us we had went to the police after they started trying to kill people the police call us down and I'm doing the lineup you know and so my one friend's in the lineup and oh so so the one friend's in the lineup and oh so all the guys are lined up. The one guy that robbed us was sleeved. So what does he do? This is criminal 101, right? Somebody convinces him in jail where jail's full of a lot of stupid people to put rubber

bands on his shirt so that he won't, his sleeves won't pull up and they won't see the tattoos because maybe when I was on the ground and I would have seen it, right? Well, I mean, so my first friend goes in, he spots him right away. As I'm walking out, there's a prosecutor of the cops. He whispers to me, it's the guys with the rubber band. and the defense attorney goes, he talked to him, you're not allowed to,

you can't do it by committee. Cops go, he didn't say anything. So I look over, and there he is, Jay Richatelli, with the rubber, of course,

he's the only guy with the rubber bands on his sleeves. You know, the other guys weren't, and that's so we ended up fingering the guys that robbed us. Why'd they call you, and did you report that you got robbed?

Yeah, well, we all, yeah, I didn't, but my other friend, yeah, we. But you guys are drug dealers. Yeah, Rob us fine. Kill us. It's time to go to the police.

Okay. So did the police know who you guys were or no? Yeah, of course. They just, you know, listen, they probably knew I was, you know, I was in a file somebody's name. But remember, the cops don't have to, all they have to do is wait for you to make a mistake. You know what I mean? They don't have to be top fight

police where it means, you know, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time or somebody rat you out. You know, they don't have to, you know, the movies where they're following the guy everywhere it goes, tapping the phones. Yeah, they do that. But most of the time, it's pure dumb luck, not great police work.

In this instance, they were focused on, and then those people had killed the man a couple weeks earlier in his sleep. So a big, a big, rich guy. So that was kind of your run in with the violent aspect of the, of us. Yeah, that's about as violent as it gets. So what, how long did you, you know, you're smuggling and your drug dealing run for before you got caught? About 20 years.

You ran it for 20 years. No time's getting caught within those 20 years. Yeah, I did. I got caught the one, so. Well, in between the 20 years. Yeah, I got caught. Yeah, I got caught. So in 1980, so I'll tell you about two cocaine smuggling, if you don't mind.

Get that out of the way. And then I'll tell you about the two final busts. Does that kind of work for your chronological? Yeah. All right. So one time a friend of my Nathan, Nathan Hanson, and my friend, Lee come to me and they go, hey, we're smuggling a small load of cocaine from the Bahamas. Sometimes you do like a little load to make up and not get some bucks up to do a bigger load.

This was easy, right, theoretically. So what you do is, again, when you're flying in from someplace like the Bahamas by this time, everybody's, the tower, everybody's looking for small planes from the Bahamas, right? Because they know it's easy drug move. So, but there's a trick. I lived right west of the airport, just on the other side of the high at 95, you know, right? And there was a golf course like a mile from my house.

So what you do is you fly in, you come in from the Bahamas, you got your pilot, and you got the kicker. And in this plane, we had two duffel bags full of weed with callium glow sticks put on it and taped to it, you know, so you can see them at night glowing, you know, the sticks that you shake and break. And they glow green or red, you know, effervescent. and you come in like you're going to land and you call in, and any pilot can do this.

You're going to land in Fort Lauder Airport. You got a little Cessna 172 or some small plane and you call in say, I'd like a go-around. What that means is you're not comfortable landing and you want to come by and try again. And the tower's always going to tell you yes because what do you want to tell you? No, you know.

All right, well, I think I'll be crashing on nine right, you know. You know, they're always going to give it to you. but you're already below the radar. You're getting ready to land, so you're below 200 feet. So what you do is you keep going, go over 95, over the little woods there, and next thing you know, there's a golf course. In the golf course that night is two friends of mine. I'm parked on one side of the golf course.

Nathan, who owned the load, was on the other side. The kicker kicks the two duffel bags out. Probably, I think there was 40 or 80 kilos of cocaine. I can't remember quite right. And the kickers, the catchers, now are. hugging a tree, right? Because why? Because there's a duffel bag doing 140 miles an hour from four, you know, coming in, weighing 50 pounds or 80, you know, whatever it weighs. And, you know, if it hits a tree, it'll just break the branches. I know guys that were catching, catching,

and they got hitting head with wood, you know, you don't wear, almost wear a helmet, but they're wearing black, you know, they have knives, guns, and everything in case. So I pull up in a pickup truck. The one guy comes running out of the woods, throws the duffel bag in the back, jumps in the front seat, hit it. We go driving down the street, get to a dark place where he can then jump in the front seat. We don't want to be driving around. Bad enough, a cop pulls up behind us

and there's a black duffel bag with glow green sticks on it and a guy dressed like Tom Cruise, you know, all dressed in black with, you know. So we get to my house. We grab the duffel bags inside, cut them open. I go in the kitchen and the living room, you know, right there.

Get some plastic bags, rip open the kilos, put about two or three grams in the bags, you know, a couple grams for each of us, tape it all up, rip the bag, put it in suitcases, and Nathan, who owns the whole load, goes, man, we got to go.

I go, where are we going? He goes, we got tickets to the Eddie Murphy concert. I go what? He goes, yeah, I got four tickets. You want to go? Yeah, I want to go. We put the Coke in this trunk of his Mercedes, you know, 560,

and jump in one of my cars, and the four of us go to the Eddie Murphy concert. And Eddie Murphy's on stage dancing I used to wear that red I think it was the delirious tour or something and he's telling jokes we're all laughing and Nathan's sitting next to me and he kind of leans over he goes

you think we should go and I go what I mean the show's really good Nate but I mean you did leave like a million dollars or whatever in the trunk of a car in front of my house you know so that was one story and we got away with it. The next story Nathan comes to me and goes hey

I want to load a plane with about 300 kilos was out of Columbia, you know anybody. And I knew a guy that had done time in Columbia. He was actually, back then, the Colombian kingpings like Pablo Escobar would go to jail, and they basically owned the jail. Like going to jail was nothing, right? You know? So America wanted to extradite the Colombian drug kingpins back to America,

like they eventually did with El Chapo and his partner the other day. So the Colombians don't want to let, you know, they want to fight that. So they go, well, you got to give a. So they end up extraditing my friend Ronnie Vest back to Columbia. He got caught down there bringing a load of weed out. So all of a sudden, like this guy's in America, you know, American jail comfortable. The next thing you know, they put him in South. And it's like, like, why me?

I said, Ronnie, boy, the most unluckiest guy, the one guy to one political pawn. But while he's there, he meets a lot of connections. So he's got a guy. So I bring Nathan down. Guy flies up from Columbia. Everything was going good. The guy had the Coke. Everything looked good.

and Nathan decides to light up a fat joint. When this guy's like the intercontinental and like one of the most expensive hotels in Miami. And this guy's not like a vivus sapata-looking guy with a gunbell. He's a sophisticated Latin businessman. You know? And they look at drugs like marijuana and cocaine

is for peasants. You know, I mean, that's, this is a guy that's, you know, going to put, you know, a million dollars with a drugs in a plane, you know. And as soon as he lit up the joint, I go, that, you know, that's going to fuck. this up. Sure enough, I get a call shortly after he doesn't want to work with us. But Nathan does load the plane. So he finds a road to nowhere, need one of those. And why? Because if

Johnny jumped off the bridge, wouldn't, I find myself agreeing to do part of the offload. Now, what do you, sweetened the deal with? I was only getting paid 20 grand for the night. Like, I make more than that. But I was racing cars and the cars were costing $6,000, $6,000. weekend. So there's 20 grand towards my race car habit. And I could also buy some kilos, you know, put up a few bucks and buy two or three kilos at Colombian price. And I had the right to sell as much of the 300 kilos as I could. So I could have turned one night's work into, you know, still making 20 grand. Back in those days, you know, still today, 20 grand for one night's work is kind of like what some people make in a half a year. So it's not that bad. But the other part's sweetened

for me to do it. So, man, we had acquired Claymore Mines, Laws, Rockets. Remember the guy that was going to do, the two guys that were going to do the hit for me to kill the guys that Robney? Well, one of them was the U.S. Army Special Forces, and we traded a bunch of blow to him in exchange for Claymore Mines, Laws, Rockets, automatic machine guns. And why they didn't kill the guy was somehow the one guy had gotten out, the police raided his house, and they found behind his refrigerator, Claymore and my, I mean,

the article in the newspaper was, man has enough house to blow up, you know, enough behind his refrigerator to blow up a block. I mean, it was a huge thing. They had, like, the attorney general, the head of the military, they had a big TV thing, you know, a board with, you know, strings going.

None of us got caught. But here we are, again, these middle class kids from sleepy little beach town what a cache of Claymore mines, machine guns, hand grenades, laws, rockets. You know, we could have taken down at 747 with a laws rocket. I mean, it's just crazy, right? So what do we find ourselves?

We're laying in the road. We're dressed in camouflage. We've been up for days on speed. And, um, and, you know, Big Jeff's on the front of the road. He's security. He's hanging with the end. M-16 on the hand grenades. I'm down the middle of the road.

I'm the one that's going to help build the runway. My other friend T-tops down at the other end of the road, he's going to build the other half of the runway. We have Lee's in the woods with the radio equipment. He's got, you know, ham radio wires. He's got to talk to Columbia, know when the plane leaves, and how many hours till we're going to, you know, we have to time it. So, and we're jacked, though, F up.

I mean, I've been up for two days, you know. And again, this isn't my thing, you know. I hope my wife isn't listening to this. She probably will be. Oh, gosh. So she didn't read the book. She's smart. She goes, she's very proud of it.

She's even giving me some advice on writing it. Anyway, so all of a sudden, we're just laying there, you know, and waiting, waiting, and all of a sudden you hear on the radio, click, click, and then everybody else goes, click, click, click, click, click, and then click, click, click, and then click, click, click, click. And then click, click, click, click. That's all the team telling, you know, radio silence, you know. And then after the fourth click, you hear someone yell out, hang fire, hang fire. And we, I jump up, I pull out my backpack. In the backpack, I have the calium sticks.

Smuggler's best friend is the callium stick. I know your four-year-old loves them at the birthday party, but at a roll of duct tape and you can smuggle anything. So we have them on fishing line. So I run, now you're talking about a runway, like 300. yards and you know it's a long i'm up on speed for days running my heart out we're breaking the sticks and then laying the strings out in the middle of the road every 30 feet there'd be like 10 feet of string on the sides i'm putting these um beacons that you do when you go overboard in a boat like they're flashing waterproof beacons and then we have these little high-tech things that go on nine-volt

batteries that are called fireflies that are like military issue the first like LED they're blinds you. So now I'm putting out the fireflies. Me and the other guy start on one end. We both run to the middle, set up, and then we both run back. So, you know, setting up the lights. I remember Nathan told me, he turned to the co-pilot and said, no matter is dead road, dead black, all of a sudden, boom. He looks over and goes, look, it's Miami International and I know customs. bring it down and I'm going I mean it's you know

you can't see I'm blinded from looking at all this you know in the middle of the night looking at the fireflies my I've been up for days my eyes are so dilated you know but I jump in the car I race back to the plane

luckily I didn't run into the plane spin the car around put the coke in the car I think most of the coke in my I was driving the coke out maybe we had to think a second car might have had a little bit in it and the car

had special switch on it to shut the tail lights off. It's like an old rum rudder trick. If the cops were chasing you, obviously if you hit the brake lights, they can find you. So you can shut off the lights. Then we had little running lights on the very bottom put in, and then we could shut off all the electricity to the back of the car so that if the cops did chase us, we could go dark and go down a road. Made it back to Fort Lauderdale and, you know, made a million, you know, made all the money.

Another trip successful. Right. So six weeks later, eight weeks later, we go to do it again. And same shit, back in the woods, jacked up, big Jeff with the machine gun, the hand grenades, me with the, you know, the car and everything. And we got a call over the radio from Columbia, the plane, Nathan didn't make it. He went into the tree line taken off, and the plane exploded. And, you know, remember you've got. 300 kilos of Coke, which is 700 pounds, two pilots, another 400 pounds.

We had these 50-gallon drums, I think there were 30-gallon, lined up six of them in the plane. And what would happen is when the plane starts to run out of, you know, like starts to falter, the engines run out of gas. The co-pilot takes these rubber hoses with brass tubes on sticks them in the next tank, and then sticks them in the next tank. So you have, if each tank had another, that's another 180 gallons or 200 gallons of fuel plus the wing tanks, and you have tip tanks you can add to a plane. And Lee went down and they said all they found was a piece of his backbone. The whole plane just exploded. And so I lost a good friend that night. And that's not the, I mean, in high school, I had friends that crashed in planes and DC3s.

What happens to the product in that scenario? Do you pay for it up front? No, I mean, well, if you put up the money, you lost your product. So you had pre put up the money for that? I, or at that point did you get credit? Yeah, because I put some of the money in. I had actually had about 20 or 30 grand in that I lost. So they don't send the money to you guys on the plane until they get paid first?

No, no, we're bringing the load in. So we, you know, everybody. But whoever you got it from the load, you're not growing at yourself. No, no, the Colombians, we had to pay them for the load. Or sometimes what you'll do is, and that's why he might have done that. I know I put up money for part of the load, but just for two or three kilos, because he wasn't going to let me buy that much more, right? Sometimes what I like to do is make it sort of the Colombians own part of the load.

Like, I'll tell you what, we'll buy our load, but you have, you know, the reason you want to do that, like I said in Jamaica, then the runway's guaranteed to be in better shape, the fuel's guaranteed to be better. The plane is going to make sure, everybody's going to make sure it gets home. At least it gets off the ground. And I don't know what Nathan's deal was on the second load, but he had crashed a plane. plane once before, got stuck in Columbia, couldn't come back into America. So we had a charter, my friend Aldo, the one that got killed in New York for the two keys,

that was a charter boat guy. We chartered his boat and a bunch of us went over, we rode over to the Bahamas. Nathan got smuggled into the Bahamas by the Colombians, you know, and then, because you can pay people off to come in without passport and this and that. And then we brought them back in the fishing boat, you know, we snuggled, and we dropped them off put a dock and then we went in clear customs. So, like one time before he had crashed, but he didn't die.

But, and we got chased down in the middle of the ocean by the Navy. You know, look out there and there comes, you know, the Navy hydrofoils. I'm like, oh, shit, the captain calls me up. Hey, Ken, your eyes are better than mine. I'm in the tuna tower on this sport fish. He goes, what does that look like to you? Is that a cigarette?

And I'm looking with the binoculars. I go, dude, that ain't no cigarette because it was, you know, in really rough ocean. And we were in, I think it's the Nagee hydrofoil. And it was, but they didn't, you know, they kind of just let us go. So you're doing this 20 years. Yeah. How do you get caught?

So I go, I get married. I go on my honeymoon. I come home. I have a one and a half year old daughter. And I got to go back to work. I paid $40,000 for a wedding, $10,000 for a honeymoon. I'm just throwing numbers out there. I sold my car.

We go to Aspen, we go on that beautiful honeymoon. And I look at my then wife and I go, hey, I got to go back to work. And she looks at me. Remember, no woman wants to get married. They want to have a Barbie white picket fence and a little pink corvette. Not a, you know, and she married, you know, she was living with a drug runner. You know, she went in the limos to the concert. She saw, she got all the clean blows she ever wanted.

She went in planes and traveled and, you know, had everything jet skiing, you know, I had a fleet of jet skis or boat. But, you know, when you party, you party with everybody. When you walk, you walk alone. And usually somebody's shoe hits you in the back of the head. So asking women to stay with drug dealers after they get busted is not easy. So she says to me, don't go. You're married now.

You have a one and a half year old daughter. Don't go. I'll get a job. You'll get a job. I'll eat white bread and baloney. sandwiches, don't go. And I'm like, I've got to get out of here. I've got to go make some money.

I don't even have a car. I sold my car. It's not getting that money. So I throw about $100,000 into the, you know, I drive out to Texas. And now we're trying to buy the same thing you're used to seeing, right? That green high-end weed. And it had slowed down in Ohio. People didn't want to buy a thousand pounds of Colombian weed.

They wanted to buy, you know, the good stuff. And Tex-Mex had gotten better. So I used to go to Texas and try to, I had a few people. people out there, you know, make a few calls, just head out there with the money and see, you know, had a few friends, see who can pull up a small load of like 100 pounds. I had a truck that had secret compartments, that we could hide the weed, to move it from Texas to Ohio, and I had a driver, Paco, this Peruvian guy, which didn't work out good for him, but Paco, the driver.

We head up to Ohio, not knowing that my partner up there, since high school, had gotten busted. And what had happened is my friend Kelly, the guy that we had done the Uncle Ralph trip with, had also done a cocaine trip with Uncle Ralph. And just as naive as the first one was, because they didn't know what they were doing, they got busted with the second one. And somehow Kelly left the country and the rest of the family kind of got off on it. And it kind of landed on Kelly. He went on the run.

And he'd been on a run for years. unbeknownst to me or somewhat, I heard rumors of it, Kelly was back in country and he had moved a thousand pounds up to Terry. And they didn't tell me because

Terry's my partner. You're backstabbing me, right? Like in the streets, you got around me. Like, you know, putting a bullet in you would have been a good thing to do. You're bringing drugs into my backyard.

That's my gig. Me and Terry had built it for 12 years. Kelly got greedy, called Terry. Terry got greedy. He said, bring it up. Well, now you have a thousand pounds of wheat in a market that's looking for like 100 pounds of good wheat, not a thousand pounds of commercial. One of Terry's guys gets busted. Terry turns in me and Kelly on the same day. They time it so that I'm going to land from Texas and they don't have any idea. I'm trying to find a load and Kelly's going to land the same time. Because if one of us gets

busted and the other one doesn't, vice versa, the news is going to get out. And only one of us is going to show up, right? They time it exactly. I get there and I remember something telling me, and anytime you talk to a drug dealer, I promise you that they'll say the same thing. Something wasn't right. Something in my stomach told me. Something in my gut said it wasn't. I remember driving into this little town in Ohio, Lorraine on the, you know, it's like Vermillion Lorraine right on Lake Erie, and I see a car go by with like four big guys in it. It looked like a front line of a football team and like a little car. And it just caught me, you know.

And Paco, my driver's in front and I go Paco, pull over here, went behind a Taco Bell and just parked the two vehicles. I'm watching the ocean thinking, we never go to a hotel. We always go to Terry's house. And Terry had had, but it's a contractor now, he's building houses, making money. He had a house, and then on the other side of the property, he had his dad's house. They had a barn in the middle. Well, his father turned out owned all the land, and the barn was between the two houses.

That's where the weed was that Kelly had brought in. So when Terry got turned in, the cops came to him and go, hey, we know this is your father's property. So your mother and father are going to jail. You and your wife were going to jail, and your four kids are going to be orphans. So what does Terry do? He turns me in and he turns Kelly in. So I had no idea. I'm sitting in a hotel room with him.

I got the load outside. He comes in my room, lights up a roach. And he's wearing a yellow raincoat. He's like, why does he trust? That's the wires, the hide the mic and the wires. Lights the roach, doors come smashing in. I'm on the ground. We're all handcuffed.

Me, Terry, and Paco. And I immediately looked up and go, well, he ain't in the same position as me. I mean, I knew he turned me in instantly. Instantly. He just knew it. And later that, you know, the cops come into the room. You better talk. You better talk. And we're trained as kids.

Remember, I've been doing this since I'm 18 or younger. And how old are you now when you got busted? 32. No, wait. 30. Right, it was 1992. So I'm born in 57, so what's that, 35. Okay, so you're 35 and you're saying you're trained as kids.

Oh, yeah. Don't say a word. Make it, don't, don't, because once you talk, there's, you got, your deal's done. There's no deal you're ever going to make because you're already confessed, right? My lawyer, who I used many times, had a plaque behind his head. And in the plaque. This Memorial Day, shop one of Avocados biggest mattress sales of the year and fall in love with sleep again. At avocado, better sleep starts with better materials.

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get up to 20% off at avocado mattress.com or select retailers nationwide. Visit avocadostotamattress.com. That's avocado mattress.com. It was a big mouth bass, you know, mounted to the plaque and it sat underneath it, but it only kept his mouth shut. And who is this? The feds or local police? Local police. The Lorraine County, Ohio is the Lorraine County Drug Task Force. And so they come in, I'm handcuffed.

This prosecutor, Michael Rosenbaum, total nut crusher. Even the cops were afraid of him. Like he's walking up the steps and the cops are like getting nervous, shutting off the TV. You know who this is? I don't know. How would I know? And he comes in, he's in my face.

You better talk, Mr. You better talk. You're going to do a lot of time. and I go, you got the wrong guy. Knowing full well, as I say in the book, he's got the right guy. I know that and he knows that, but I'm not going to talk. So I go to jail. I'm waiting to get my indictment,

and my wife sending me pictures, the baby, you know. And I go into detail in the book. One of the things that I think helped me with the cops was Kelly was just an asshole. He always was arrogant. And when we had to go, oh, like when I'm getting fingerprinted, There's Kelly getting fingerprint. I go, they got Kelly, you know,

because I knew he was on the run. So we're sitting there, and my lawyer had come up from Miami, and we all used the same guy, Michael Gilletti, one of the greatest lawyers that ever. I used him in Ohio. I used him in the, I got busted in 88, and he got me out of it.

That's the time we smuggled, I didn't go into that boat, we smuggled the loaded weed in from Canada. I'm using a sea plane. I got busted driving down the street with it, and Gillettea got me out of that case for illegal search and seizure

because the cop thought it was fireworks put a gun to me and I got lucky you know it was my lawyer said you had 1,400 pounds of weed it was illegal search and seizure fruit from the forbidden tree

they said if you had one gram of coke or one ounce of coke you'd have went to jail you got lucky yeah but I did two weeks in one of the worst hellhold prisons in America was built they just got flushing toilets

The guy's like, you wait until you, you have to shit and piss in a bucket. And then I was like, I get there and they have the new stainless steel model. You know, the one with the sink and a little toilet. I'm like, this is nice, you know. Every house should have a stainless steel toilet sink, you know, at least in the guest bathroom. You know, right? So the lawyer comes back now. Now I'm in Ohio.

Now that was in 88. So now it's in 92. And my lawyer. A lawyer flies up and he's interviewing me and they want to, they take me to interview my stuff. And Gilletti says to me, Kelly was up before me because he was representing both of us at, you know, that minute of the beginning of the trial case. And he goes, man, Kelly started yelling at him that their electric razor was missing. And he started accusing them as stealing it. I go, what?

He goes, yeah, man. He goes, by the time that thing, that'll be like a steam engine by the time he gets out of this case. Like, what are you yelling at the guards about stealing your razor for? Your electric razor, right? I'm there, and I know Gilletti's brother lived right around the corner in Oberlin, and he had two little nephews. He told me, I'm going to go visit my brother. So they're going through my stuff, and I had a frisbee and a football.

The reason we did that is because when you're waiting for drug deals that never happened, I got a crew of guys waiting to load, you know, they parked somewhere. We always had a frisbee and a football, because then if we're out, People are going, what's with the four guys in a hotel room for three days? You go out and throw the frisbee and at least get some exercise and look normal, right? Yeah. Oh, they're throwing, you know. So I gave the football.

I go, well, did you bring anything for your nephews when you flew up? He goes, no, man, I just jumped on the plane to come get you and see you. I go, here, you can take the football into Frisbee. I don't think I'll be using them for a long time. Flash forward like three months. I'm still in jail. They call me out of my cell, the process service there. You know, he's dressed in, like, I knew he wasn't a cop.

He's dressed like some, you know, in a beige suit, you know, like, you know, in jail it's either blue or green. You know, it's not beige. He goes, you can bear? I go, yeah. He goes, here, and he hands me my indictment. I've been waiting three months for it. I can't bond out until you get indicted.

And the guard, Bill, who's sitting next to me, who actually was friendly with Bill, goes, you know, good guy. And I start looking at the papers, and the bill goes, you're going to be all right, kid? And I go, yeah, why? He goes, you're looking at 55 years. He goes, we're putting you on suicide watch tonight. And I just go, no need, no need.

I go back to myself to read it. Well, it's not 55 years, it's Rico. You know, Rico's 25 years. And, you know, and at some point in that period, before or after that day, the guy next to me in the cell had done 15 years in Angola prison, right? One of the worst prisons in America, you know, the one in Louisiana in the swamps,

in the middle of 1,800 acres of alligator and snake infested, you know, amnesty International called him one of the worst hellos on earth, you know. even for, you know, like Guatemala standards, Angola's not as a good place, you know. And he says, listen to me. He goes, I know you're keeping your mouth shut and you're not going to rat.

But the more raise and values you are clean to die a lifetime ago. He goes, you see this, you're looking at who's a rat in here. It's not who hasn't ratted. It's who hasn't ratted yet. you're looking now at 25 years. You know, the world has changed. You know, he goes, I got busted.

I did 15 years in Angola prison. I mean, his skin is loose and white. He's got the prison tattoos, you know. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Just, you know, and he says, you know how many times, you have a one and a half year old daughter? I said, yeah. He goes, you know how many times I saw my daughter in 15 years?

I go, no, he goes, once. he goes, think of this. He goes, if you can change your life, if you can, if you rat, if you make a deal and you get to see your daughter again, he goes, but you got to change your life. You got to do it for your daughter and you got to change your life. If you can do that, then you make your best deal. But if you ever go back to selling drugs, if you ever go back, then you're nothing more than a snitch and you deserve what you're going to get.

So with that in mind, I eventually made bond. I go home and I'm like, fuck, what am I going to do? I couldn't bust anybody in Ohio. All 17 people in Ohio turned me and I was the kingpin, you know, goes up the ladder. And right before, when I was in jail, in Ohio, when I was thinking, man, I call my best friend, my kind of right-hand man in Florida, I go, hey, tell everybody I'm in big trouble and that I might have to do something with the cops. I took a poison pill. I did that so that none of my friends, not that they were going to work with me anyway,

but at least that the cops said, you need to go try him, I knew that he wouldn't talk to me. Believe me, nobody was going to talk to me anyway, but I just put it out there, don't talk to me. So I'm down in Florida now,

back home. I have no car. I lost, you know, 40 or 50,000 in the wedding, 10 or 15,000 in the honeymoon, $100,000 in the weed. I just paid, $9,000 for the bond, and I've hired $80,000 for the lawyers at least started paying them.

I'm effing broke, right? And I buy a $400 yellow car, a canary yellow car with no air conditioning. It was a station wagon, like a Plymouth something. And I'm doing oil changes and repair work at a friend's shop and painting another friend of mine's house. And I get a phone call from a guy, Dave Jackson, who was a yacht broker like Sandy Perkoff. and me and Dave had been like party guys family stuff never did you know he wasn't a drug dealer and actually months earlier he had asked me

brings me to his 5,000 square foot mansion asked me to brings me up into the little guest bathroom upstairs breaks out some coke starts chopping it up and goes hey can you get me a kilo of coke and I'm thinking oh Dave look how cute you're trying to set me up for a kilo I mean you're in why am I he's got

mansion wiring this little bathroom probably the best sound quality for the recorder right yeah and you're a yacht broker he's Jimmy Buffett was one of his clients he came to me one time to buy coke so he could go do it with Jimmy Buffett you know I mean this is the guy that swings with the biggest you know he's to sell Lear Jets and yachts five offices in five countries you know I mean so so I didn't do the coke because I'm not a daytime Coke user and I walked out think I swear I walked out in the part walking through his big driveway with the gates that open up and go,

how cute. Dave tried to set me up. Smartest thing I ever did. Because after I got busted, I get a phone call at my house. And remember, none of my friends are calling to see how I'm doing. You know, I'm persona non grata, and rightfully so. You know, and he says, hey, how would you like to work for the DEA?

And I mean, literally, I'm freaked out to the point where I see. my wife in the kitchen, I'm like turning the phone. Like, you know, I don't want her to hear this. It's my little daughter, you know, playing in the, you know, the high chair. He's like, what are you talking about? He goes, listen to me. He goes, I'm working with the DEA.

I go, what are you calling me for? He goes, he goes, you come see me. He goes, you know, I'll tell you. So we meet at this place called the Floridian on Las Solis Boulevard, which is kind of like the high-end shopping area, Fort Lauderdale, and that restaurant's been there. We get a booth in the back. We're probably one of a million clandestine conversations

that's taken place over the last 75 years after Floridian. And he says, tells me that if I come work with the DEA, he'll get credit for it. And I'm like, what? He kind of explains it it's kind of like a multi-level marketing thing like Amway. I'm like, wait a second. You work for the feds and it's kind of like, you know, you get credit, you know, it's like, he says, yeah.

He goes, I got this DEH in Jacksonville name. I call him in the book, Jim Cain. And he goes, go up and talk to him. So he ends up talking to the arresting officers, Jim Cain, I talked to him. And I end up getting in the yellow station, like with no air conditioning, wearing a suit. Remember, in 1988 when I got busted, when I had to go to court, remember I'm 30-something years old in 1988. I didn't know how to make a tie. It's not like, you know, it's part of the prerequisite of drug dealing, like, you have to make a tie.

And my brother had to, like, make the tie and, like, say, okay, when you put it on, you, like, make the noose and you slide it up. I had a clip-on tie when I was a little kid. I don't know where they were, but so now, you know, it's four years later. And by the way, I beat the case in 88. They appealed it. They kept my $80,000. I paid $80,000 cash bond. 80 is always the number for some reason.

of all my moves. And I took me years on appeal. I had just gotten out of appeal on that case about a year and a half earlier when then I got it busted again. So I had actually been busted in 88, took two years going to court to 1990 before I actually got the court

because you stole the case as long as possible. I was actually running cocaine selling. I was, my other Bob Silverblood had smuggled a load of cocaine. So I would literally go to court in Boston wearing a suit, go to, the suit, go to D.C. where there was these two warehouses, you know, storage warehouse.

One had the Coke and one was the money drop. I'd have people meet me in D.C. I'd give out the kilos of Coke to my drivers or buyers. Take the money, put it in the money drop on the second. You know, I had two keys to two different. And then either go home or go back to Boston. I mean, I'd done the trip without the court case, but more than once I did the trip while doing a court, because you have to keep, like, you might stall a court case. case for years, which you do, I did it twice, but you still have to go to court and make an appearance and say, Your Honor, you know, blah, blah. So, here's Dave Jackson telling me now.

So, again, I put on the suit, get in the yellow, Canary Yellow, Plymouth Station wagon, drive the five hours to Jacksonville wearing an effing suit with no air conditioning to go meet my new DEA handler. So you take the deal with the DEA? Well, yeah, I hadn't, all I knew was to drive the Jackson vans. and yeah, nothing's been cut in stone, but I'm going up to be, do the deal. Why did this turn federal?

Is it just because they were working with the state? Here's why, because the cops in Ohio knew that I could never bust anybody again. And Jim Kane, the DEA handler was one of the most prolific DE agents in U.S. history, had a very entrepreneurial spirit. And when Dave Jackson, Dave Jackson already told them about me, right? Dave had already tried to set me up. Of course, Dave builds me up.

Oh, this guy's been in the business forever. Dave's a salesman. He's smuggled so much drugs. He knows everybody. And the DEA, they need bodies. The more people they can get into that web, the more cases they're going to make. So you meet with this DEA agent for the first time. Right.

I drive up and I'm wearing a suit. And, of course, what does the guy do? Is that better? He comes out and goes, he's this big, burly guy, you know, Agent Jim Kaine. And he's like, boy, look at you. The drug dealer wearing a suit. Might as well be pigs wearing a spats or something. I'm like, but in with him is the arresting officer in Lorraine County, the head of the drug task force, Dennis Kavanaugh, and his right-hand guy, Jim Smith, or whatever his name was.

And we go out and he's got like a, Captain Bobby, he comes up to me, he goes, my name's Jim Kaine. But from now on, you'll know me as, and to all you meet. be Captain Bobby Burke. And your name now is Kilo Bravo, which is Ken Bear, Kilo Bravo. And he shakes my hands and I'm like, looking at this guy. So we go into a boat he has.

He has this confiscated sport fish. And I've been on a shit ton of boats. I mean, I've been in a middle of a sail, you know, own boats. So next thing I know, we're taking the captain from Ohio and his right-hand man out for a ride on one of the boats. Kind of like a day in Florida,

You know, and I've got my suit off. I've got my shoes off. I've got the shirt opened up. I looked like a pirate with a Sax Fifth Avenue suit on, right? And we go out and I'm pulling up the bumpers and I'm untying the lines and he's putting the boat on top and we're cruising. Get back. We all meet in the salon of the boat. And they basically tell me that they have made this deal that everything I do for the feds that the city of Lorraine County is going to get credit for,

both in arrests and in the reason that the drug wars, remember I keep talking about the drug wars. What the cops want is assets. Drug dealers want Porsches, houses, you know, fancy boats and gold. And you know what the cops want? All the gold, all the boats, all the houses. They want the money because that's what keeps the drug wars going.

And let's face it, in 1973, when Nixon started the war on drugs, how did they not know it wasn't going to end up like prohibition? There wasn't going to be Al Capone's and blood in the street. In the end, in Miami, we had the cocaine cowboy wars and people being machine gun and people, you know, and people be having their heads cut off and, you know, all that happened because when the government tells the people that they can't have what the people want, you build a market, a black market. Listen, if it wasn't for prohibition, the mob never would have built Vegas. they never would have had the power, the juice, and the ability to, you know, the illegal crimes generate cash. And again, nobody's happier than the politicians, the cops, and the lawyers. So we sit down and we make a deal that everything I do for the DEA, whatever assets come in,

whether it be a house, a car, a boat, or whatever, in the bust, they're going to get part of it. So they're going to get, and think about Ohio. Ohio's thinking, they're all tight for cash. She was a hard, you know, 1992. Economies a little shaky. And I'm never coming back to Ohio to commit a crime, right? And you let me out of Ohio. Believe me, you know, I'm not coming back.

So they look at it like the cost effectively, you know, let's not put the guy in jail for a long time up here because he's not going to commit another crime. And you're not protecting the good people Ohio. I'm not coming back. All my connections are in jail. So we agree to do that. they do. So I go home and now I got to figure out who to bust. I don't have anybody to bust.

And he has me go out and buy a little tape recorder, it's a little Sony tape recorder, a little mic, and shows me how to set up a phone call. And the way you do it is, this is what has to be done for everybody that you tape. And the tape recorder had a little bug that would go in your ear, like a little earphone. So when I put the phone next to it, it can record, the sound going in and out by your ear. So you're hearing the voice. And then it had a microphone that would record the talking. So I go to a, let's say I was going to set up Bill, Bill Bixby, my favorite fake name.

And I got a pocket full of quarters and I go to a pay phone. There used to be pay phones. Obviously, you know, we use pay phones because nobody can trace the calls. And I record into the tape recorder. Today is December 25th, 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm at pay phone number 777-5544. You know, test, test, one, two, three, one, two, three. I'll be setting up, that would be the, you know, say,

Bill Bixby, be calling, we'll be talking about 300 kilos of cocaine. The number I'm dialing is 555, 555, 555, 55-5, click. And I dial the number, start call. That has to be done at every taped conversation. You have to have a beginning. And then let's say I talk to them,

for two minutes and 45 seconds about doing a cocaine run. Hang up the phone. Phone call ended, 245, you know, December 14th, you know, the conversation was, bah, ba, ba, ba, ba. Call ending now, dot to dot. You know, I have to start and end the call. The reason being is that way no slick lawyer can say, oh, it's edited.

No, in the conversation, he said it was two hours and 50, you know, two minutes and 53 seconds. It's two minutes and 50. It starts on, you know, it all has to be documented. Now, obviously, if you're wearing a wire, kind of the same thing, right? Like, I'm going to go see somebody. I'll be in my car going, okay, I'm wearing a wire, I'm parked at so-and-so. Today is so-and-so.

I'm going to see so-and-so. The time is so-and-so. And I walk in, try to set up somebody, you know, for a drug deal and walk out and, you know, get to the car. Okay, conversation ended. Da-da-da-da-da. Shut off the tape recorder. always got to be like that. So that's what he taught me.

I went out and bought my little tape recorder. You know, his little microcassettes. This is a, it was called the Sony M-900. I mean, to this day, go on eBay, they never made them, they stopped making them. They're like the size of, like, the tape, and a used one is $650. I mean, they're collectible.

Unfortunately, my ex-wife had stole mine when she left, but, um, anyway, so I go, um, I start working for this guy, And I start trying to put cases together. But the interesting thing was, they needed me as much as I needed them. The DEA needs people that know the story that have lived the life, right?

The DEA agent never, he wasn't around since 19, you know, running dope. He didn't know that the first kilos might have come and wrapped in duct tape. The second kilos came wrapped in plastery that can make a cast out of, second generation. Third kilos came in. plastic fiberglass you know how they make fiberglass casts you know they use the material anyway if

you can have plaster cast if you go to you ever break i've broken enough legs to go do you can you do you want the plaster one or the expensive fiberglass one well that stuff they when they throw it out of planes and when they toss it they don't want it to you know obviously the other thing is the duct tape ones you could take a little razor blade cut open and you can't cut it you know the fiberglass or the plaster one so they were more you know what we call a rat proof as people you know you know get in it and steal some. So I knew that stuff. I knew the ones that were stamped with the condor and men that came from Carlos Leder. Carlos Lita used to stay at a friend in mine's house that used to give Coke to. I don't know if you know who that is, but he was one of the

originals with Pablo Escobar and the Ocho brothers to start the Colombian smuggling thing. Carlos Lader was a famous, one of the first guys to transport it out of Columbia through the island, through the Bahamas into America. And so if whatever was stamped with a condor, that was his his logo. I know all that. I know when the par, when the good red and gold buds from Columbia, there was a strain where they'd come in in Marlboro boxes. So the boxes were actually the boxes that they would ship Marlboro cigarettes in. And, and, you know, that, so I know that stuff. So it was me, Dave Jackson, who didn't know much much about drug dealing, but knew a lot of drug dealers he sold boats to, and he was as slick as black ice when it came to a salesman.

and this other guy that was working for Jim at the time named, I call him Sabo in the book, but he was a white Jamaican, and he was one of the biggest smugglers in the world. I have probably friends with three of the biggest smugglers that ever, you know, at this that are still alive, but he, Sabo, he, like when Donnie Steinberg used to bring 200,000 pounds in, he'd bring it up outside offshore, and then the boats would hit it, right? when Randy Lanier, I don't know if you've ever heard of his story,

you know, Randy, he's a good friend of mine. He went to jail for 27 years, a race car driver. In his book, he talks about bringing in 167,000 pounds into San Francisco. Huge trip. Sable brought in 335,000 pounds right up the Mississippi. They had 20 trucks to unload it. They used the Teamsters with gas-powered conveyor belts, and the last 35,000 pounds,

they couldn't fit it into the 20 trucks, so they left it in the barge and sank the barge in the middle of the Mississippi somewhere. So he was a big smuggler, and he was moving kilos to Europe. Jamaican guy, great guy, my brother, my brother. So I meet Sabo because he's working for the DEA too.

So the three of us become Jim Cain's dream team. We're just really good at it. Like one time David Jackson talked this guy into coming to work for our group, and we end up convincing the guy, I'm the lieutenant, and we're going to run his, he's coming up to Jacksonville with his boat, and he's going to work, he's going to be our new, he was transporting, he had transported $15 million with his sea ray for some Mexican drug smug, cocaine smugglers.

So he was good at moving money. He put it in his boat and smuggle it off. sure. So, you know, we busted him for conspiracy. I busted another guy. Here's an interesting story. I busted a guy from a friend of a. People would come up to me and go listen. Even in jail in Ohio, I don't know the guy from Madden. He goes, hey, buddy, I know you're looking at 25. Here's a phone number of a guy in Detroit. He owes me money. I want to get even with him. If you get out of here, you make a deal. I gave that number to the DEA. They busted the guy. I got credit for you. for it. Some crazy shit.

How many people do you think that you've taken down working for the deal? Well, when they put my paperwork up to the judge, I had 14 cases. That you took down. Yeah, well, I was part of either. I mean, what he used to do was put me into cases because he wanted me there. I'm smart. One time he calls me up and he goes, I'm in Fort, I'm at home and he goes, hey, I'm in Fort Lauderdale. I need you to come down here right now.

So I go down there because he's kind of a big, well, you know, talk like that. And he's staying at the pierce, at, um, hotel on 17th Street Causeway. I go up there and he's got his legs crossed and he's got a pen and paper on it, like a therapist. He goes, hey man, my superiors want you to proffer yourself. You know what a pro, you've ever been, you know, for, there's your guests, you know, if your listeners don't understand. Proffer means that I'm going to tell them everything I've ever done and everything I know about the drug business.

If, if everything I tell them is all correct and I leave nothing. off, then I'm absolved from all the crimes I've ever done. But if they find one thing down the road that I get connected to and I didn't tell them, then I can go to jail for everything I've ever told them. Right. And one thing about type A plus personality people, they hate paperwork. So here he is trying to start to write. And I'm looking. He's got this felt pan and this legal pat. I go, what are you doing? I go, I can't do that. I go, my wife, I'll be going to jail shortly. I have a one and a half year old daughter. My wife, everybody in this town I went to high school with,

we all know each other. My wife will be alone, she'll be ostracized. My daughter, I can't do that. These are my friends from high school. And he's writing and I go, and nobody can read your handwriting. You know, look? He goes, you want a steak?

I go, yeah. He goes, come on, let's go to Chucks, the restaurant across the street. I kid you not. And I'm sitting there and he made me sit in a specific chair at a specific table because we're sitting here with his back to the door. He's an RMDE agent. They don't usually sit with their back to the door. When I'm getting a free steak, they have a salad bar, they have a mushroom appetizer.

Who doesn't love chucks? And he says to me, look over my shoulder. See the guy at the bar in the leather jacket? And I'm looking like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want you to go up to him. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to walk out. When I'm out the door, I'm just getting out the door, walk up to him and talk drug deal. And I'm looking at him going. What? Like, you know, like this complete stranger. Next day I know, he's out the door and I'm sitting here. So I go up to the bar and I go, hey, oh, he goes, tell him Captain Bobby sent you.

So I go, hey, Captain Bobby sent me. And, you know, just figured we get to the next door. know each other and I'm scanning the bar looking for anybody that might be with him. Like, what's going on? And we start talking drug deal. And, you know, I mean, you know, he has the same history as me talking about back in the old days, you know, rap that I can do and this guy can do. And I'm thinking to myself, the guy's wearing a leather jacket. It's probably got a wire underneath, right? It's Florida. And he looked like something out of like a Sam Scorsese movie, hair jet black, like red shirt, black leather jacket. I'm like, God, he looks like he's from like Boston or New York, you know, he didn't look like Florida, but, but in the end of the day,

nothing went with the conversation, probably because he was with customs, you know, one time a guy calls me up, and I knew this guy from Europe, total wackadule, calls me up, he's in Fort Lauderdale, almost got me, the guy almost got me killed in Amsterdam. All of a sudden, he's visiting me in Fort Lauderdale. So I go, um, Mario, I go, what are you doing? He goes, just whacked out. Me, Frankie Montlione was out of jail for a while, and Saba, we're all hanging out. out like partying with the guy in Lauderdale. And I remember I'm ready to go to jail. Frankie just got out of jail and Sebo's working for the, you know, freelancing for the DEA.

So this guy doesn't know that. He's from Amsterdam. And finally after a couple days, he comes to from all he's drugging and drinking, whatever. We thought he was on acid the whole time. I don't know. He was whacked. He tells him he's got 200 kilos of hash coming into America and it's parked in Fort Lauderdale at the pier 66. and he had actually been introduced to me by Sandy, my bad dad,

who was now living on Costa Rica on the run. And I'm like, shouldn't have told me that, buddy. Like, what am I going to do? I don't know this guy. And, you know, I got to pave my road, man. I'm looking at 25 years. And it was a husband and wife. They come in in their sailboat.

They had sailed from Amsterdam to Fort Lauderdale. I mean, that's like a huge endeavor. It's like 4,000 miles an open ocean or maybe they went by Greenland. I don't know how they did it. And they landed in Fort Lauderdale. Now, the cops, Captain Bobby, right, the de agent, he wants him in Jacksonville. Why? Because that's where all the asset seizure is going to be.

He wants the boat. He wants to credit. But I'm like, dude, these people just sailed like 4,000 miles for six weeks in the ocean. I'm not getting them to go to Jacksonville now. He goes, all right, we have to cut in the Fort Lauderdale. As a matter of fact, when I went to work for the Jacksonville, D.E., it's called the Northern District. I had to report into Fort Lauderdale to the Southern District to announce myself, you know, to describe. And they're all, like, why aren't you working for us?

Like, why would you, why are you asking me? This is, I'm not, you know, I'm a, I don't have control about where I work. The guy in Jacksonville, you know, pick my, so anyway, they all fight about the assets. So I'm sitting there on the boat with this guy, getting ready to set them up, and I get a phone call. and it's Captain Bobby you know the A goes you got to bring him down now

I go what's up he goes Customs is on the dock We need to get them before they do So I walk up with the guy To go to his rent a car I go where's the kilos I got to see him before

I got to see a proof of product Takes me up to his rent a car Opens up a sale bag I see the plastic You know kilos The wrap Now I can see customs right behind me But they're not

You know they're like They look like two construction workers walking on a dock. But I know those are the customs guys. So I tipped my hat. Boom. You know, get down, DEA, get down. You know, no, no.

Same thing every time. And let me tell you, everybody I ever busted, they flip before they hit the ground. And I talked to Sabo the other day. He's in Spain. He goes, same thing. They didn't, one guy, the guy that we took his boat, we brought him up to Jacksonville

and set up the whole skin there. They didn't even get the DEA out. I'm like, dude, they practiced this. I don't at least do their thing, you know. Did you feel bad doing this to people? I feel bad to this day. As much as I sound with bravado and brave, you know, and like, wow, we did this, we did that.

Yeah, man. I don't go into a restaurant. I don't go anywhere about looking over my shoulder. And not because of just that, because I've been a drug dealer my whole life. I'm trained like that. For you and I go into a restaurant, I'll know everybody in the restaurant.

I'll look at every face. I'll know what size jeans somebody might be wearing. Partly I'm a people watcher. But yeah, man, I feel horrible about it. Listen, when I was a kid growing up, and I grew up on old Westerns, remember the Cowboys that I talked about? The Cowboy Way.

You don't lie, you don't steal, you don't cheat, you don't mess with another man's woman, you don't throw the first punch. Now, don't snitch wasn't in there. But think about it. When you're in first grade, you're on the playground, you do something wrong. What's the first thing?

One kid says to the other, don't wrap me out, don't snitch. You know, I don't, I'll be honest with you. I had a one and a half year old daughter. I had kind of a drug addicted wife. I was looking at 25 years. The world was coming down around me. My kids are fully grown. I have a wonderful wife now.

I have a great life, but I don't think I could do it again. If I got in trouble again, I don't, I would 99% just do the time. Not because I want to have a bad have had two open heart surgeries. I have a pacemaker. I just as much as I energy I put into it. I did it right. It's a stupid German work ethic, you know. Going to be the best drug dealer ever lived,

going to be the best snitch. But no, I never felt good at best. So that deal kept you out of prison completely? So that deal, you know, we busted the hash deal. That turned into an international smuggling deal. The last deal was 10,000 kilos of cocaine to Canada. Somehow another, a CI had set something up. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, along with a few, came to Jim Kane.

Because in Canada, they didn't have conspiracy laws. So how are you going to bring down a big drug case, buying one gram at a time? And who are you going to meet to buy 100, you know? So they came to us. we put on they brought the big you know Captain

you know Captain Bobby and Sabo and I and Dave Jackson we put on a dog and pony show we flew the the second in command down from Canada came to Dave Jackson's house

now he had this 5,000 house you know mansion on the water Dave's the yacht broker I'm the lieutenant for Captain Bobby's big smuggling operation Sabo's one of the other big guys my wife at the time

who was 5-6, 36, 24-36, beautiful blonde hair. Come on with a good salesman and a drug, you know. I had a beautiful wife. I have, too. I have a really beautiful wife now. The guy actually gets down near the pool and gets his, Dave, goes, why'd you take a picture with the chick? The guy doesn't know it's my girlfriend.

It's just a hot blonde at the pool. Karen's got a blonde hair over him, giving him a hug. Leroux goes back up and tells his partner, this guy McAllister, who's one of the, the most violent guys in the world. And their group is the Hells Angels, the Rock Island, the Rock Harbor motorcycle gang,

the Italian Mafia and the Irish mob. And they make up what's called the consortium. And they make, the mob's going to bring in the cocaine, and they've already brought in like 40,000 kilos of Coke, 50,000, you know, kilos of hash. These, you know, this, McAllister had,

armed robbed a Brinks truck and shot one guard twice in the leg and then shut the other guy in the face. Went to jail, got out. One time they found them in a routine traffic stop with a briefcase with two hand grenades and a machine gun with a pistol grip that when you pull the trigger, a Mac 10 in the machine. So this is a bad ass. These are badass guys. And we go up there and we're going to do this cocaine deal. So me, David's same. And I think Jim Kane, the agent, kind of put me in there, A, because, you know, they want me to be one of the actors.

And B, he knew I'd get credit, you know, the time was running out. It had been almost two years of doing cases, obviously, I didn't tell you every thing I ever, you know, we did. My clock was running down. There's only so long you can stall the cops, right? So much time they're going to give you before you have to go to court. And so we go up. there and we have the dog and pony show is a C-11 C-130 a C-11 cargo plane. I'm not sure it was an Air National Guard. In it were three cars. Each car had 100 kilos of cocaine in secret compartments. And what it was is one of the cars is actually a little Honda like my wife was driving. You turn the key on, kind of this is each one had a little different step, but you turn on the radio and you push into cigarette lighter and the compartment opens up to expose the car. Coke. So we had 300 kilos to show the guys. And they had given some money up like 20 grand to help,

you know, the DEA cap, you know, Jim always said, you got to pay, you always wanted to get cash out of them. So that way they could give us money. Like here, Kenny, here's two or three grand to live on and buy new cool stuff. And listen, Dave Jackson, I saw him one time to set up something, like found some house or something. It was worth a million dollars. And I saw the DEA give him a briefcase with $100,000 cash in it right in front of me. Here, this is yours bounty. And he was still out working for him, but that was a little extra. So we go up there and we all meet, we meet at this Denny's and I'm parked and, oh, I go into Canada. They send me into Canada and they send David into Canada. So what they're doing is they can't, they don't want to send DEA agents into

Canada because you have to announce. You have to declare. If you, if you're an agent for the federal government and you don't declare, you're a spy. You know, remember Paul, the guy was in Russia, they kept them for so long. Paul Whalen, yeah. Yeah, I remember he kept saying he was, he was American, ex-American military. He was probably in Russia. I'm not saying he was. Look, I'm not anybody to call anybody anything, but what the Russians would be saying is he was an undeclared agent for the United States government. When I went into Canada, me and David were undeclared agents because McAllister had already told him that he had customs in his pocket and that they could smuggle the coke in themselves

obviously the DEA wasn't going to give them the coke to smuggle so me and David go in when I left Canada when I was on stakeout up there and Dave and I were staking out because think about it if you busted these guys what's the first thing they're going to do try to get home or if they're a rip-off they're going to try to rip you off or they're going to try to get back across the Canadian border so they wanted us there to try to try to say, hey, hey, I see cars coming.

As a matter of fact, when I got, when I left Canada, oh, so what happens is they didn't show up with the money. So the deal didn't happen that day. And, I mean, the planes flying around doing surveillance. The DEA, the head of the DEA, Jacksonville, had flown up in a Lear jet. We had to go meet the guy. It was like 28 below on a military runway.

And here's this, you know, I'm like, not a big dog and pony show, you know. The cops from Ohio were there. Nothing happened. So several months later, they did pull it off. They ended up busting everybody. And the Canadians flew down to Jacksonville to the same marina where I first went in one of the boats with a half a million dollars and to put the deal together. One time I busted this guy and he goes, hey, I don't know anybody, but I have a guy in Jamaica.

So anyhow, the end of my run was that final bust. You know, I had to, but I'll give you an example of undeclared. They sent me to Jamaica to go put a deal together with a Jamaican guy. And I know Jamaica. I've been, I live down there. I've been there many times. Now I'm in Kingston. In Kingston, that's like being, you know,

Kingston's one of the most dangerous cities in the world. I used to hang out in the grill, which is like, it's like, you know, a tourist place, you know. And they fuck it all up. I mean, I get made. guy comes to my room, I guess I'm on the phone, and the guy comes, I knocks on the door, and I don't know if you heard me talking, because I've been waiting for days, and I had to meet the DE agent in the middle of the street and this range rover. Like, you can't have, the only white guy and talking to a black American in the middle of the

center of town of Kingston and not that get around, that, you know, the coconut telegraph of Jamaica. And that guy's like, I knock on the door, he goes, you're a bad man. I go, excuse me? He goes, I mean, you know what you are. We know. You're a bad man. And like, I'm going, no, no, no, no.

And I try to talk them down. And you know what they have, you know what a machete party is? No. Okay, in Jamaica, they don't have bullets. They do have bullets and guns, but it's really rare. So they just take you out into a field and cut you up with a machete. Holy shit. So I'm like, I'm trying to convince this guy.

But what they did is they sent me down unannounced. Yeah, the DEA was talking to me. But the Jamaican government, and didn't know that I was there working, I was an individual. And I didn't have any, I was no, I had no radio equipment, you know, I was in contact with the DEA there,

but they sent me unannounced because they didn't wanna tell anybody I was coming because the possibility that the guy I was trying to set up might have connections in the government. So that was another time that I was sent down, undeclared as they say. So all of this work you did kept you out of prison. So yeah, so I end up being told,

I'm going up and I'm getting probation. And you got to get out of jail free card. Yeah, but here's the story. I go up there and as the judge is reading the charges, five years probation, $25,000 fine, turned out $12,500 was to the Black River Society, which the judge's wife was the president of. So a little money for the judge's wife's charity. And my record would be expunged at the end of my probation period.

Well, this new prosecutor has been two years, goes ballistic, starts screaming. And what? This guy's been running an ongoing criminal enterprise. He's going to get probation. And then he's going to get expunged. That's for first-time offenders. Runs out the door and my lawyers go, no, it's okay. And then all of a sudden he starts looking nervous.

So he comes back like two hours later. I'm sitting there pacing the floor. It's good. You're going home. But here's the story. All the black and brown prisoners that I was handcuffed to and the twice I've been in the court system, they never got out, right?

I'm not saying the system is fair. They look at me like a citizen who can be, you know, and they look at other, if you're a citizen, they're going to try to give you a second chance, right? You got a second chance. You're a citizen. But if you're a mutt, they look at you and go, I'm not helping this guy.

He's just going to be coming back every six months. And here's the story. Judge Glovis, my judge. Now, remember, I did 14, I did an international cocaine case. I did an international hashis case. Busted all this other stuff. Stop the jail break.

That's another story. It's in the book. I can't go into it now. But literally stopped the jail break at the jail I was in. But the story I heard was my lawyer, Jack Bradley, was going to run for district attorney. The district attorney, Michael Rosenbaum, I think it was Rosenbaum or something, was a Republican. Jack was a Democrat. The judge Glovis was a Democrat.

What they wanted was, they wanted Glovis was going to retire. He was going to run four more years of, he wanted to be a judge four more years and run unopposed. So the deal was if my lawyer doesn't run for district attorney, the Republicans won't run anybody against Glovis. And Glovis can not have to spend any money for one more term and just pocket the money and go, you know, be a judge for four years. somewhere in that was also Kenny Bear getting probation. Because I paid the 80,000 to my lawyer.

But that is the way the system works. You've lived quite a life, Ken. Yeah. So what do you do now? Tell the people real quick what you do. Well, when I got out of jail, the judge says, do you have a job? So I got a job selling cars because if you're a felon, it seems like the first. Are you now?

You've ever been a convicted felon. Yes. Perfect. Get a table over there and start selling cars. I buy and sell cars and I kind of semi-retired. I'm 67. I still buy and sell trucks and cars. I'm married to a beautiful woman.

I have a wonderful life. My daughter, the one I went to protect at one and a half, is now a doctor working where? Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland. Your old stomping ground. Full circle. The last time I went up there was to drive all her stuff up. to move her into the job.

And you're done with the drug smuggling. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I still, you know, and involved in Oregon and, you know, the legal stuff, but I don't, I mean, I know, my fingers are in the pie. I know everything that's going on, but I'm not involved in anything. And so, you know, I always say on my tombstone is going to say, here lies a used car, a used car selling drug dealing snitch.

And then right below the toilet seat, it says, an author. So my goal is, you know, to promote my book, One Step Over the Line. It's on Amazon, Kindle. I did the audible reading myself. And my other goal is maybe to start my own podcast called One Step Over the Line and have stories about people that have done crimes or done certain things in their life that might have changed their lives or somebody else's. Well, you certainly have enough stories to support your own podcast. I mean, all the ones like me and the Johnny's and the mats and people who were talking about, they've all started their platforms by telling their story.

So it's definitely something to consider. Well, I've gotten most of them, and not all of them, but I think we've done well together. You've done it. Thank you so much for letting me come on. Of course. Thank you for coming, Ken. I'm glad we can make this work, and it was a really good conversation. Thank you so much.

You're a gentleman, my friend.