Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - International Smuggler Makes Millions, Hides Money, & Escapes The FBI | Tommy Powell

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

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You're just stacking it right on the deck. But once the boat leaves, they start putting it underneath in the holes. And in the meantime, I had bought some property in Howell, Michigan, 50 acres of land. And I decided to bury some money there. Nice. This is how I got away with all this shit. My dad committed so on December 29th, 1969. I found him, and there was like eight.

bottles of cutty sark scotch on the ground around the bed and a vial of 52-and-alls. And then I've got him and I'm going, why, Dad? Why, why, why, why? He was still alive when the ambulances got there, but he died on the way to the hospital. And that kind of put me in a whole new direction right there. He had a $50,000 insurance program or life insurance on him. And I had four older brothers, so we split that up. that gave us $10,000 each.

So with that $10,000, I bought a Ford-Aconaline van, two Triumph 650 motorcycles, and we took off for Tucson. So we landed in Tucson, we're going into this bar and meeting people and stuff like that. Finally, we met these guys from Tucson that said, hey, you want to sell those motorcycles? We said, yeah, we'll sell them. He says, well, you take reefer for him.

And I says, yeah, we'll take reefer for him. We didn't, you know, this is, I never sold that amount of reefer before. We got 50 kilos for each motorcycle. And what was a kilo worth? Oh, back then, God only knows. I mean, it was selling probably for 200, 250 pound in Ann Arbor at that time, or somewhere 200, maybe. And so we packed that up into foot lockers and put it in the Greyhound. bus and shipped it back to Ann Arbor and that was the start right there you know that's where I

started my business and I did about you know five or six of those trips you know and then finally I got busted in Ann Arbor with Ann Arbor's largest bus to Ann Arbor Michigan the University of Michigan and I had already made you know two or three hundred thousand dollars so I thought you know where are you selling are you selling this stuff like are you selling it to kids of the kids in Ann Arbor, I mean, the students in Ann Arbor, it's the best market in the world. That's where all our market was, was in the college towns. You know, Madison, Wisconsin, Northwestern, New York, we would sell some to New York. How'd you get busted? My friend Bruce, he packaged it in a foot locker that wasn't very secure, and a dog got it. The dog's name was Bomber, and I got busted

with Bomber. I remember this listening to the thing. Sheriff Harvey from Ann Arbor. He was all pleased and everything, and long story in there, but then, you know, it got dismissed because Bomber didn't have a search warrant. Okay. So I says, okay, well, it's time for me to move down, get out of here, and leave town. And in the meantime, I'm dating Cindy, I can't say her last name because she doesn't want to be involved, but she was an Olympic gold medal winner in the 1964 Olympics. and I was dating her.

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Just efficient, effective grooming wherever you need it. We decided to head out of town, so I went down to Gainesville. So I'm going to a place in Gainesville, you know, to party, and it's called Sin City. I've seen all my old friends from St. Petersburg. What are you guys doing in Gainesville, man? You guys are from St. Pete. So I run into Jim Maslanka. He says, well, what happened?

How come you're here? And he says, well, I got busted in Ann Arbor for selling reefer. And he says, you know how to sell reefer? And I said, yeah, I know how to sell reefer. And he says, you want to sell some reefer? Finally, I agreed, and I started doing loads out of Gainesville, like 300, 500, $1,000, $2,500, $3,000, $3,000,000, you know, I move up from a Lincoln Continental. Then I'd go to a Winnebago and use a Winnebago. We could get about 3,000 pounds in a Winnebago and be pretty safe.

So you're buying it from your buddy? No, they're fronting it to me. Okay, so they're fronting it. This whole business is fronted. Okay, so, and you're just transporting it back and forth and selling it on college campuses? Yeah, well, I'm not back and forth, just from Gainesville to Detroit. Okay. So I get it in Gainesville and take it to Detroit.

So finally, after I sell enough of it, I get to meet Mike Knight, who was the ultimate smuggler. I mean, I probably sold 20,000 pounds of his reefer, and finally he wanted to meet me. So I started working with him and doing like 10,000 pound loads to Ann Arbor. And I probably sold 150, 200,000 pounds of his reefer. How are you moving that much? Sears trucks, you know, big trucks, panel trucks. And we'd use Winnebagoes. Okay.

And I'd just load, on load, come back, get another load, go back, and I was doing it quite steady. And the way Mike Knight had started his Jamaican business, he was the biggest Jamaican smuggler there ever was. My brother, Jimmy, in 69, decided to go down to Jamaica and have a vacation. So he went down there in 69 and had a vacation, got high, and saw that there was down there. And he decided to send a sailboat down there with three friends of mine. He sent them down there and they picked up like, you know, 20 pounds or something like. that and came back and unloaded it in front of our house in Reddington Beach right on the Gulf of Mexico. Jimmy took it to a guy named Mike Hubbard. Mike looked at it and he showed it to

Michael Knight. Well, Michael Knight looked at it and says, man, I'm going to Jamaica. So he loads up his like, I think it was a 23 or 24 foot Lafitte craft. And, I mean, to go from St. Petersburg and a Lafitte craft all the way down to Jamaica takes a lot of balls. So he went down to Jamaica and loaded up like, I think it was 200 pounds on the first trip. On the way back, they had some problems and they had to pull into Guantanamo Bay. Before they pull into Guantanamo Bay, they went into the rocks and the caves on the way into Guantanamo Bay, took the reefer off, stashed it, went in at the Navy and told him that, hey, you guys got to leave, but they said, well, we can't leave. We don't have any gas and we're hungry. So the Navy went

ahead and took care of him, gave him the gas, and then he took back and brought back that load. Well, that started the Jamaican market right there. I don't care about the East Coast of Florida or in Miami or anything like that. That shit wasn't going on at all. I mean, all this stuff happened in Passa Girl, Florida. That's where the Jamaican started. That's where the Colombian started. There's no doubting that. So we became partners, me and Mike, because I was doing so much of his reefer. And in the meantime, I'm moving back between Detroit and Ann Arbor, and Cindy's graduating from Wayne State University, and she introduces me to a guy named Victor Bonilla, and he was a Colombian. So I'm doing all this Jamaican at the time, and I'm going, oof, I want to go to

Columbia, you know, so. You want to go to Columbia? Yeah, of course. I want to go get better weed. Okay. I started talking to Victor, I says, okay, we're going to have to go down to Columbia and do this. And he was all on it and wanted to do it and everything. So I financed everything and we flew down to Santa Mar, we flew to Bogota and then to Santa Mar. Of course, we went to Cardahan and Bar and Kiya in the meantime. And we were trying to find a connection for and the first guy we ran into was a guy called Raul Davila. Now, he was the head of the black tuna gang i don't know if you've ever heard of them i've heard the i've heard the name we went around you know with him trying to scare up 20 000 pounds and he's saying you know you can't do that

there isn't that much here nobody's ever done that amount of of reefer out of here you know and i says well raoul why don't you just snoop around and see if you can find somebody that can get us 20 000 pounds together we'll send down a shrimp boat and we'll load it up so about four or five six days later he comes back, and he says, okay, I got somebody you can talk to. So he brings us to this house in Santa Marta, and the guy's name is Guillermo Avella. And he started off the boom in Columbia. I don't have any doubt about that. And he was a little guy, and he was wiry, and he liked to go up, and he was going into the mountains all the time. So he says, yeah, I can get you 20,000 pounds together. I says okay well let's do it and so he goes up in the mountains he keeps bringing us back samples and

stuff like that you know and finally he brings back this really nice gold bud and I said yeah we'll do that I don't know when it'll work comes the night of the loading in Taganga harbor which is a little harbor that's north of Santa Marta which is an infamous for smuggling ever since the conquistadors gold then but a different kind of gold now and he's only got 16,000 pounds. So what are we going to do? We're going to do the 16,000. We load the 16,000 pounds. And when that hits the United States, when that hit Ann Arbor, everybody on the boat that was working on the boat, the crew members, they all became smugglers. So this is how it happened. Every time somebody, a boat would go down and the crew would be on it, those crew members would go, oh, I can do

this. So that's, it was like a explosion. explosion of boom you know yeah I know the the sizzles the one guy's talking about making he's like I could make seven he's I'm making seven thousand five hundred dollars a year he's like as a captain he said or in a day I was making five thousand dollars or an hour or two something like that yeah Dave Cable I'm curious like the logistics of the shrimp boat smuggling okay if you want a hundred thousand pounds how does that whole process work from deciding that's how much you want how are they loading it on the boat? Gotcha, I know what you mean. Getting across to getting to the final consumer, you know. So shrimp boats were always the best way to go because there's thousands of shrimp boats in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, okay, and there's no way they could stop and pull over all them. Anyways, when I was doing my business, I was way ahead of everybody.

Nobody, the DEA wasn't even in business at that time. You know, whether they come into business in 74, I was starting. And I started in Tucson in 70. So you go buy a shrimp boat. You try and make sure that it's safe. And you hire a crew. And the crew is usually people that come out of bars, you know, and want to make some money. And you send it down to the Yucatan or the windward passage off to the coast of Columbia.

and that usually takes anywhere from depending on the speed of the shrimp boat, which is not very fast. It could take a week or two weeks to get down there, depending on the weather. And then we would load the shrimp boats on the coast of Columbia in various areas. There was Taganga Harbor. There was Noaha, there was Sinto, there was Changa. These are all bays on the coast of Columbia. And then the biggest one that started doing 100,000,

pound loads was portete and that's where the freighters started moving out of once everybody figured out they could do a freighter and instead of a shrimp boat you know and run it offshore and everybody run out and get the reefer and then we'd bring it back to on loading spots in louisiana florida south carolina main i mean i didn't even go into the main trip yes you guys are going to have to read the book or something like that's a good one right there that was a 65000 pound unload. But I would use my Beljet Ranger helicopter to go find the onloading spots, and then I'd drive all over the coast of the United States. I kept a chart room with every chart of the coastline of the United States in my house, you know, and I would have hundreds and hundreds of charts,

just studying them to find the onloading spots, because the unloading spots to me were always the key to everything. You know, you got an onloading spot. You could sell it right away for a million of somebody you know that's and the unloading spots they're not like your typical like docks or ports you're like what you're pulling up to or what where oh well it's a good unloading spot i guess well let's talk about bio lafouche in louisiana um biola fush is close to the mississippi river it's a bayou and it runs up in there and on that one right there I brought my McKee craft down into the bayous with my 150 horsepower motor on the McKee craft

that would go about 75 mile an hour and cruise through the bayous looking for unloading spots and I ran across this really nice brand new shrimp dock unloading spot there and it was perfect and it ended up I only did one trip there and I had some actually the crew members of that boat took that on loading spot over

and became famous small. mugglers themselves after me, you know. That's what usually happened in my business. If I'd do a load, the crew would get off and go, okay, we can go do this. We're going to use this onloading spot, but I never used an onloading spot more than once. I didn't like it. The next load I did, I like it at $20,000. I think I did to like two or three, 20,000 pound loads after that.

And then I kicked it up to 40,000 pounds because they were getting it together then to be able to do a 40,000 pound load. And in the meantime, when all these boats are coming back, everybody's turning into a smuggler you know i mean i can track all the smugglers you know because i put a lot of them in business you know i mean and there's there was that much of a market oh god you couldn't get rid of it never had a problem okay i mean when i bought that first 16 000 pounds in ann arbor i sold it in two weeks and i fronted it all out they didn't sell it right you give it to people and they're supposed to give you the money back how often does that happen all the time all the time

Because the bottom line is that didn't belong to me. It belonged to the Colombians. And if they lost the money or fucked up, then they have to answer to the Colombians. That's how I always got paid. Okay. You know. They don't want to deal with the Colombians?

No. Are they not? They didn't want the Colombian necktide. They have like a collections department? You definitely got a collections department. I mean, I could have used that a lot, but I never had to because I'm a peaceful type of person. And then that's when I partnered up. with Mike Knight and he was doing the Jamaicans and I says Mike you got to get quit doing

these Jamaicans let's go down to Columbia you and me become partners and we'll start doing loads out of Columbia so I did like four loads with him 40,000 pounds and then we decided to do a hundred thousand pound load and we each put up six hundred thousand dollars put it on the boat Victor was supposed to load it and the two boats got down there each boat was going to hold like 50,000 and these are shrimp boats yeah shrimp boats we always use shrimp boats you're just stacking at what it not right on the deck of course when it leaves it's got to be on the deck but once the boat leaves they start putting it underneath in the holes okay because they want the boat out of there right away they don't want it hanging out so i sent two shrimp boats down with mike knight

and victor didn't get his shit together which continued to happen and it didn't get loaded And then Mike was not too happy about that. So I'm sitting in my friend's house in Anna Marie Island, and we're right on the Tampa Bay, and we're looking, and we're seeing this boat coming across Tampa Bay, and it's a McKee craft with a 150 on the back, so he's going about 60 mile an hour. And he hits the lot next door,

and the boat goes flying into the lot, he steps out of the boat and starts walking towards the house, and I said, Robert, oof, we're in trouble now. I didn't know anything about it at the time that the boat hadn't get loaded because Victor didn't tell me, nor his brother. And Mike comes in and says, hey, that boat didn't get loaded. And they're on their way back.

I said, oh, shit. So I says, Mike, you know, I'm good for it. I owe you $600 grand. I'll pay as soon as I can, you know. So he's kind of cool with it. He had millions and millions of dollars. Why didn't it get loaded? He didn't get loaded because Victor didn't have his shit together.

He's probably doing and screwing around. And also the Wahir up in the north coast of Columbia has a rainy season. And the rainy season can cause a lot of problems in trafficking that reefer up to Portete was where the port was. So he had all sorts of excuses, but it didn't make any difference to me. I mean, there's no excuse for that. So we did a couple more trips, $40,000. thousand and then i did a 40,000 pound trip out of taganga harbor and victor had been talking to somebody and he put on three barrels of they're not the 55 gallon drums but there's a size

that's smaller i think it's like 30 gallons or something like that so he put like 30 gallons of hash oil on the boat you asked me if he could do it before and i said no man do not put that shit on the boat. That's trouble. Why? Because it's the nastiest stuff on the planet Earth. I mean, it's boiled in kerosene. It's stinky and it's terrible.

You can't smoke it and you yourself if you're smoking. So, unbeknownst to me during the loading process and I didn't see it, he put the three barrels on the boat. So the boat gets back

and I'm going, holy shit, when I'm on it and I see them three barrels and I can put them in the semi, I'm going, oh, Ma, and I don't know what to do with this. So, this stuff belonged to the mafia, was what happened. And I decided with Dichter to go ahead and set up a lab, and we were going to make the Israeli formula for pure THC, which we eventually did, and the guy doing it went a little wacko on us. and that got busted. How did that get busted?

I really don't know to this day, but I know that before it got busted, I went into the lab and something was weird, so I went in there and got that one barrel out of there. I had two other barrels buried on a friend of mine farm, and I got that one barrel out of there and started heading down the road. And later on, when I was getting a rain to DEA agent came up to me and says, how did you get that barrel of hash oil out of there? I said, I just went in there and drove and got it. What are you guys out to lunch or something?

They were out to lunch. So I drove in while they were out to lunch and picked up the barrel and got it out of there. And then the guy that was doing it, his name was Rick Barnhouse, and we're driving back from the lab and we're driving along the road. And there he is walking alongside of the road

of the suitcase in his hand, stoned out of his mind. So he picked him. says, what's going on? Rick? What's going on, man? He's all screwed up. And so then we're sitting in the car and we're going, what's that smell? He'd shit his pants. And so we took him to the closest motel, gave him 10 grand. So Rick, get your shit together. All this, this hash oil shit's all over with. And so then these mafia dudes wanted to get the money for it and the hash oil back and stuff like that. So I'm trying to negotiate that. This is all prior to your lab getting

rated? No, afterwards. Okay. So you had been raided, you were arrested, you were arraigned. I wasn't arrested. Okay, so it had been rated, you just hadn't been picked up. Hadn't been picked up. That just, that was the start of some of my problems. Okay. So they wanted the hashback, or they kidnapped my partner, Robert, and held him. So I went and dug up the hash and delivered the hash oil to them and how does that happen they kidnapped me do you get a phone call like they just they they that you say it like it's a normal thing like no what was going on you know you robert just went to meet him you know so they kidnapped them right there and then what do you get a phone call yeah of course okay i don't know how many buddies have been kidnapped i'm not

sure out that one there's a few other times you're going to get into that okay so we dropped the hash oil off and got rid of them and so this was started the investigation into me. Where did this hash oil? The feds were involved in this because they knew these mafioso guys. And then... Did you get Robert back? Yeah, I got Robert back. Oh, that's a plus. He was happy. He didn't get, he didn't phase him too much. He was a good dude under tough situations. He was good. And in the meantime, I had bought some property in Howell, Michigan, 50 acres of land in Howell, Michigan, wish I had that today. And I decided to bury some money there. So I had a Halliburton suitcase, the biggest one they make, and I fill it up

with $100 bills, and it was $383,000 and some change. I went and buried it there and buried it really well, you know. And then we had a rainstorm, and the rainstorm happened. It uncovered a bit of the suitcase, and Hunter, Dwayne Wilsmore, jumps over my fence with no post posted no hunting no trespassing right everything else he goes on there and happens to stumble upon the suitcase so he's sitting there with a suitcase he takes it home calls the state police the state police come they pry out the suitcase they're all shit-faced figuring out what the hell is going on here so i'm the owner of the property so i says you know I'm going to claim this money because I'm the owner.

Right. So I went ahead and hired a couple attorneys, and we went in to claim it. I gave them the combination of the suitcase. I gave them the receipt to the suitcase. I gave them some of the pouches that were inside of the suitcase. I told them exactly where it was. It was on my property. And we went to court through.

This is a big thing. It's in the newspapers. Yeah, it was going to say there was like articles and stuff about it, right? Yeah, I was in the news. New York Times and everything, big stuff, all over everywhere. So they rule against me. Right. You know, you know how it is.

Right. I don't have to go into that whole story how they're liars and thieves, you know. I mean, when it comes to the legal system, it's, they do nothing but lie. I'll get into more of that too. A question with the suitcase, $300,000, did the hunter end up being able to keep that? Yeah, Mr. Wilsmore. I went through quite a long court battle for that, and he did get to keep it. And I think by the time that $383,000 was given to him, actually the state, I mean, Judge Mahinsky,

want to get his name in here, he's a piece of shit. And Judge Mahinsky decided that the county or the city of Howell, Michigan should get half, and the hunter get the other half you can see the collusion there you know and so by the time it got out of the interest bearing accounts and stuff like that I think it was like he probably got about 400 grand and the

in the city got another 400 grand I think they probably built a new town hall with it I think is what they did why even you know what I'm saying why even turn it in I got the suitcase I just get in my fucking car and drive off if I was him I you know I would never have

told anybody he was afraid that it was mafia money he was going to be found and get and so that kind of put me on the radar so i says okay i'm going to go back to florida so i moved back down to florida i moved to indian rocks beach on the gulf of mexico again are you still moving loads oh yeah still working okay collecting money and doing trips but if you are you aware that this is kind to put you on their radar and they're watching you and yeah they were watching my house i could see him i could scope them out i could see them park down the road and stuff like that you know they were just in their initial stages of trying to figure out how to bust me for something right and so i moved indian rocks and me and mike are still working together and then i got a phone call from somebody and

And he says, your brother, Jimmy, just murdered this girl. I go, what? And this is at our motel, the Casamarina and Treasure Island, Florida. Jimmy was dealing and snorting like a mad fiend. And this is your brother, brother. Yeah, my brother, brother. Not my brother from another man. Right, okay.

And that's accurate? He gave a girl. Yeah, he killed a girl. Her name was Karen Jolly. And then he got another guy, Jeff Stitt in the leg, S-T-I-T-T, good friend of mine. I don't know if he's still around. And so that became a big thing in the beaches and everything. And I'm trying to hide out from the FBI.

And I also got the Gainesville 8 thing going on. That's another story. The Gainesville 8, I don't know who you are, if you know who they are. And most people might not know who they are. But they were planning and disruption of the Republican Convention back in, what, 1972 or something like that. And they ordered these hand rockets through my waterbed store. and they were going to use the hand rockets with the ball bearings to disrupt the Republican

Convention. A guy named Scott Camille was the head of the Gainesville 8, and my manager for the store, that's a loose term manager, my manager for the store, John Briggs, ordered these hand rockets through my store. So I got the FBI on me for that. So I got the FBI going here in Gainesville, and I got Jimmy murdering this girl in St. Pete. So I got, well, I can not go around anywhere now. So ended up, the FBI came to see me in Gainesville.

They knocked on my door. I got 300 pounds of reefer in the house. And they said, can we come in? And I says, no, man, me and my girlfriend are running around nude. You know, I'll come out in the car and talk to you as soon as I get some clothes on. I took all my clothes off before I went to the door because I knew who they were. I opened the door up and going, what do you do? And I said, then then I closed the door.

and then I put my clothes on and went out and talked to them, which was cool because they could, they would have come in there and smell the reefer. And so then I talked to them. I said, listen, I ain't gotten anything to do with this. And I told Briggs, John Briggs, I said, man, you got to confess up. You got to tell him you did it today. I had nothing to do with it or I'm going to strangle you.

Right. You know, so he did that. And so the FBI laid off my ass there. What about your brother in the murder? Like, why did he murder the chick? Because he thought they were stealing her. when probably the worst dealing is okay and then the guy he shot

okay so this was a whole thing okay okay book club on Monday gym on Tuesday date night on Wednesday out on the town on Thursday Quiet night in on Friday It's good to have a routine And it's good for your eyes too

Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at spec savers You'll know just how healthy they are. Visit specksavers.cavers.ca to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. So the FBI is saying, okay, so you got the guy to own up to the hand rockets. Is that what you call it? Hand rockets. I don't know what hand rockets.

It's like a slingshot, but it's got a band on it that goes right here so you can just pull it back. That's like a slingshot. It's a slingshot, but it's a hand rocket. I mean, the slingshot, you got to hold. This thing had a wrist thing on it where you could get more torque on it. And he's just going to, what, fire that in, just shoot that in the crowd or something? They were going to use them during the Republican convention to shoot at Nixon or something, you know? You know, we didn't like Nixon too much back then.

I didn't have anything to do with violence ever. And so my mother comes to me, Tommy, you got to get him out of this. I said, how am I going to get him out of it? She says, you're going to hire the best lawyer that you can find, and you're going to get them out of it. And I says, Mom, I don't want to do that. She says, well, if you don't do it, I'm going to have nothing to do with you. You're not going to be my son anymore and all that shit, you know.

So I says, okay, I'll do it. So I hired a guy named Arnold Levine in Tampa, Florida. I heard the name. Okay, well, he's the guy. So I went into his office and carried in $120,000 and $100 bills. And so here you go, Arnold. fix it. And he said, I can't take that's it. I don't know that this is illegal. This may be illegal money. No, I finished the story. So I go there and I forgot something in the room after I dropped

it off with him. So I walked back in the room. He's on his hands and knees counting all the hundreds, you know, and I'm going, oh boy. Sorry, Arnold, you know, but we came fast friends and he got Jimmy off for, he was mentally insane because he was under the influence of at the time. Oh, my God. Try that today. Yeah, I was going to say that would never work today. Okay, so I got my brother off and paid off the family,

and I was still working between Detroit and Gainesville and St. Petersburg. And in Detroit, I had to move out of the house in Detroit, which was a bummer. So I moved to Farmington Hills, got a nice little place in Farmington Hills. Why did you have to move out of the house? What do you mean? Because the feds were on me. Okay. I was a fugitive.

okay i was on the verge of being a fugitive because uh so when i'm living in farmington hills i hear that there's an indictment out on me and had sorry had someone gotten like had because of the raid from the the lab or was it somebody else had gotten busted with with with and they had rolled on all those things they were getting those getting those people together you know the The rats. Okay. So things are not looking good? Well, yeah, things aren't looking good.

I mean, it was all Victor that screwed me up, man, with that hash oil, and then the buried money. And so I was living in Farmington Hills. Me and Cindy are living in Farmington Hills, and I'm still dealing and collecting money and sent it to Columbia. I walk out the door one day and I look down the street, which I've done it quite a few times, and seen something kind of weird. And I said, oh, God, two guys sitting in a car. car. This isn't good. So I went back in the house. I said, Cindy, pack up your shit. Take all this money. I don't know. I had a quarter of a million dollars or something. And I had another friend

there at the time, Paul Greiner. He's a disc jockey for WABX in Detroit. And I says, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to go ahead and leave. As soon as I leave, you're going to watch out to see if that car follows me, which I think they're going to do as soon as the car follows me you put all the shit in the car and take off and i'm going to meet you uh at this motel near the flint airport because so then i walk out the door get my car they do follow me and i'm in my bnw 3.0 c s i they're following me and they're i'm going i'm going to lose these fuckers and it's just more to the neighborhood i'm going like 110 mile an hour through neighborhoods and it's the fall and I'm hitting these piles of leaves and

the leaves are blown up on the back of their car and everything finally I make enough left and right turns where I lose them so then the first thing I do is pull over a phone booths call my lear jet pilot I said hey jean meet me at the flint airport where you as soon as you can I had heard there was an indictment out at that time so me and Cindy put on some wigs and went to the flint airport and as we're walking in the flin airport there's like eight fucking state troopers there and we got to go in and we're walking by the state troopers and my hair's all kind of under my wig and stuff and i'm going does this look suspicious or what and then jean comes up and we walk right by them and they didn't say anything you know i'm definitely a wanted man then and

uh getting the lear jet and take off to boston and my cousin was a travel agent, so I had her do me like six tickets to different places into Europe, you know, and I had all those six tickets. And I says, when we got to Boston, I said, Cindy, pick a ticket, any ticket. So she picked the tickets to Munich. And we flew to Munich and checked into Bezierhof, which is probably the most famous hotel there in Munich. And that was my European start of my European venture and that goes on for a while and then so you you you know you you believe you're wanted you are wanted you were indicted right I knew there was an indictment coming out people have been telling me you know but I didn't know for sure 100 percent whether there's indictment out

but when they started following me and they're following me at 100 mile hour I know shit's happening then I got to get out of town so you're in Munich I mean are you planning on like what's your what's your plan? What's the plan? They get lost. You know, if they're going to get me, they're going to have to extradite me, you know? Would they not extradite you from Munich? Well, they could if they could find me. Okay. Do you have a, do you have a, I mean, are you still traveling under your own personal passport? Yeah, I was always traveling under my passport. Okay. But, you know, they didn't have it together back then to, yeah, they don't have the computer. Figure it out. They didn't have the computer system. So I was doing pretty good. And then we went down to St. Moritz and Glenn. My partner,

He came down there, and he got a place in St. Moritz, and then I got a place in St. Moritz. And then I decided St. Moritz was a little bit too risky for me and a little too high profile. St. Moritz, everybody knows where St. Moritz. That's where everybody wants to go in their life, to hang out in St. Moritz. Anyways, at that time. So I moved up to Amsterdam, and I left Cindy in Germany while I went to find a house in Amsterdam. So I got a nice little farmhouse in Beemster, Holland, on a dike that was like 14 feet below the water line or water level. And then brought Cindy up there and we moved up there for a while. And she didn't like it. So she moved back to St. Moritz.

And I decided it was time to go back to work. Glenn and me got together and we went to London. When flying in London, I think we had like, I think we had 80 grand or 50 grand or something. No, 50 grand. You each had 25 grand, and we had it on us. I usually put my money in my boots. You know, I'd always buy a size 13 boot or size 12 boot. When I'm usually wear it 10, 10 and a half,

and I could get all that money in the boots, you know. And on the body, too, I'd have it too. And Glenn had the same thing, and he had money all over them. So when we're going through customs, you know, we're going, you know, we don't have any drugs on us or anything. We're not going to worry about it. If we got the money, you know, that's not illegal to do the money. they got to figure something out.

So they pull us aside, start searching us, and I says, you know, I know you guys can do whatever you want. I got money here. Here's the money. Here's how much I got. And I says, Glenn has money on them too. You know, so he's got $25 grand on him.

So while I'm talking to the one guy, they got us in separate rooms, of course, when the cop comes in, he says, we found, we found $15,000 on him. And I says, well, you better keep looking because there's another 10 there, and it's all my money. Right. And this is before you had to declare over $10,000. Yeah.

Okay. And even in England at the time, that law, that wasn't a law in effect for me. Or, you know, in America, that was the law, but it wasn't there. And so they're sitting there, and they got the two joints, and they got the 50 grand, and they got all our luggage. I says, you know, I haven't committed a crime here. I want my money. He's got a couple joints, you know, you can do with him whatever you want, but I'm going to get him off no matter what.

I want my money and I want to get out of here. This is, am I under arrest? He said, no. I says, okay, well, give me my money. So they gave me all the $50,000, gave me all the luggage and everything. They kept Glenn. and as they're wheeling me out the front door, I don't think we had like five suitcases,

and they're wheeling me out the front door, and I says, now, is this where you're going to have me robbed? Oh, boy, those British cops were pissed in. Get the fuck out of here, you fucking limey motherfucker or something. You know, they call me all sorts of names. So then I hop in a cab.

I said to the cab driver, okay, I know there's a street here in London, that has all your barristers in in london take me to that street so he took me to the i don't remember the name of the street it's in the book somewhere and i said he took me to that street i just walked into the first attorney's office i got and i put five grand on the table and i says get my friend out now so he got him out and so he comes back out and he's got a court date like four or five days later and i don't know he's an english court is a trip in itself i mean these guys got wigs on and you're in a dais and you're standing there in the middle of everything it's kind of like so i went

with him and i went in there first of all to check it out i says no man i'm not staying in here so i went back out and then glen comes walking out and he says not guilty right and i says glen how come He says, well, it seems to be a law in England. If you didn't know that you were in possession of those drugs, then you're not guilty. And he had them in his back pocket. Right. That's when the laws are the laws. I mean, nowadays, it's all supposition and lies.

So then we decided to go, that's when decided to go down to Morocco and do a Moroccan deal. So I had set it up in the States before I had left with a friend of mine. I went to Barnstable over on the west coast of England, and I bought a Rangerover over there. And when I went into the bank, when I went to buy the Rangerover, the guy says, well, I'm not taking American money because I had all cash. And I says, okay, well, we're going to town and get a change into pounds. So I went into the bank and Barnstable, give the money to cash here. I said, can't do that. We're going to have to come back later.

So I said, okay, well, I went to a bar. It was a 400-year-old smuggling bar in the basement somewhere. And then we went back to the bank, and there they are. The cops are there. Oh, well, what are you doing here? What are you doing with all this money? And I says, what are you talking about? I'm a tourist.

I'm buying a car. I'm going to go drive around Europe. I'm spending my money in England. What are you guys doing to me? Am I under arrest? I just came through the airport. They saw the fucking money. They let me go.

told them all that. And they says, well, okay. And then I talked to the baked matter. So I said, would you give me my money so I can get out of here? So he went ahead and gave me my money. We got out of there. So we loaded up the Range Rover and headed towards Morocco through the White Cliffs of Dover there, left Dover and drove into France and drove down to Bordeaux and bought like $5,000 worth

of wine and threw it in the back of the Rangerover because we knew that you can't drink when you're in Morocco. Of course, we wanted to have some alcohol, and drove down Costa del Sol, down to Tangier, down to Gibraltar. Took a ferry from Gibraltar to the Spanish town of Suta, and it's a Spanish enclave right on the north coast of Africa. It's all Spanish. So you go in there, and you don't even clear any customs because it's Spain. So we went in there, and it's fine. So then we're in the Range Rover, and we're driving through Moroccan Customs,

and shit, there's a line at least a half a mile long. And I said, screw this, and I go around the whole line, pull right up to Customs, you know. And while we're there, well, now I've already got Sonny, another partner that I picked up, and he spoke Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Hebrew. the sky comes up to the car and he says What are you doing? He says, I can get you through customs. And we says, okay, well, how are you going to do that?

He says, well, just let me get in the car and we'll go through customs. And he says, well, listen, what we'll do, you get us through customs. You go on the other side of customs and we'll pick you up. Okay. And he says, okay. So we get through customs and he's standing on the side of the road. shit, we went by him at 70-mile hour. Okay. Why was he? Why?

You know, you can't trust a Moroccan. Okay. I mean, don't hold that against me anybody from Morocco, but I mean, you know, it's a pretty tricky country, you know. They got all these hoods on, you know, and jobulas, and you don't even know who's behind the hood. So we hauled ass to Tangiers, and I think there were some cars following us, but we lost them. and then I had a hook up with the brother to the king of Morocco. Of course, his name was Muhammad, I think.

And we went to the palace in Rabat, because, you know, somebody wants to buy 40,000 pounds. Ash is a big deal in Morocco. I went there and met with him in the palace. And he says, okay, well, meet us up in the reef mountains. Oh, what's the name of that town up there? It begins with a T. Anyways, we go up in the Reef Mountains

and stay with his farmer and his farms, you know, and he's got his brother on and he's making hash and he keeps bringing us this hash, and the hash is no good, man. It's like terrible stuff, you know? Nothing like the blonde or red Lebanese that I was getting in Detroit. And I said, sorry, we can't, this isn't good enough. So then one day he comes back with a box.

a ball about this big, and says, try that. And I says, okay, so we tried that. Woof, that's really good. And I says, okay, I'll take 20,000 pounds of that. And he says, it can't happen. He says, that's all off the fingers of the farmers. Okay. That's not the way they make hash.

They take the plant and beat it with a broom or something like that through a cheesecloth or something to get their hash. but the oil from the farmer's hands is the really potent stuff. And so we couldn't cut a deal there. And so I had to give up on the Moroccan stuff. I mean, I went all over Morocco. I was down to the Spanish Sahara, Agadir, Fez, everywhere in Morocco. And then I decided to go back to the United States after the United States. after that because I needed to go back to work so I we flew to the Canary Islands and then from

the Canary Islands we went to the Bahamas and then in the Bahamas I have two friends, two girls there were really good friends of mine and I started living in the Bahamas and sneaking into the States and collecting money and doing more trips. Well I mean and you still only have your passport. You don't have any other credentials. No, now when I got to the Bahamas and I got to the Bahamas. Hamas, I have a cache of different papers. You know all about that. Okay.

So I got driver's licenses from Ohio and Canadian birth certificates, and I got about 20 different IDs. You found a forger? Yeah. I had a forger, and I did the get the baby's birth certificate door deal. Right. I had a good forger out of San Francisco. Did you two?

No. I would just go, well, I first started forging licenses myself, you know, because that was when Florida, it was, it was a, it was a laminated, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, a card, but you could, you could actually say, and it had the hologram on it, but you were, I was able to sand off the information, and then I would print the same information or print different information in reverse on a piece of, laminate, thin laminate, like a transparency paper. Good idea. And then I glue it and I laminate it over, squeegee out all the excess, cut it out, buff it up a little bit, and you could still see bits and pieces of the hologram. So if you're just an employee at a bank or you're at a title company, it looked okay. Yeah, you're not looking at it.

Right. But bank people look at it pretty good sometime. But what I did was I did that a few times. And then eventually I just figured out I could just go into the DMV with like a burst certificate. and a shop birth certificate and a social security card and I could get them to just issue me an ID. I can never get a driver's license, but I could get an actual Florida State ID. Well, you know, once you got the Florida State ID, man, it's on. I didn't get anything. Now I'm getting all real stuff. I'm bank accounts, buying stuff. And, you know, it was a progression.

There were lots of different things. Eventually, I know all about it. I mean, yeah. But no, I never had a forger like that must have been. That would, that would have been great. It was good. The stress level would have been much easier going to a guy that could get you the documents as opposed to standing in line and getting your trying to get a real passport with fake information. You're like, I'm just waiting to get arrested. I had, I worked for McDonald-Douglas. I had their identification, and I had a California driver's license official, and I had a press pass too, which was kind of cool.

But, yeah, good forger there. So then I flew to the Bahamas and moved in the Bahamas, and I moved into a place over by Leifford-K near Love Beach, and actually the Rolling Stones had used this place, used to live there, and stay there when they were there. And I just hung out in the Bahamas and go back to the States whenever I needed to.

And then I moved to on Queen Street in Nassau to right next to the American Embassy, which was a big thrill. And then I would be going, I'd always like to go back to the States on Chalk Airlines. It was the seaplane. They had a seaplane in Paradise Island, Chalk Airlines. They fly into government cut in Miami. They'd just land right in government cut. And I'd go in there, and they would go into a trailer. And the trailer was a customs trailer. And it wasn't like going into Miami. International. Yeah, with a serious custom agents. You know, I'd dress up like a tourist and have all the flowery shirts and all that shit. And there you'd go in and you'd clear, customs there and it was a breeze, you know. So I'd use that as the basic way to get in the

United States. I've gone, well, I'm snow-skied into the United States. But then, let's see, I cited that, okay, they're getting too close to me in the Bahamas. I'm going to move to Columbia. Cindy left me, and I says, well, there's no reason to be in the Bahamas anymore. I'm to go down to Columbia and work from there. So I went to Columbia, moving into Santa Marta, Columbia. And I lived there off and on for seven years. What are you doing there? You're still moving stuff? Still moving stuff. You're all the way from Columbia back to the United States. Are you still coming in the United States? No, I was loading boats for people. Way safer. Yeah, because I had the best bodyguards. Man, I had badass bodyguards in Columbia.

Great guys. I think there's a picture of them in here somewhere. So I would get loads together and help some of my fellow smugglers get their loads together. And my partner, Raphael Aron, was his name. He got murdered while I was there. How that happened? Well, he was making a lot of money and he looked like a gold brick walking around. and he was doing, there's two families in Santa Marta at the time, they called the Cardinades and the Viadablancas.

And what happened is they got into a blood feud over the honor of a woman, I believe it was. And so it ended up, the Viadablancas ended up killing up, killing the entire Cardinace family, you know, like 40, 50 people or something like that. And it's a big story down there in Santa Mart. Anybody would know about that. And so he got wiped out. And so I was dealing with his partner, Enrique Coronado, who was the head of the Viadablancas. And both those guys used to be my driver when I first got to Columbia.

They were my drivers. You know, they weren't even in the drug business. They were doing cigarettes and alcohol and everything through the Wahira, which is the North Coast of Columbia, where all the smuggling goes on. and it's still going on to this day. Try to stop it, but they can't. And, well, Raphael one day, you get to this story, Raphael one day, he says, hey, I want you to go up to the Wehir and look at some reefer. And I says, okay, I'll go look at some reefer.

I didn't like the reefer from the Wahir because Wahir is a desert and it dries out the reefer, and it's not as good as the reefer that comes from the Sierra Nevada, the mountain. And so I went there and driving up in the desert And I see the big mound of bales of When I asked Lucho Castro Who was running the operation there in the way here I said Lucho how much your reefer's there And he says about a million pounds

And I says wow you guys are loading up million pound loads And he says well we're moving some stuff since you came here You know because this Lucho Castro I've known him ever since I've been there I got there in 71 and 72 is when I started there. And this is like 76 or 77. And I started looking at the reef, me and Sunny, or digging through the reef, looking at it's a dome, man, this quality is horrible.

I can't bring this back. There's no way. So we had to spend the night. So we're trying to figure out where to sleep. So he decided to go ahead and climb up the mountain. And build a little fort, you know, a little place to sleep. you know like a something like this rare right you know and so we slept in there for the night and a million pounds of and then after that rafiak and then i had to hook up with anuriki coronado

to keep doing businesses there's so many stories down there i mean it's like i don't know where to start or even go you know there's so many stories here in columbia now let's see the oil thing with Victor, I was down there, and I'm walking in Santa Marta. Me and Sonny are walking in Santa Marta. Car pulls up to us with a Uzi and a couple other guns and says, get in the car. So we had to get into car, and I'm kidnapped at that time. So they take us to the Peruvian embassy, not the Peruvian Consulate's house in Santa Marta, lock us up there. We're in there for a couple days, you know, and then, you know, Raphael, it's his job to get me out of trouble when I get into trouble like that the peruvian consulate is kidnapping people in columbia well they put me in

the peruvian consulate's house it was a columbians that kidnapped me but it was a pruvian consulate's house okay does he know this is happening yeah okay okay everybody knew in siena mara i mean i was pretty popular there i was never went anywhere without my bodyguards except that time and so we got a meeting going on and Raphael pulls up well they move me over across the street into a house across the street where they got this long table with hold about 10 15 people and so we go in there and when I'm going in there Raphael tells Sonny to tell me to sit at the end of the table by the back door and so I went and sat right at the back door and Sonny sat next to me and Raphael was to my right and he had got in it was a no weapons conference or kidnapping so he had gotten in with his 44 magnum his 44 chrome-plated magnum with a pearl handle in his clutch bag he had a clutch bag about this big and he had it on zip and I could see that he had it in there and he's he's right here you know and I'm going oof what's going to happen here and this guy

Tony that was in charge of the mobsters, he started yelling at Raphael and getting crazy. And I'm going to myself, man, you don't want to do that to Raphael. And Raphael's like, Raphael's putting his hand into the clutch bag, getting ready to pull the gun out. And I put my hand on top of his, and I said, well, no, Raphael. But that didn't last very long. In about two or three more minutes, he pulled that 44 Magnum out, and he stared at the whole crowd. and that back door opens up and we're all out of there

into 15 different jeeps. 15 jeeps with four guys in each one of them. So that was an exciting one. Another kidnapping was when I'm up in the mountains in Sierra Nevada, vacuum packing. I had brought a boat in with some vacuum packing machines on it and I think a bunch of money

and all the toys the Colombians want like washing machines and drugs. and medical equipment. I used to bring medical equipment for the M-19. I don't know if you know who they are. They're the guerrilla group in Colombia. I met a guy that was the leader of the M-19 while I was in Bogota. He wanted me to put guns on the boats. And I says, no, I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and load the boat up with all medical equipment so you can have that. I thought it was FARC. Well, there's FARC and there's M-19. Okay. But anybody will know that. And then there's the AUC, and there was a bunch of groups down there,

but M19 was the heavy one at the time. So I'd load the boat up with all everything, the Columbians wish list, you know. Raphael would give me a wish list, and I'd fill the boat up with all that and bring money down there, and then we'd load that boat up with Reefor and sent it back. And so this time I decided to do something cool and vacuum packs them up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I got a generator and two vacuum packing machines, a air compressor for the vacuum packing machines, all the equipment you need to vacuum pack with.

So this story goes on and on. I mean, I could be here a week talking about just this kidnap. So we're down there, and I send Robert and Kevin, a friend of mine, up in the mountains to do some reconnaissance up ahead of time. So they go up in the mountains, So they're up and there, and they're going to the fields and checking everything out, and they got a nice campsite down by the river on the Rio Frio is what it was called. And we finally went and started going up into the mountains with all the 15 mules and donkeys, right?

12 or 15 mules and donkeys, that's where I started the book at, because that was the most, I put the most exciting chapter in the front so I could grab everybody. attention. So it's called donkeys and mules. And we loaded them all up with the vacuum packing machines. I had to break down the generator into parts and everything like that because I'm good mechanically. I can tear anything apart and put it back together again, blindfolded usually. So I got all this all stuff packed up on the donkeys and mules and stuff like that. So we're coming into this once, it's a 12-hour walk into the mountains. We started like, stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my

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I think 2 o'clock in the morning after I met those CIA agents in Road to Daryl, but we'll skip that for now. And so we started walking up there, and you know, it's dark and you're walking, and they're clearing the way with their machetes and stuff. When they're clearing the path, they have... You know, in Vietnam, they used to have these, what do they call, pungies, punchy sticks, where they're sharpened sticks, but when they go through the jungle and they cut them, they cut an angle on them and they're like spears, and they're all on the side of the trail. So when you're walking, you've got these things left and right all the time, real dangerous. So we come to this one section, and it's a cliff.

I think it's probably about 300 feet. And the path is about this wide, you know. And there's areas, it's not a path, it's a stone, it's rock. Right. And there's areas where from the rains and stuff, there's a washout section. So you have a little triangle in there where you've got to be real careful going around. I took my backpack off and, of course, and didn't carry anything because I didn't want my backpack getting caught on anything and throwing me over the cliff. and so we're walking there and we get over and I see what like I'm halfway through and I'm seeing

oh my God that's a waterfall oh I can't wait to get in that waterfall and drink a beer because we had you know 10 15 cases of Heineken's couple cases of Cavassier you know food and everything you know so I'm getting over there and it's real scary walking across this thing you're doing a crab walk walking sideways sometimes you know you look there and it's two, three hundred feet, and it's death immediately. And so I get to the waterfall, I'm standing under the waterfall, I'm watching the donkeys and mules come across the trail. There's this one mule with all like four or five cases of Heineken on it.

And as he's walking, he's kind of bumping on the side of the cliff. And he steps into one of the washouts, goes over the cliff. and it's like the noise that that animal made I can't forget today I mean it's a he-haw and it's a horse neen but it's screaming as loud as can be

you can't recreate that sound but it was like and you know it was pretty horrible then you know kind of realize that we lost some beer but you know that's what happened and so then we went and he fell 300 feet

yeah okay and then so You know, me and Sonny are going, oh, God, let's have some Cavassier, let's have a beer, let's smoke a joint, and sit in this. There was also a pool where the water came down, so it was kind of like a bathtub. So we were in there, and all of a sudden the Colombians started laughing, you know. They were just laughing their ass off. And I said, Sonny, what are they laughing about?

And he says, they think it's pretty funny. The two gringoes sitting in there drinking a beer while the donkey went over the cliff, you know. I wasn't laughing, but they were laughing. So we went down to a Roberts camp and camped out there. They couldn't get out of there quick enough. You know, they packed up and left right away and told me what was going on and what farms and fields they had been to and stuff like that. And so we camped there and then we decided that this wasn't going to be a good enough spot

to go ahead and vacuum pack. So we found out that there was a farmer. up farther in the hills that had a cement slab. And so I sent one of the Colombians up there to ask if we could rent the slab from them. And the guy said, yeah. So what we did was load up all our vacuum packing machines and went up there and set up on the slab.

And then they started building a roof for it, you know. And while we're up there, I'm working on the generator, putting the generator back together, you know, because I wanted to get the generator working for nighttime. And all of a sudden, on a corner of my eye, I see Sonny running across this opening, like, running like really serious, you know, and then I look into the woods, and there's all these guys coming out of the woods with every weapon you can imagine. Every, oh, shotguns, Uzi's, Mac10s, everything.

And Sonny's running, and I see Sonny, I see the guy's about to shoot Sunny. and I say, Sonny, stop. Stop, Sonny, don't go any farther. So he goes, kind of realizes. So that, there was about 20 of them. So they come right out of the forest and rounded us all up and said, okay, sign this ransom note. What was it? I think it was 20 grand each. For 20 grand each. I said, I ain't going to fucking sign that. Sonny says, you can't tell him that, Tommy. And I says, just tell them, I'm not going to sign it, Sunny, and see what they have to say. So Sonny tells him, I'm not going to sign it.

And the guy just immediately starts rounding up all our workers and putting them on the end of the slab and who's going to shoot him. And I said, well, Sonny, tell them, I'll sign it now. So lots of stories in here. So I signed the ransom notes. And so they camped out with us and kept us for like three weeks while the, well, Raphael, they couldn't find Raphael because Raphael was up in the Wahir, eating turtle eggs and drinking Aguadiente or something like that. And they couldn't find them immediately, you know. So they finally found them and Raphael paid the ransom. And at night when I was sleeping, I always slept in a Colombian hammock.

They're the best in the world. And I'd be sleeping in my hammock. this would be a guy next to me with an Uzi, just like two feet away from me with his finger on the trigger while I'm sleeping. And I tried to escape and I set the generator to run out of fuel, you know, with the fuel valve. They didn't know anything about a fuel valve or the Colombians. They only knew about is what their weapons would do. And their lights went out and I had that Uzi right to my head. So we weren't going anywhere.

you better fix that machine right away or somebody's going to die, you know, and all that, you know, constant threats. Finally, you know, you've been there such a long time with them. We got them all to smoke reefer. And in Columbia, you don't smoke reefer because they think it makes you crazy. Okay. You know. And the only guy that wouldn't smoke reefer was my guard. And he was the guy that was leading the entire crew of this wayward army platoon.

Because they were, it was the army. It wasn't just, you know. Everybody down there wants to kidnap you, no matter what. So they, long story short, they got their money. They grabbed a bunch of beer and walked back down the mountain. And me and Sonny says, well, we're getting out of here now. We don't want to stay up here now. It's too dangerous.

So we left everything up there, walk down the mountain and looking at our Heineken bottles all the way down the mountain where they've been drinking our beer down the mountain and our food wrappers and stuff like that. So we got out of there and we got down to the bottom of the mountain. We caught a bus into Santa Marta from there. We were up in an area called a Rakataka that's near Fundacion. It's on the west side of the Sierra Nevada Mountain up there, where the best reefer is.

And I like that name, a Rackataka. That's what was the guy that wrote the 100 Years of Solitude, Marquez. He was a real popular. a prize winner. And so we got to Raphael's house. Raphael wasn't there, but the DAS was there. So the DAS is the CIA in Colombia, and they were waiting for us. So they kidnapped us. Okay. Got us in the back of the car, holding guns on us, two cars. And Sonny's telling him, hey, you got to wait until Raphael comes back. You'll get paid. Don't worry about it. You're going to get paid and we're waiting for Raphael

and he's not coming back. These are American CIA? No, no, no. These are D. D.A.S. It's departmento, something. It's Segurdad. They're the CIA for Columbia. Okay. And it turned out to be the guy

that turned out to be pretty good. I saved his life. And so we're leaving there going, oh, God, we're going to have to take you to the Santa Marta jail. I'm going, oh, please. so we don't need to go to the CNMRGIL. That's the biggest rat hole on the planet Earth. That's worse than the MCC Metropolitan Center in New York City.

And as we're leaving and just pulling out on the main road, here comes Raphael and his baby blue Lincoln Continental, which is the only one in Columbia, you know, guy bought for him. And he rounds them up, gets the DAZ agents in the house, pays them, I don't know, 10, 15 grand, maybe 20 grand or something. something like that. And he says, okay, well, he tells a Daz agent, it's okay, you guys can go. And I said, wait a minute. Raphael, we have to go back up to the Wahira and get on a freighter to get the hell out of here because I went there this time without any papers or anything,

which was pretty dumb. And so he says, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Well, this Dazian will take you up into the Wahira, get you on the boat, or bring you up to Lucho Castro to his house up in Noah Hera and that will take care of that. So we went through like two army checkpoints and you got us through there. You know, when you don't have any papers, it's a bit of a pain in the ass when you're going through a checkpoint. And so we finally get to Lucho's house and we're there and Lucho's going, who is what you doing with that guy? He's the DAS. I'm going to have to get him. And I said, Sonny, tell Lucho, that ain't. ain't happening. So I says, push Luso back physically. I pushed him back. And I says, no, Lucho.

And I've known Lucho for already seven years by now, because I put him in business. And he's going, and I says, Tau Sonny, tell the Daz agent to get his car and get out of here. And he's got at least a 45-minute start or a half-hour start, just get out of here. So the agent took off and Lucho wasn't happy about it, but I wasn't going to have that on my conscience. And so then we hopped in one of Lucho's jeeps and went through the Wajara. The Wajara is all desert, okay? And we're on our way up to a freighter in Portete, and two, 300-foot freighter. There's actually seven of them there on the way there I don't know if you ever heard of the Rat Patrol

no well in the old days there used to be a television program called a rat patrol where they drove around in a Jeep with a 50 caliber machine gun on the back so we're driving up there and we're driving through the desert and all of a sudden off the distance we see some lights tracking us so we turn off our lights and we keep driving you know not hitting the brakes and showing taillights or anything like that. They kept tracking us. And finally, the Colombian says, we're going to have to turn our

lights on this. It's got to be the army or something like that. So, yeah, sure is shit. It's the Rat Patrol. They pull up next to was that 50 caliber machine gun right on us. Three guys. And, okay, don't need to stop a palace. You know, we're your papers. So we don't have any papers. And we're explaining to them. Sunny's explaining to them. Sunny was really, Really good, man. He could make an Eskimo drink their own frozen piss. But, I mean, he talked to those guys, and then finally I just said, Kere una Cavesa frio?

Do you want a cold beer? Do you know the guys? And they said, yeah. So I popped up to the cooler, gave them all nice ice, cold hynikins. And that's when things started lightening up. And then I said, you want a sandwich? and we had peanut butter and jolly sandwiches and gave them each a sandwich

and then after that it was all over with they didn't bother so they let us go and then so from there I call that a kidnapping but they didn't want any money on that and so there we're going on our way to Portetti to catch a freighter to Aruba that's how we had originally gotten

in the country at the time at this trip and in Aruba Aruba they're been smuggling with Columbia for the last 500 years. So there's like seven freighters there, and we're going to each freighter, and none of them wants to take us to Aruba. So I said, Sonny, let's go back to that first guy in the freighter there

and talk to him and pull a few punches on him. So I said, Sonny, tell him that we know who owns his boat. He's a guy named Enrique Coronado. He's in Barr and Kia, and he wouldn't be. be very happy if you didn't put us on that boat. And the guy agreed after that. So we hopped on the boat. I strung my hammock between the stanchions of a lifeboat, you know, on the side there and

tied it real good just to make sure I didn't go over the side. And then I slept all the way to Aruba. Then I had my Learjet pilot come pick me up, me and Sunny, and then we flew back to the Bahamas. There's a lot more in there, but that's the gist of it. How long had you been at it? in Columbia at this point? Five years. Five years? Okay.

We were pretty well known in Colombia. I mean, I went to meet the president of the country. Raphael said one day I'm in Bogota because we didn't like hanging out in Santa Marta all the time because it gets a little rough there. I mean, there's a lot of fighting going on in shootings. So we decided to get an apartment in Bogota. And while I was in Bogota, that's where I met the head of M-19.

time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. I got his name in the book and got a picture of him. And then my bodyguard in Bogota, who used to be the bodyguard for the ex-president, he was in charge of the bodyguard detail for Pastrani, the president of Columbia. And he was a great. guy, man. Tough-looking guy, too, man. And he says, one day he comes and he says, hey, you want to meet the president? And suddenly look at each other and said, yeah, let's go meet the president, you know?

And he says, okay, well, I'm going to take you there and, I got this picture in here, Julio Cesar, Iaya, Tuba. And, and. And, and, I got his picture in here. And, and. And, And so we went to the presidential palace and sat down with the president, Dubai. And he says, you know, I know what you guys are doing up there. And he says, you don't have any worries for me. You know, and I said, well, I wouldn't be here if I thought I did, you know. And he spoke perfect English. And he says, you know, I'd like you to give a speech to the Colombian Congress

why should be legal in the country of Colombia. no shit okay something they're going this is a death warrant right you know so I'm sorry I can't do that you know so I didn't do it what kind of money are you making are you like getting by are you doing really really well I'm doing really well okay so why leave you say you were there for six or seven years why leave Columbia If, you know, things were good, you're doing well. Like, why leave? I fell in love.

Oh, that's the worst. So, this Swedish girl was walking down the beach, and I hooked up with her, and I says, you know, Sweden's a good place to go to hide. I'm about done here. I mean, this is over with it. It's turning into heaven, you know, and they're all this violence and shit. I mean, I've been in a couple shootouts down there, you know, in a bombing, and I decided to, you know,

Take my Swedish girlfriend and move to Sweden. Okay. A lot of stuff in between there, but I mean it would just be take days. Right. So why? So you went to Sweden because you thought, I mean, were you still concerned about being extradited from Sweden? I mean, let me explain that. So before I went to Sweden, I went back to the States to clean up some things, you know?

Okay. And so I went with my mobile home trailer and I went up to hot. Harvard and went to the International, Harvard International Law Library. I had my forger do me a nice document showing that I was a lawyer. So I went in the International Library for about a week and a half

and studied the extradition treaty with Sweden and everything. And there was no way I could get extradited out of Sweden for a conspiracy charge because they have an issue in the treaty, the extradition treaty, called reciprocity. The law in Sweden has to be exactly the same as the law in the United States.

Right. And if it doesn't match, then they can't extradite you. And so conspiracy and Title 21, Section 848, Continuous Criminal Enterprise, which is what I was charged with, that was non-extraditable. So I says, I'm going to Sweden. Right. If the only thing they can get me on is a possession charge. So I decided Sweden would be a safe place to go,

and if I did get extradited, I'd only be able to get extradited for possession, and they'd never caught me with anything. They couldn't extradite me. So I'm there and I have one son, you know, and I'd already had him, I'm in the process of my wife is having the second son, Alex, and got a nice house outside of, actually right outside Stockholm here at the Gloobin. Had a house right near there and used to hear the Rolling Stones there. and I decided, you know, to go to the hospital to see my newborn son.

I was there for the birth, and then the next day I wanted to bring my other son to the hospital, you know, to meet his brother. And so when I'm leaving the house, I'm looking down the street, oh, God, there's a car with four guys in it. Well, how long had you been in Sweden at this point? Oh, year and a half, two years. Okay. You made it sound. It almost seemed like you got there. like within a week. As I'm telling you what, if anybody has anything to say,

my timeline can be way off all the time because it's such a long time ago and it's hard to remember. It took me 40 years to write this thing. So then I go, oh God, it's either the mafia or it's the cops. So when I drive down the road a little farther and I look down that road,

there's another car with four guys in it. And I go, okay, something, and this is really wrong. And I got my son in the backseat strapped in, you know. And he's almost two years old. And I'm driving into, I live in a section of Stockholm that's not the center section of Stockholm, and I'm heading towards Center, Stockholm. And there's a roundabout on the way in there.

And the roundabout goes to a city called Sauter Mom, which is the southern poverty of Stockholm. home. And there's a roundabout there. So I get in the roundabout, and I go, I figure, oh, I go around the roundabout, they're around me. I go around again. They're still there. I go around again, they're still there. So like after five times the going in the roundabout, I figure, okay, I got to pull over. So I get over the bridge into Sauter Mom, and I pull over to the right, and they're all out of the car where their guns drawn and everything, you know, and I got my son in the back seat. you know, I'm totally concerned about him, and I'm going, okay, you guys, don't do anything stupid. I'm not armed.

You can see my hands. Put your guns away. My son's in the car. I'm not going to give you a problem. Let's figure out what's going on here. And they says, well, you got an arrest warrant from the United States called a provisional arrest warrant, a provisional arrest warrant because that's the way the treaty works. They issued that warrant under the treaty.

And so I says, okay, well, here's what we're going to do. I'm on my way to the hospital to take my son to see his brother. What we're going to do is you're going to, they started to take me and put my son in another car, and he was going crazy, you know. It's really torn up. And so I says, listen, you guys got to pull over and put my son in here with me right now. This is no, we're not going to do that. So I brought my feet up and I kicked the fucking window out.

And I says, hey, you're going to have a big problem with me unless you put my son in here. So they did pull over, put my son with me, and we drove to the hospital, and we dropped my son off at the hospital. And he went in and saw his baby brother, and they took me off to Kronensburg Hacktacket, or something Swedish name. But that's the main prison in Stockholm, and it's in Saar, Mom. And there, wow, that's a long story. There, I met up with the Swedish prosecutor. Her name was Solvei Ribberdall, and she was a chief prosecutor in Sweden at the time. And she's sitting there reading the indictment, which is in the back of the book.

I put the indictment in the back of the book. And she says, she says, you couldn't have done all this. And I says, no, I didn't. That was my brother Jimmy. And I said, I swear to God, it was my brother Jimmy. I didn't do any of that. You got it the wrong person right here. So she continued, you know, of course, she didn't have any.

Her hands were tied because the American government wanted me. And the American government has their population. over the Swedish government like it you wouldn't believe. So they put me in the prison there, and I go on a 51-day hunger strike. All I did is drink water for 51 days. And this is during the period of time, they're getting ready to take me to the Supreme Court,

the Swedish Supreme Court, to see if I'm extraditable. There's stories in between here, but, you know, I'm getting to the meaty stuff. And so I get to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court, I got this really cool attorney. He's a good guy and he did a nice job trying his best to get me out of the situation. And, well, even before the Swedish Supreme Court, there's a clause in the extradition treaty that within 40 days, if they don't have all the documents to Sweden, they have to let me go. Okay, well, first of all, when I got arrested,

they didn't even have an indictment against me. That's the prosecutor in the United States. States got kicked out of Detroit and has sent down to Florida for that. Her name is Susan Daltova. And so they ran there right away to the grand jury to get the indictment after they got me arrested in Sweden. And then when 40 days approached, I'm jumping up and down and kicking the door going, let me out of here. You're violating the treaty between the United States and Sweden. You've got to let me out, you know, of course, to no avail. And so I've I went to the Swedish Supreme Court, and it's like, oh, God, what a picture that is. I think there was five of them.

They're all got the wigs on, the white wigs on, and they're sitting way up there. And I'm the only black guy in the room, you know. And I'm going, oh, this doesn't look good for me, man. And I pleaded for, you know, that I was a Swedish citizen. I was a Swedish resident. I had my Swedish Social Security card. my Swedish driver's license. I was living in Sweden.

I was married to a suite. I had two children. Please don't extradite me. Right. So, yeah, they extradite me. After the only thing they did nice was to go ahead and say, okay, you can stay for Christmas and stay in Sweden, be with your family for Christmas.

How nice, you know? That's nice. I was trying to delay it as long as I could, you know. And, oh, well, I can't forget this part. Anyways, there's a guy named Wesley Park. I have to go piss on his grave, no matter where he dies. That's a given. So he's in the room, and he comes to see me when I'm first arrested and thrown in the Swedish prison.

And he comes up to me, and he says, you know, you're facing life with no parole plus 70 years. Don't you think it's time you cooperated with us? And I says, hey, kiss my ass and get the fuck out of here, dude. You know, just in the Swedish guards are there and everything. He says, listen, I'm going to tell you one thing. You're never going to see your wife and children again if you don't cooperate with me. I flew across the table, grabbed them by the throat, and started fucking strangling them. The Swedish guards were like, they were there for a minute.

They were just dumbfounded while I'm strangling. I'm looking over, and I know they're coming to get me. And he's fighting across the table. I'm holding his neck squeezing as hard as I can. And the Swedish guards broke me up. And then he got out of there after that. And I says, listen, you motherfucker, there's no way you can get me out of Sweden

because of the law of reciprocity. So he went back to the United States, went to Congress or somebody in the State Department, and they modified the treaty ex post facto. And then he comes back as the nerve to come back into the room again, same two Swedish guards, and they're like, you're very good this time. And I says, Jesus, he says, hey, Mr. Paul,

Check this out. This is an addendum to the treaty. You're going back to America. And I said, fuck you, get out of here. You know, I didn't like this guy at all. And so I didn't strangle him this time because he wasn't getting that close to me. And so that was the one story there. So then the Supreme Court decides to extradite me.

And then the U.S. Marshals fly over from Detroit. Tony Bertone from the U.S. Marshal Service in Detroit comes over. with his two another guy named Emu or something like that and there's three of them and so they're taking me the chief of police of Stockholm

has taken me to Arlanda Airport in Sweden and they bring me, they locked me up and oh I forgot to put that one in the places I've been held and without my permission

they put me in the Swedish lockup in the Arlanda prison and then they took me out of there and brought me up to meet the marshals. And so I'm sitting there going, oh, God, who are these guys? So they says, listen to Mr. Powell. We just got back from England and we brought a guy that gave us a lot of trouble on the plane. And we had to put them in a straight jacket and gag them. And I says, man, you can have a hell of a worse problem with me. I'm going to tear that airplane apart. I'm going to be the biggest

problem you ever had in your life unless you take me over to the bar over. there and buy me a beer. So Tony Bertone looks to the chief of police of Stockholm and says, well, what would you do? And the chief of police says, I'd buy him a beer. So I went and then, you know, in Sweden they got a, you know, a big pint beer. And they're like going, oh my God, he's going to drink that whole thing. You know, I'm going like, it's the best beer I had in my life and it's the worst beer in Sweden at the same time as it's called a spendrips. And so then I flew back with them, and they put me in MCC, New York.

You know, you might know a little bit about that place, but it's a pretty bad place. It's like the worst prison in the United States. And the first night in there, they put me in there, and I get there in the afternoon, and they put me in there, and I'm, this place is empty, and it was a

Friday. So I got on the table and went to sleep, you know? And then about six, seven, eight o'clock or something like that. All of a sudden, get off the table, you honky motherfucker. And he's pushing me off the table, these black dudes.

I'm like, oh, shit. Okay, so I said, okay, okay, you guys, I'm off the table. So I went under the table and went to sleep, you know, because I was pretty tired and it was pretty worn out. It was pretty stressful. So then they took me from there. They took me to McGuire Air Force Base, and they had, commandeered a Coast Guard Learjet to take me from McGuire Air Force Base to

Selfridge Air Force Base outside of Detroit. I tried to escape out of that one, too. I almost got out the window. You said you had an escape in Sweden. Is there a story behind that? Okay. How'd you know that? You briefly just mentioned it.

I went down. Okay. Okay, when I was locked up in the Stockholm prison, I decided to attempt an escape, and I You decided to attempt an escape, or you were trying to escape? I was trying to escape, but it turned out to be an attempt. Okay. But what I did is my wife brought me a glass cutter and a hacksaw. Your wife's a gangster.

Well. She was at that time. I've known some very good women in my life. Let me tell you, man. They're all the best, man. I love women. So I got that into my cell, and I started, well, I cut the window out, and I'm on the eighth floor, right? So I started saving sheets.

And I had enough sheets to cover that eight floors. So the sheets were white, and the building was brown. So I took the garbage can, and I took my coffee. and put the sheets in the coffee to get them brown and dyed all the sheets, and then I dried them and folding them all out in my room. You know, this took time. Yeah. You know?

And then in the meantime, I cut the window out, and I'm getting ready to go out on on New Year's Eve. I got 50 grand in a Mercedes waiting for me out as front. And I cut the window out. I says, okay, cool. And then I'm looking at this thing. It's a square bar. And I says, okay, I got to cut it on an angle, because once I cut it on an angle, I can cut it.

cut it over here and weaken into here, and then I can pull it out, and that's how I'm going to get out. And then it had a lock on it, and I looked at that lock, and I said, that looks dangerous. So I used to, I started sticking a rose in there because my wife would bring me roses, and I'd stick the rows in the lock, and immediately the guards would be in there. And I go, oh, well, I'm not going to mess with that lock, because that's going to trigger the alarm. But there was no alarm in the bar itself. It was a square bar.

I can't call it a bar. some kind of square, two-inch square. And so I cut that and I kept cutting and it, cut in it and cutting it and then going, come I'm not getting through here. And then I thought, oh, God, I heard about these things. They got a stainless steel rod in there with ball bearings. So it spins. It spins when you go to cut it.

And so I took the, I mean, my window had been open with the glass missing out of it for almost a week and a half, you know, and the guards come in and check the rooms and stuff, but this was around the holidays and Christmas. So they didn't find it. And so I knew I wasn't getting out, so I packed up the hacksaw and the glass cutter. And I told the guards that I needed to talk to the tour Bjorn was his name, T-O-R-Bjorn, which is bear in Swedish. And I put the hacksaw and glass cutter on the table in front of him and I says you know I've been trying to escape and he's you know Swedish dry humor and he says yeah no if I was you I'd be doing the same thing man and he didn't even get excited about it or anything he says listen can you do me a favor and not

tell the American government that I tried to do this because once I get back to the United States that'll really screw me up when my bond hearing comes up and he said no yeah I'll do that And they says, okay, you're in this room now. And then, like, three hours later, they had replaced the window and put me back in the room. See, my idea was I switched cells with somebody. Say, man, do you want to switch sales? I like that sell better. I'll put some money on your books and then switch sales with the guy.

Wait for him. You tried to escape. No, no, I said that's what I would. I wouldn't have gone and turned it in. I'd have been like, I got to get out of this room. Like so that I can. No, I could. There's no switch in cells.

So I have some deniability here. There is no switch in cells. I was in solitary confinement. Okay. I was in solitary confinement for six months. Kind of screws up your mind there. Then they took me downtown to the U.S. Marshal's office and dropped me in the lockup in the U.S. Marshal's office.

You might know something about that. Okay. And then from there, they took me to Milin Federal Prison outside of Detroit. and that's why I spent the next three years there. That's where you were indicted out of, Detroit? Yeah, I was indicted out of Detroit. Okay. And you spent three years in the lockup?

Why three years in the locker? Were you fighting your case the whole time? I was a pretrial detainee. Okay. Because I was... Well, they're not giving you bond. No. Well, actually, another interesting story here.

So I did get bond for a million dollars. We posted that out. of Florida, you know, putting the motels up for collateral. Okay. And then they got smart with me and go ahead and told the state of Florida to put a $2 million bond on me. So I couldn't make that $2 million bond. Okay.

And that kept me in prison. So then while I'm in my island, I'm a pretrial detainee. And so they're not supposed to let you out in the yard. And what happened is when I got in there to one guy, one of the, one of the trustees came up and says, are you Tommy Powell? I says, yeah, man. How are you doing? He says, you want to smoke a joint? And I says, yeah, man, I'll smoke a joint. So I sat there with him and passed in a joint between the bars. And he started telling me, you know, what I'm in for and what it's going to be like in federal prison in my island, you know, because I had no idea, of course.

And he says, you want to smoke another joint? And I says, yeah, I'll smoke another joint. So he sat there and smoked two joints. And then he says, now tomorrow you're going to get visited by Mr. Wilcox. And Mr. Wilcox is in charge of the whole prison. He's not the warden, but he's the one that takes care of putting everybody where they're supposed to be. And he says, what you want to tell him is you want to tell him your situation that you were in solitary confinement in Sweden for six months. I weighed like 95 pounds at the time because of my fasting.

And he says, you just tell him that you're mentally, you can't mentally spend another day in confinement and locked up that you need to get into the yard right away. And that was some really good advice from him. So when Wilcox came, we went through all that scenario, and he said, I'll do what I can. And then the next day I was in the yard. So that was really cool.

So then I'm going, the first thing I do is like, man, I got to get back in shape. I got to fight this, you know. I'm 95 pounds and nothing, you know. So first thing I do is go to the gym, and the gym's full. You know, and I'm going, oh, God. So I walk up to these two white guys, and I say, hey, can I work out with you guys? And they said, fuck, no, get out of here, man.

You little wimpy little fucker. Get out of here. So then I go back to my dorm, I'm all like going, oh, man, I'm not going to be able to work out. How are we going to work out? So, like, 20 minutes later, they showed back up at my dorm and said, man, we heard about you. You will be happy and glad to work out with you. And I worked out with those guys for three years, man, you know. Huck and George famous guys, too.

So had you been sentenced at this point? Mm-mm. You're still fighting. Okay. So what happened, just prison stories, you know out there. There's a lot of them. So what happened is I had a guy come visit me whose wife worked in the prosecutor's office. She was a secretary in a prosecutor's office, and she overheard a conversation that they couldn't afford to bring me to

trial because there was 120 witnesses against me, okay? Okay. And that they had to get a plea agreement. And she heard this and told her boyfriend, her boyfriend came to visit me in prison and told me this. This is how I got no snitching. Nice. This is how I got away with all this shit.

So he says, does that help you? And I says, yeah, man, that helps me a lot. So the first thing I did, I went back to my dorm. I started, I hooked up with Tommy Snedo, who was the head of the crime syndicate family in Cleveland and John Calandra. You know, a lot of criminals, a lot of them. Now I know you. But we all had 848, so we all worked together. So I started writing my plea agreement. And so in the plea agreement, I was no snitching clause, you know, where I wasn't going to testify against anybody in a grand jury or a pettit jury. or a pettit jury, and then I'm going to be transferred to Sweden under the treaty between Sweden

and the United States to spend my prison time in Sweden rather than the United States. It was a 12-page plea agreement. How does that work? I didn't tell my attorney about it because I didn't want him knowing about it, but I didn't spring it on them in the last minute just before they picked the jury. You know, so I had fired like four attorneys, you know, I had Arnold Levine come up, from Florida. He was no good. You know, he couldn't handle it in Michigan and stuff like that. And so I got to settle on a guy named Robert Hurlbert, who my uncle Bernie, who used to own the

Bellevue-Biltmore in Florida, the largest wooden construction in the world. He got this attorney for me, or he at least told me this was the right guy. And so the first time I met him, he comes he comes into the visiting room and he's got two hand carts with boxes on him. And I says, what's that? He says, well, that's the 120 witness statements against you. And I said, listen, Robert, and he didn't know anything about what I had heard. And I says, what we're going to do is we're going to beat this on a technicality. We're going to go all over the Supreme Court.

We're going to do somehow beat it on a technicality. you know and he says okay okay whatever you want to do so he starts filing motions he's filed like 20 motions you know and one of the motions was was the way that i got indicted by the grand jury you know the way i got indicted by the grand jury they don't put in here that i got indicted after i was arrested in sweden they skipped all that so he says okay we're going to do it he files all these motions and everything like that so finally i go ahead and get the plea agreement done that I'm doing. Right. And it's a masterpiece. I think it's in here. Yeah, plea agreement's in there. And I had a lot of help from all the other criminals, you know,

in prison, writing it and everything. And so he says, okay, well, we're going to the jury trial tomorrow. And we're sitting there with the window with a little thing underneath it. So I slipped the plea agreement under the window and he says, what's that? I says, well, that's my plea agreement. he says what he says you motherfucker you're just now telling me that i said well robert i didn't want to jeopardize anything i just thought you might want to read it and see if they'll accept it so he reads it and he goes oh man so he runs up to the u.s. attorney's office and they say okay we'll take it but we're not going to do the transfer to sweden and i says we'll tell him to forget it so he says He tells them to forget it, and then all of a sudden they come back and say, well, what they did is they talked to Stephen Trott, who was head of the criminal division in Washington, D.C., and he approved it. Stephen Trott. He was a big dude.

And so I came back, and so that's what I did. I went ahead and did the plea agreement, so I'm getting in front of Judge Freeman. And Judge Freeman, here's a little story about Judge Freeman. And so I'm going to the courthouse all the time from Mylan. And I've got all my legal materials. You know, my legal materials now is getting up to four or five boxes, the legal materials. And then U.S. Marshals are making me carry all that while I'm leg ironed and handcuffed and belly chained and everything. And they're making me carry all my boxes. So I told them one day, I says, hey, screw you guys.

I am not putting that shit in there. You guys put it in there because I had a plan. And they said, no, we're not doing that. So they left all my legal material at the prison. And then when I got to Judge Freeman in front of Judge Freeman, he says, you ready to proceed, Mr. Powell? I says, no, Your Honor, I don't have my legal material with me. And he says, why don't you have your legal material with you? Because, Your Honor, I was belly chained, leg irons on, handcuffed, and they want me to carry

a four or five boxes, a legal material, and I can't do that. So, oh, boy, he went off on those marshals like they, I had a rough ride back to mine that day. Right. And so that was pretty cool. And then another time, after the plea agreement was done, and Herbert submits it to Judge Freeman, Judge Freeman goes, and he's like, Judge Freeman's like 70 years old at this time. He says, Mr. Powell, this is the longest pre-agreement I've ever seen in my life. I've read it three or four times.

I don't understand it. I'm going to have to go back in and read it again, and I'll see you when I'm done reading it again. So we're all sitting in the courtroom for like about an hour waiting for him to finish the reading the plea agreement. So he comes back and he says, okay, I agree to the plea agreement. And so that was, I knew then that I was doing six years. Six years where, though, like did you actually go back to Sweden?

That's the story of Sweden, the nice country of Sweden. Refused to accept you? Yeah, they refused to accept me because they said I was not domiciled in the country of Sweden. Okay, anybody knows what a domiciliary is. It's a person that lives there, works there, got a driver's license, has social security there, has children and a wife. That's a domicile. I was totally domiciled in Sweden, and they refused it. Okay.

So you did it in the U.S. Yeah. So I did Mylan, and then I went to Tara Hut, chained with Tommy Sunito. And then from there, I went to Lewisburg, and then from Lewisburg, I took Conair to Talladega. And then from Talladega, I took a bus to Tallahassee. And then from Tallahassee, I ended up at Eagland Air Force Base. I had a buddy who was just at Egglin Air Force Base. It's still there?

Egglin? Yeah. He's still there. He's still there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he was there recently, and he just got shipped. The where?

I don't know yet. He's in Atlanta. Colby knows. He's in, yeah. Colby knows about Atlanta? No, Colby, but Colby knows. He knows my. You should have been there during the Mariel boat lift.

That was a big mistake. And then they take over the prison? Yep. Yeah. I had a couple friends there during that. Kobe doesn't know what the Mariala list is. No. It's called the Cuban invasion.

The illegal immigrants, Trump would get off on that one. That's when Castro opened up. He opened up the prisons and mental asylums and let all of, and he said anybody that wants to go to the United States, go. And they all jumped on boats and came over here. And they landed on the shore and they were allowed to stay. The problem was it.

created what they called in Miami. They called it the Cuban crime wave. So tons of these guys were being arrested. You know, the movie Scarface is kind of loosely based on it, on some of those guys. Anyway, they end up, a ton of them end up getting picked up and brought to Atlanta where they're kind of trying to extradite them, right? They're being held there. They're trying to send them back to Cuba and they get upset.

Of course, they're upset. They don't want to go back to Cuba. And so they have a riot and they take over the prison. They burned it down. They burned down one of the wings. But here's the thing. They had demands, and they got a lot of their demands met. And one of the demands was that every Wednesday in federal prison,

have you heard this, right? No, I haven't heard this one, but I can imagine. Every Wednesday in federal prison, you have to have hamburgers and french fries. And to this day, Wednesday is hamburger and french fry day. And you get hamburgers and french fries every Wednesday. I think there was maybe only a few Wednesdays we didn't get it for some reason you ended up not getting hamburgers and french fries. When I first got there for the first couple of years, you were getting cheeseburgers and french fries. In paradise.

Fucking great. Are you kidding? After being it, I was lucky for a year in the Marshalls all over, got to prison. We had Fountain Coke and I got a hamburger, a cheeseburger and french fries. I was like, I can do some time here. Like, I'm going to be all right. but very shortly they changed like that they went to what they called a national menu and then the food just went to hell still better than probably i deserve but so i became a lawyer while

i was in prison okay and i always assisted people in my island i've got i had a bunkmate of mine he would rob the bank and he had been in the korean war and he had 200 Chinese after they dug a tunnel under the Yalu River and snuck up behind him, and he had to turn his machine gun around and kill them all. Chinese? Yeah, Koreans? No, Chinese. Okay.

And North Koreans, too, but Chinese too. So they threw them in a pit and fed him rice for a couple years. And when he got back, he decided to rob a bank. And so he robbed the bank and got caught and was my husband. roommate and then I wrote a rule what is a rule 35 to the judge for him and he had a 20 year sentence the judge had knocked it down to 10 okay so I was helping always help 20 years for bank robbery did he have a gun did he fire it yeah he had a gun I don't know if he fired it okay I was gonna say but we write up a nice little story about him so he was mentally deranged because of the

Chinese. And then I started suing the federal prison system over asbestos exposure. I'm sure that went over well. Oh yeah, they love me. Yeah. But I had a little trick. I always kept a habeas corpus in the appellate court. I always would file a keep a habeas always active because if you got a habeas corpus in the appellate court, they can't transfer you. Okay. So when I was in myelin, I filed them for asbestos exposure in there because they had Cuban inmate come in and beat up all the asbestos in our room and spread it all over our room and everything so we could breathe it. And then I filed suit them on that. And so when I was trying to get down to Florida, I had to dismiss that suit along with the director of the Bureau of Prisons happened to get in the same Learjet as my attorney. And they

gave the director of prisons a ride to Washington, D.C., and my attorney says, well, you need to let Mr. Powell go to Florida because the warden, Calvin, whatever his name was, the warden that wants Powell to go to Sandstone, and that's Nanookland Man, Frozen Wilderness. And so that, I had to drop that lawsuit against myelin for the asbestos exposure. And then they moved me to Tallahassee. And then I filed against them in Tallahassee. Big thing in Tallahassee. Woo, big thing.

The wardens always hated me. Asbestos is a big thing? Asbestos is a big thing in all federal prisons. Okay. And when I was in Mylan, you know, like I had this asbestos exposure suit going and I had the thing with me getting transferred. So I'm walking through the yard one day and the warden's there. And the first time I talked to him about it, he says, Paul, you're going to Sandstone.

And he says, no, I'm not going to Sandstone warden. I got an habeas corpus, and you can't move me anywhere. You know, he was definitely out to get me and get me moved around. And then after Quinlan, Director of Bureau of Prisons, was on the plane with my attorney, and they worked out a deal to send me to Tallahassee, I went walking by the warden, and he's sitting in the stands, and I walked up in the stand says, hey, guess what? Guess where I'm going? I'm going to Tallahassee.

And he says, yeah, I know you, motherfucker, get out of here. You know, so that was cool. So then from there, I went to Tallahassee, and they're doing the same thing in Tallahassee, man. We're in the dormitory, and they got these pipes running across the ceiling, like three pipes covered with asbestos. And they're using power cutoff saws and cutting it all. It's all going all over the bunks, all over the lockers, all over the floor everywhere. So what do they do? They give you a plastic sheet to put on your bed so you don't get asbestosis or mesothi.

the OMA, you know. So then I immediately wrote a letter to my dorm supervisor and says, hey, listen, you're violating my Fifth Amendment on my Eighth Amendment rights of cruel and unusual punishment. You have to get me out of this dormitory right away. If you don't, I'm going to file a suit against you. So I filed suit against them under civil rights under the Eighth Amendment. And I shit at the fan. EPA came in, OSHA came in, and they came in, and they got this another room with all the prison officials in the room and everything and with the OSHA people and the EPA. And I says, you know, the lady from the EPA was running the situation. I said, could you get all these guys out of here?

I need to talk to you guys in private, you know? She says, clear the room. So they cleared the room and I talked to them in everything. and told him exactly what was going on. And I was working in the law library at that time. And the door in the law library was next to the safety office. So I'd have my ear on the door listening and writing everything down and taking notes about everything.

And I'd send all this stuff to the EPA in OSHA. Well, there was an assistant warden there, and her name was Monica Wetzel. She's still around. And I hear this, well, I'm sitting there all day. I'm leaning back and listen to the door. I hear this click, clack, click, clack. I go, oh, she walks around a corner, and she sees me with my ear to the door, and she goes, holy fuck, Powell.

So, eight minutes later, Powell, report to the warden's office. I mean, I've been to the warden's office quite a few times. So, he goes, Paul, report the wardens off, comes over the loudspeakers, and the whole prison knows it. And the prison knows, everybody in the prison knows what I'm doing, because I'm trying to protect their health from exposure to asbestos. Even the guards know, okay, because they're getting the same shit. They're breeding asbestos in every day all day long, and they don't even know what's going on. So he says, a Powell, you're out of the law library.

I says, well, you can't do that, warden. I've got a whistleblower statute against you under the EPA. When I filed suit, I asked for whistleblower status, and I have that. So you can't move me anywhere that I don't want to go. He says, where do you want to go? he says what I would like is I'd like a gate pass I want to leave this prison tomorrow and I'm going to want to go work in horticulture

he says you got it and I'll get the fuck out of here so gate pass usually takes two or three weeks to get so the next day I had a gate pass so I'm walking to the sally port and you know everybody lines up to go to the sally port and I'm walking there it's like a new thing for me you know I'm going God I'm getting out of fucking prison and all of a sudden all the end made start clapping and clapping and it's like I'm walking oh some kind of walk where they beat

you in stuff or something you know or you're walking down the line and they're all clapping and clapping even the guards are clapping you know because the guards knew that they were subject to the same situation as everybody else in the prison and you know the federal borough prison didn't care anything about it they just wanted to get rid of the asbestos so then I went out and then I'm in horticulture and he says okay I can't remember remember his name he was a good guy he says okay pal pick up a shovel and get on that truck i says wait a minute warden i got no bending no stooping no prolonged standing no lifting over five pounds and no sunshine is this from my medical from the inner the all the injuries you had when you were in

military this back the bad back okay the bad back's in there it's carried over but i got the sun for melanoma i got no bending and no stooping because of the back and you can improve that you've had this back problem for from the government 30 years makes sense so he says what do you want to do i said you know i'm going to remember his name here one of these times he says what do you want to do and i says i'd like to get a cup of coffee there and i'd like to grab a couple books off the bookshelf there and go to the rose garden and read some books and drink some coffee he says go ahead so that was That was your prison experience?

That was my first time out of prison. First day. And so something happened there where they moved me out of there. And they moved me to the library on the prison base. So I started taking over the prison base library. And the librarians in there were going, like, we got to get rid of this guy. He knows how to run the prison or he knows too much about things, you know. So they think back to the warden's office.

Okay, Powell, where do you want to do now? It's not like you got to do this or you got to do that. He's asking me what I want to do. And I says, okay, well, I'd like to go to recreation and work at the gym, at the base gym. And he says, okay, I'll get you that. So they send me out there to the base gym, and there's this guy named Mr. Proctor. He was cool. These civilians were cool.

And he goes, I got just the job for you. And I said, what's that? He says, you're going to run the Nautilus Gym. Okay. So every day I go out and run the Nautilus Gym, keep the machines clean, you know, and take care of the Nautilus Gym. I'm there with a woman called D. She was a wonderful person. and I spent the rest of my time in Anglin Air Force Base working out.

Okay. Nice. Did you go to a halfway house? Mm-hmm. In St. Petersburg, I went to the Salvation Army halfway house. Okay. I went to the Goodwill one. Yeah, that's it.

The Goodwill. It was a Goodwill. Oh, it was Goodwill. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, but it was Goodwill. It was a Salvation Army. It was goodwill.

Yeah. I went to the Goodwill one here in Tampa. Tampa. How long would you, were you there? A couple months. A couple months. And then, would they give you an ankle monitor and you could leave? No, they didn't have ankle monitors. But then, you know, I had continuous criminal enterprise, no parole, okay? CCE. So, yeah, CCE, title 21, section 848. So they, they put me on probation. Yeah. And I says, you can't put me on probation. I'm not, I don't have parole. I don't have any parole.

You can't put me on probation. There's no parole with the CCE. And so I'm in the parole office in downtown Tampa, and I'm telling them, you know, okay, I'll go along with you guys because I don't, I'm tired of fighting. You know, I'm over the shit. I'll go along with you because I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm straight and narrow now.

So it comes to, I file a suit against the Bureau of Prisons, and I had a case where I did a pro se case in the United States Court of Appeals. in Washington, D.C., against the Bureau of Prisons, and I was oral arguing my own case because I was pro se, and the court actually appointed an amicus for me to help me. And I had that to go to, and I wanted to go to Sweden after that to go see my family. Right. So I told the probation, I says, listen to you guys, well, I'm in New York.

I'm getting on a plane, and I'm going out of... I'm going to Sweden. So I like permission for that. They said, no, we're not going to give you your permission. I says, well, I'm going to go anyways. Her name was Janet Shield. And I said, I'm going anyways. Do you know her?

No. I think it's funny that you know everybody's name. I can't remember anybody's name. Oh, I remember them all. Especially the ones I've got to go piss on their grave. And so she says, well, let me run up. Okay, we'll give you two weeks. Because I told them, I says, when I'm in the court of appeals,

I'm going to tell them what's going on. with you guys and what you're doing to me. I got oral argument for a half hour. I can get that in there. You know? They said, okay, you can go for two weeks. I stayed six months. Okay.

And then when I came back... While you're on supervised release. Yeah. On probation. Okay. Because I didn't give a fuck. So when I come back, you know, I'm going, okay, I'm in a lot of trouble. You know, I'm going to have to deal with this.

but I know their kids, nothing they can do to me because, you know, I wasn't on parole, and they didn't have any right to have me on probation in the first place. So I get back into the airport, and when I got extradited, the chief of Custins came to me and walked me through with the U.S. Marshals. Right. No line. No line, nothing. So here's the crux of the situation.

So then I get there, when I'm getting off the plane, there he is again. When I come back from Sweden, after I've been extrad, I did all my time and everything. And he says, Mr. Powell, come with me. I says, oh, I remember you. How are you doing, man? He says, I'm doing fine. Come on. Come on with me. So he takes me and walks me by immigration, walks me through customs. I don't say anything to anybody. Goes to the baggage claim.

He puts my luggage on the cart, wheels me to the front door, just have a nice day, Mr. Powell. Nice. That's the custom of a re-entry I want to deal with next time. That's the way it is with me now. Really? Whenever I go anywhere and I come back from customs, it's like I go through right away. I would expect that I'd be bummed, dragged into the back room and searching an an anal, everything, you know? I don't.

I get asked questions about my passport. I get pulled to the side. I get asked, am I allowed to leave? Am I, what are you doing? What were you arrested for? They don't give me any of that. They must be in customs. And I've met some, I know.

some customs guys, you know, and they say I'm pretty clean right now to go anywhere. You know, they won't bother me. Yeah, I can go. It's just when I come back, they give me a hard time. It's easy to get out. Yeah, exactly. Coming back in is the crux of the situation. Well, and how, so how long have you been out?

Oh, geez, I got out in 90. Okay. Went in in 84. And what did you do after you got out? Just been hanging out? Computer work. I became a computer genius, and I got a degree in digital forensics, like four years ago. Websites.

I've never really – I've never really had a job, you know. Did you get a master's degree, or what was it? No, I was an associate's degree. Oh, okay. Okay, and then you started writing – you wrote the book, like you started writing the book, like a year or so ago? 40 years ago. The first book I had was in Amsterdam, and – I had to leave Amsterdam in a hurry, and I left it in the house when I left,

and the guy that got it probably was surprised. Okay, but this one just came out a couple weeks ago. Two weeks, yeah. And you're working... Buy this book! And you're working on the audible version. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Benny Kramer?

No. Okay, he was a big pot smuggler in Miami. He had gotten arrested. Did you ever hear about... What year? All my stuff depends on the years because I started this business, basically. Yeah, I want to be in the 70s. I know you've heard this part.

He had gotten a life sentence, or at least was going to be getting a license. I think he got a life sentence. And then he had paid a guy to learn how to fly a helicopter. Oh, yeah. I heard why I was in prison. Yeah. And then he... So, Benny Kramer, his brother hired a guy.

They gave him pilot life. license on how to fly a bell helicopter, right? The one with the big glass ball around it, right? There's a lot of bell helicopters. Okay, well, this is the one when it had a big, the kind of the glass by thing. My was a jet helicopter. Yeah, well, this is not that one.

I know. So, this is more like a crop duster type, type hair, you know, one. So he learned to fly that. They went and grabbed, they got an airplane, and they, they fitted it with extra fuel tanks. So he could actually fly from Miami all the way to Columbia. Yeah, that's a common thing. So they had the plane waiting. The guy, Benny's supposed to meet the guy in the rec yard.

The guy takes off at the helicopter, and Benny's supposed to be there at a certain time. So Benny's outside, let's say it's 11 o'clock. He's waiting. I remember this now. He's waiting. It's been 20 minutes. Benny's freaking out. Where is this fucking guy?

Like they're going to call count soon. They're going to close the rec yard. They're going to call count. So he runs inside and keep in mind, Benny, while he had been there, had gained like 60 pounds. He runs inside. He tries to call his brother from the phone. While he's there, he hears people screaming that there's a helicopter in the rec yard. He runs outside as a guy's trying to land the helicopter.

So Benny runs up to the helicopter. He gets inside the helicopter, but he's really fat. He reaches in and he grabs like the alternator or alt-tel or whatever it is. Because, you know, those things were complicated, way more complicated. Oh, man, you step on the side of a helicopter that you're talking about right now. It's going to tilt right away. And if that guy weighed that much, he'd screw things up right away. Supposedly, he also grabbed something and pulled it.

And immediately the helicopter, the back of the helicopter, it swung sideways. it hit the chain link fence because it was a tight little, this was not a big wreckyard, the fences are small. And it hit it and it flipped the helicopter over and threw Benny out of the helicopter. Benny ended up breaking his leg and his ribs and something. This was Miami. This is Miami. Yeah.

And this is a... They did it in Tallahassee, too. Oh, okay. Well, I know that after this whole thing happened. So, you know, Benny, of course, gets, he gets an escape charge. Added all into his life sentence and then the helicopter pilot got three years and then that's nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And then they ended up in federal prisons like throughout the country. They ended up if you went in the wreck, most of the rackyards, you would have these light poles and they started putting wires from the light poles all the way to the fences. You'd have these fucking hundreds of, of, you know, hundreds of feet or yards of these metal. You know, this started in France The helicopter trip started in France

That guy escaped in France Didn't work well in Miami No, it didn't work well anywhere Really? France, the guy got away Seems like it's great Seems like you get away You got a, you know Like you get a life sentence

And Benny Kramer had a ton of money You know, he just had tons of money So you got nothing to lose Hey you guys, I appreciate you watch the video Do me favor hit the subscribe button Hit the bell so get notified of videos like this Also if you go in the description box, you're going to see a link to the book. It's on Amazon. This is what the

front jacket cover. It's called Reifer. And click on the link, go buy the book, leave a good review on the website because that helps drive the Amazon algorithm to promote the book for Amazon to suggest it to book buyers on Amazon. So I really appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Please consider joining our Patreon. It's $10 a month. We put Patreon exclusive content. There will probably be some stuff from this interview on Patreon. Thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. Go into the description box, hit the link, go to Amazon, buy the book, leave a good review. Thank you very much. See ya.