The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - How A Career Trafficker Moved TONS Of Pot & Escaped The Law For 40 Years: Sitdown W The Reefer King

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

Dive deep into the captivating life of George Gleckler, one of America's most prolific pot smugglers. George discusses his 40-year career in drug trafficking, his childhood trauma, and his eventual transformation into a psychologist. From unloading tons of pot from Colombian ships off the coast of New York to becoming a certified therapist in Los Angeles, George shares jaw-dropping stories of his smuggling days, his brushes with the law, and his journey toward healing and redemption. This is an episode filled with thrilling tales, raw emotions, and powerful insights into the human psyche. Go Support George! George's Practice: https://npidb.org/doctors/behavioral_health/marriage-family-therapist_106h00000x/1356599534.aspx This Episode Is #Sponsored By MANDO! Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code MITCHELL at shopmando.com! #mandopod Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I saw the first pound of Columbia. I'm going to buy a boat and I'm going to get the boat first and then reach out. So all I needed was a place to offload. And I found a very wealthy man that had this huge estate. And I gave the guy some good cash and he would turn his back. I ended up with a million and a half in my pocket. I should have gotten caught. I don't know how I didn't get caught.

George Gleckler is a psychologist based here in Los Angeles. But for 40 years, he was one of the most prolific pot smugglers in American history. Born and raised in Long Island in the 1970s, George was one of the earliest gringoes to begin unloading pot cargo ships coming up from Columbia and anchoring in the waters off the coast of New York City. George was always seeking adventure and the next thrill. Besides manning pot ships for Colombian cartels, he got his pilot's license and began flying in plane loads of Mexican Sinsemia from Sinaloa

and set up a distribution ring from the East Coast all the way to see. Seattle, Washington. He can only speculate how many tons of pot he moved in his 40-year career. He was never caught and so didn't make the headlines like other famous traffickers of his era, but it was undoubtedly millions and millions of pounds. However, George was much more than just a drug smuggler. He was an avid painter and artist and interested in the power of psychiatry and therapy to help heal the human mind. He talks about his own trauma from childhood and how it went untreated and eventually led him into substance abuse and illegal activity. After having children, George decided it was time to retire from the game.

He settled in Los Angeles and became a certified neuropsychologist, and to this day, he still has a very successful practice. He truly was one of the most fascinating cats I've had the pleasure of speaking with. For a bonus talk with George, where he dives further into how he transformed his life from drug-addicted outlaw to a sober and honest citizen, go over to Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show. Ladies and gentlemen, you can only get stories like this one right here.

I give you George Gleckler right here in The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. I had a so-called partner. When I first met him, he said, I'm a pilot. I said, you want to smuggle. We were getting up to three, four hundred pounds on a plane. We landed in Chowak, and we went through customs. Then we snuck back through the mountains and went and loaded up and brought it back the same exact way.

That's when I see lights behind me start to flash And I didn't even think I just hit it I was driving like my life depended on And then I parked the car, hopped out, Close the door and I started running And he pulls out a burner, shank It's like six inches And he passes it to me

And he goes here, that's yours Don't ever leave the cell block without this He was the reason I made it out of that place alive Did you ever, did you get drafted? No, I was at the University of Arizona Okay Friends of mine were coming back in body bags, and it was just a bad situation, man. How did you dodge it?

I was student deferment. Right. Right. So are you, what part of Long Island are you from? Believe it or not, the town's called Hicksville. Yeah. It's accurate, though, because they're a Long Island Hicks. It was right in the middle, and then we moved to Bay Shore.

Okay. But I grew up, I went to Hicksville High School. went with Billy Joel Right A lot of talent Has come out of Long Island Yeah They get out and they do not return

Most of them Now do you Are you from a middle class family What was the household like Oh God There's a trip I have PTSD from it That's what it was like

Okay My dad worked at Grumman aircraft For his entire life He was a plumber before that He played minor league baseball You know And I think That's part of why

he got depressed and kind of withdrew. You know, if he said nine words to me in my life, that was a lot. Wow. Okay. And my mom was a victim of child sexual abuse. Uh-huh. And she got psychotic at times. It was really bad.

Yeah, I didn't know who I had to poke my head in, which mom's is here right now. Wow. Okay. So you effectively had no parents? I had parents. I had a roof over my hand. had everything I needed. You know, I didn't want for anything.

Right. But I couldn't trust they were unpredictable and not stable. Mm-hmm. You know? My dad was stable, but he was removed. Mentally removed, I think, was with my mom. Yeah. And, but my mom was just very unstable.

Okay. And that was scary for a kid because you look for protection. Yeah. Well, he's not protecting me, and she's not going to protect me. I'm on my own. Mm-hmm. And what happens is, it kind of, there was an incident at Jones Beach where she had me by the hand at a very young age where, you know, a wave came up and the white water took my feet out from under me.

And I just remember looking up and seeing her and she was like totally, you know, like smiling and not paying attention. And I remember from that day on, it became clear. It was like I was a kid with two minds, one that was in reality and one that was in fantasy. Now with fantasy, yeah, my mom's there. She's going to protect me. But the reality was, no, kid, you're on your own. And from then on, I lived one person with two minds. Yeah.

And it's different than somebody has multiple personality disorder. It's not that. It's just like fantasy was easier. I have the same thing. I still have to battle fantasies of the old life of. Oh, yeah. You wouldn't believe the things that go through my head. head, you know, despite all of this podcast success and I'm so far removed from the old days,

but I still have like dreams of being a drug kingpin. That's the stupidest thing. And I like, I create these different characters. I have a whole family. It's why it's really, it's really psychotic, but I don't know how to get it out of my head. So you from, and from a young age, I think a lot of kids are like that. But, you know, usually it's like they want to play sports. Oh, I played sports. You know, I was an average kid growing up. How did you get into, in high school, were you a pot smoker?

Were you selling pot? No, pot wasn't really a big deal until about 11th grade people started getting high. Yeah. And, you know, I was always drifting between friends. I could never really, like, make a connection. They think that's what hurt me to most. I couldn't connect at a deeper level with people, and I would just keep drifting trying to connect.

So there was a lot. And then all of a sudden my brother, I'd say brother, but he was actually my cousin. My mother's sister lived next door, and we had this compounds, so to speak. School was a dead end right next to me, at my house, and she had a house, and my father being German, had these big hedges all the way around, and he made it, you know, like a common. back. And he kind of just

retired into a Walden garden in the backyard and just checked out. So how did you, when you went to Arizona for college, when did you start selling product?

And how did that come about? Well, let's go back to Hicksville for a second. My brother dragged me when he said, come on, I'm going to show you, turn you on to something cool. And it was called the elegant billiard parlor. And this guy died that owned it and his wife, Vicki, she looked like

Mae West, big blind wig, big boobs, bright red lipstick. She ran it and everybody was her kid. And, you know, it was all the lost children gathered there. And all of a sudden, I connected. And I found it real easy to

become competent sewing hash, just dimes of hash. I'd buy an ounce, sometimes a quarter pound a hash. And I was a guy, to go to in the pool room if you wanted Hesh. And that's where I learned to do heroin. That was, you know, if you were a man, you did some heroin. You didn't say no.

Right. Otherwise, you're a punk. Wow. So that's how you guys looked at heroin back in those days, not as something that, like, a dirty street junkie does. Well. But was it kind of glamorous? No, not at all yet.

It was probably, it's more like you said, dirty street drug. But, you know, it was just, we're a bunch of lost kids. Some were bad And I was a bad kid, but not by nature But there was there must have been some kind of identity around using heroin in those days Like I'm a heroin addict It wasn't spoken man You know you just

We did it among ourselves I never put a needle on my arm I snorted it or I smoked it But one time I did a needle But I just like to hide from smoking it And I could also Control was an important thing in my life.

It was so out of control my life. I needed control. So if I hit it up, I lost control. If I just snorted or smoked a little, I could still maintain. And I like that. Wow. Dead in the feelings, but still operate in 100%. And you're a high school kid still?

Plus grade. Wow. Who's selling you smack? Who's got the age back then? Oh, God, it was just a friend He went to prison Did a robbery He went to prison

Came out of a junkie And he spread it into the pool hall All right And it's brown It's brown stuff No, it's white China white Okay

Yeah But you never got into that Selling that You strictly Stayed on the other end of the bag Stayed away from it man Yeah I just bought some

You know The profits from the hash It was cheap back then Yeah Dine bag You know it's 10 bucks Hash Interesting

Interesting. So it's dark, gummy-looking hash. All kinds. There was red Lebanese, blonde Lebanese, catmandu. Right. And that kind of predated marijuana, did it not, in the U.S.? Or was it just around the same time? I found it after marijuana.

Okay. And it, you know, just maybe it was there before. I don't know. But in my experience, I got it later, a year or two after the weed. and, you know, it was all It was Nepalese Temple Ball. That was the big thing. If you could get the round Nepalese Temple ball

with the, there was this white swirl in it, and they said it was opium. I don't know if it was or not. Interesting. Okay. So then, but you graduated, but you got into college somehow. Yeah, well, I went to St. John's University for two years.

Okay. And you continued selling hash? No, I kind of quit that. Yeah, I got busy with school. and I didn't know what I wanted to do. You know, the Vietnam War, it sounds bad because a lot of people died there, and I don't want to say I was trying to not go, but I was, to be honest. And, you know, I had three friends come back.

They were dead. Kids I played baseball with in Little League. Wow. So I didn't want to go. So I went to St. Johns, and I still didn't know who I was. And then my friends came back during the summer, and they were at the University of Arizona. They talked me into it.

And just like that, Mexico is only like an hour away. Yeah. You know, 60 miles. I said, okay, I'm in. Yeah. I transferred from one school to another. Of course. And the weather, my God, from a kid from Long Island.

Oh, my God. You must have loved being in Arizona. Yeah. It was great. And it was just, it was small. And 300,000 people in Tucson. Yeah. 50,000 students.

It was just great. Mm-hmm. You know, it's just what I needed. And, uh, I rented an apartment since I was in a freshman. I could live off campus. So four of us got in a two-bedroom apartment, all from Hickson. It was wonderful.

Nice. And, you know, what I learned, all the apartments and sunset towers, most of them were smugglers and dealers. Wow. It was insane. What year are we talking now? That was 1970. 1970. Yeah.

So this is like the very beginning of. the Mexican kind of like marijuana family smuggling industry, you might say.

I don't know when Mexicans, you know, you see these old movies, you know, from the 30s with weed.

I'm sure it came from Mexico, but I never put a name to the place it came from. I'm sure. Obviously,

it's coming from Mexico if you have all these stash houses in Tucson. So that's... Yeah,

so Sunset Towers. And the next door of this really hot girl Rosa. She was up there's Seen. Nogales is the border town. Is Arizona and then there's Mexico, Nogales. And she

lived on here by chance. I went to her house for Thanksgiving. It was a customs agent. Oh, Christ. She had a friend that came from Mexico named Marco. He was my first legit connection. Okay. And I said,

Marco, I just went on the campus and I bought an ounce of weed and they called it a lid. Yeah. I don't know what a lid means. What is a lid? He said, and he said, sometimes it's three fingers, sometimes it's two fingers. Yeah. And I said, well, let me tell you, it's going to cost you 20 bucks in New York.

And this is only 10 bucks here. Yeah. Let's get together. Sure. So then there is this guy, Jim. I didn't know how to put it together yet. You know, I never smuggled. This guy, Jim, did a couple Mexican trips.

So I turned him on to Marco. So I went with him. They paid me 500 bucks to carry two duffel bags of weed. And there are Ami sacks, only green duffel bags from army surplus. And so you went down to Mexico with Marco? With Marco, with Jim, and three other guys. Wow. Where did you go?

Where did you meet to pick up the work? Marco took us to, I would say it's four or five blocks from just going inland. and more, you know, from the border. Okay, so you're in Nogales. In Lagoos, Mexico. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local total wine and more to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for

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And it was like creepy as hell, man, because we were these white guys on a corner out away from where the tourists come. And we're just like dust is coming up. There's the neon lights. It looked like some kind of movie scene. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Finally, they came and grabbed us and said, all right, jump in the car.

And they took us to this road and said, all right, get out and run up that hill. And one of the things Jim told me, he says, make sure you bring two inner tubes, you know, rubber inner tubes. And I said, okay. So we run through the cemetery. I'm tripping over tombstones. Dogs are barking. And there's the fence, the United States border with barbed wire. Thank you, Jim.

We took the tire tubes and we threw them over the barbed wire, man. And that was great. You know, it worked perfect. That was the border wall back then. Yeah. That was like the strict border wall. Yeah. It was like a V shape of barbed wire.

Yeah. So you had to be kind of an athlete, you know, to climb out under it and then flip yourself over. Yeah. You know, and then throw, you know, first you had to throw all the bags over. Right. And each bag weighed 50 pounds. So that was a trip. Wow.

Yeah. And there was like, there was like a basin almost. And then it was like 300-yard dash to this hill. It was like a plateau. And there's a scrub shit, whatever it was. And then once you hit that spot, you know, you're wide open, man. Anyone with a flashlight can hone in on you. There was this mound of dirt.

You know, it was like just like a plateau. You'd go up like sand dunes. But it was rock and dirt. And you go about 100 feet and it plateaus and then you just walk eight miles. Wow. And we had the cross stash right near the drive-in theater. And we knew, you know, how to locate it. Yeah.

And Jim was up and down that 100 times on a dirt bike. Yeah. And so we did it. Wow. So you got over a couple hundred pounds of pot as. I had 100. I had two. That's all I could carry.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we got. Two college kids. Yeah, 100 pounds. Yeah, we had 500 pounds. Wow. So he did well.

I said, what did you pay for, Jim? I said, never mind. It was like 12 bucks he paid. For how much? A pound. Yeah. And so I found out that I could get it for seven bucks from Marco. So I decided to go, I only did it with Jim.

Jim was a weird guy, man. He was like on another level. Like something, he was spaced, you know. He wasn't autistic, but he got really high on something. something and never came down. Yeah. We were, that first trip, we're walking through the desert. And he hands me this piece of paper.

And it's this scribbled a lion to follow. And he said, this is the map to the drive-in, George. I said, you're kidding. You want me to follow this? We're out in the middle of nowhere. And he said, I said, what are you going to do? Well, there's a campfire there. I think it's the border patrol.

I'm going to go up and see what they're talking about. And I just looked, he just took off and left this out there. We found the movie. We found, I found a windmill that made noise, an old wooden one. And I walked towards it and then sure enough, there was civilization. There was the driving. So we got back. We threw the trunk of a car and drove up to Nogales Highway.

And then now you realize, oh, I can go around Jim and deal directly with Marco. Yeah. And. But the next day, I go to Jim on campus. I go to Jim. What'd you do, man? Oh, there were border patrol. I said, what did they do?

What did they say? I don't know. I fell asleep when I woke up. They were gone. Yeah. That was Jim. Wow. So I didn't feel too safe with them.

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Wow. Yeah. How many runs did you make like that? I made probably three or four A nice lot getting horses And tying horses together And backpacking them with horses You know

And the farm is You know, I'd have to cut You know like Horses? Yeah, I had to cut fencing But as long as the branches didn't mind As long as I mended them But the first trip was the scariest

Hang on. So where did you got horses on the U.S. side? I bought horses. I own them. Okay, so you bought horses You brought them from the stable brought them to the border fence, went over to Mexico, cut and then came back with the pot,

cut holes in the fence. No, I didn't cut holes in the fence. Okay, threw it over. Okay. And then you put them on the... Then tied them together. Dude, you're like an old Mexican man on a burro just trudging through the desert.

Like the adventures of dawn one. Yeah, exactly. That's hilarious. But... And so were you able to bring back more pot that way? Now that you had horses? Oh, yeah. I didn't have to pay anybody.

I just had to feed the horses. Right. You know, and I didn't trust anybody. You know, growing up with my mom, she was paranoid. And I think, you know, everybody was the enemy. So I kind of grew up thinking everybody's the enemy, too. So I didn't trust people too well. Right.

The first trip I ever made, though, on my own, this is important. It was like I was either going to quit or I was going to continue. You know, I ran down that three years. hundred yards without the horses myself and light started coming a vehicle started coming right alongside the fence I couldn't tell what side of the fence and then I saw him he was on this side of the fence and you know with the hill when it rains a lot makes these little like crevices and I took the weed and myself and I just buried myself in this crevice he went up on top because he bit the light and he didn't see me on the bottom.

Wow. And he was up above me. And the fucker, I don't know how he had radar or something. Right. Maybe. You know, he just sat there for Ellis and I would sit there. And so you're just lying there. Lying there in his dirt.

That's fucking crazy. God knows I'm thinking about scorpions and snakes. Right. You know, you just sit back and say, God, what are they doing in the pool room right now? Yeah, right. Who are I am right now? Can you imagine? if the cats in the pool room knew that you were hiding out the desert with 500 pounds of pot on you?

Yeah, it was more like, what the fuck am I doing? You actually be in the pool room. But you obviously got something out of it besides just money. Yeah. So, you know, doing the dumb thing, I took a rock like you think you would. And I heaved at 50 yards, you know. And he wouldn't fake it. You know, he didn't fake out.

He put the lake, boom, almost like 10 feet from me. And he didn't fall for it. And so, who the fuck is this guy? Yeah. So I knew one thing. After about three hours, I had to get up on top and to the windmill before the sun came up. Because eight miles, that's a long hike. Yeah.

Especially carrying weed. And I said, okay, I have to leave the weed. I got to say goodbye to it. So I just rolled, you know, and it seemed like I had to go about 300 yards. It seemed like it took hours, but I don't know how long it took. But I finally got enough distance where I. I climbed up there a plateau and he didn't see me

and I went and I walked back to the driving. Did you eventually go back and get it? Get your pot? No, that's really good. He, uh, I had a 68 GTO so I'm driving down the road all of a sudden the lights start flashing.

Guy pulls me over and it's him. Oh, I didn't know it at the time. He says, what are you doing out here? I said, I just want to see some hoarse. down in New Dallas. Yeah. Why was he caught by the drive-in?

And I just looked. It just had no answer. He said, come here, I'm going to show you something. He had my weed in the back of his truck. Oh, no way. Fucking guy. Yeah, excuse me. But didn't have enough to put a case on you, though, right?

No. You weren't with the dope. No. So what lesson did you learn that day? Just, you know, you want to be a criminal? You got to take a chance, you know? It's a risk. And that didn't defer.

Nothing to give me, you know. That didn't stop you, though. It did for a month. You know, I said, shit, that was close. Now he's got me, you know, is where I live because of the car registration. I have to change my address, which I did. Then I put it back together again. And I said, I'm going to do the horses.

And I'm going to go further down, way further down, the fence line. And that's what I did. Yeah. I stayed out of that area. Okay. So you're getting over. 500 pounds a pot and then how are you for $7 a pound and then how are you flipping them are you selling them locally or are you sending them back east well that's why i went to muckle for i said

let's get them i'll give you some money up front and you and i split you know and we go to new york with it because it's sold in tucson for 65 a pound wow and it that was a cheap you know up to 75 And then we take it to New York is 125 to 135. Wow. So it was a good markup. That's a, from $7? In the 70s? Yeah, right.

So you're making tens of thousands of run? Yeah, I was going for, I decided I was going to go into school of education. And they said, well, you can become a teacher and get $7,700 a year. Right. Or I can make it in the night. Yeah, easily. Yeah. At least.

Wow. There was so much room. There was so much. markup. Now, how did that progress? It progressed to where I said, I don't feel safe out there in the desert anymore. There were stories of, I don't know if it's true. They're saying they're bringing shit from Vietnam back now, you know, his radar stuff, these, you know, sound detectors. And it could have been bullshit, could have been real. I said, I don't feel safe out there,

Marco. And you're just sitting here. What about what can we put together? My sister. He says, I said, tell me about your sister. Well, she lives in Mexico, you know, in the house. But she works at Valley National Bank in Nogales, Arizona. And she's been working there for 12 years. And I said, yeah, so he says, well, we're going to take her, make keys for her car. We're going to load the trunk up. We're going to let her drive through the border like she has for 12 years.

And then we're going to go steal the car from Valley. a national bank and unload it. Yeah. We did that for a whole year. Oh, my God. And his sister never knew. No. Never knew.

Good older brother. But I came back. I said, okay, we're done with this. How much did you get across? Quite a few trips, I imagine. We could fit without her noticing a good 400 pounds, 500 pounds. And you could get rid of them like that on the East Coast, right? Within a week.

Yeah. And then were you also? transporting it yourself back east? Okay. So you're constantly back and forth. Back and forth. I loved it. Wow.

You know, brook 66, man. It was nothing else in the world like it. Right. It's dead today. It to have all the bypasses. I used to love that. Two in the morning you could wheel into a place in New Mexico and just the cafe is open all night. There's a couple of truck drivers.

He tells some old stories. Yeah. Then you're on the road again. That was America. Right. I loved it. Right. You're having a steak and a steak and eggs.

Yeah. A couple of laughs. They don't know what you got. That was real America. Right. Now they have Motel 6 with bypasses. Uh-huh. And now you go, I went off.

Oh, it was Grants, New Mexico. And I went where I was my favorite stop. And it was the cafe was open. The one was in it. Yeah. You know, it was old. It was running down. There was no one on the streets.

It was just a ghost town. How long would it take you to drive? from Arizona to Long Island? Almost, it was exactly 2,400 miles, 2,450 miles. So 50 miles an hour is 48, I guess 48 hours. Okay, so you spend two nights on the road. Yeah, or it would take four days if you want to take it easy.

Yeah. Or a couple times we blast it through. You know, we did some white crosses and blasted it through in 24, 48 straight hours. And you never had a problem with highway patrol? Never got pinched. Yeah. No. Wow.

So now here you are like 21? 22 years old? Yeah, 21, 22. So you're financially free? Yeah. Are you still going to school? Yeah, but I got on academic probation. I wonder why.

And then I started paying this guy, George and Bonnet, and he was going to class for me. Nice. It was funny. I was on campus. campus one day and I was walking with George and we're both George and the instructor said, hi George and I looked and he was talking to him. He said that was your geography teacher, George. Nice.

Nice. Nice. I couldn't lose the student to firm it. Right. So I paid someone to go to school for me. Right. You know, it sounds like a chicken shit thing. But who's going to volunteer and say, I want to go to nom and get shot out?

No. You know, it's, I God bless the people that. People were shooting themselves on purpose to get out of going. Yeah. I still feel like a shift saying that, you know, and laughing. That's all right. George Bush, Trump, they all got rich people to firmets. God, Nixon and Kissinger should be war criminals.

Yeah, they are. You know, Cambodia. Yeah. So are you still doing H? Yeah. and smack throughout this whole period when you're loving life, you're making money, you've got building your identity as this drug trafficker? Yeah, I got married and my wife was, she was a French LaGroro, was the last name and she was beautiful and we had a beautiful daughter Kim and everything

was right. And then I realized, you know, I'm a smuggler. I'm addicted to heroin. Now my wife is, She wants to have a family And she was young And I was young And it just we went in opposite directions But today with good friends Okay So you're smuggling pot

Through Marco's sister's trunk This goes on for about a year How long do you continue Like what do you switch it up after you I wasn't happy anymore So what I did I said Marco it's time we quit you know, I always believe that we have certain limits, you know, and certain trips have limits

too. People get in trouble when they try to cowboy it. Right. So I said, we're going to buy your sister a house. I'm holding back some money. You could buy a house in Nogales, Mexico for $10,000. Mark will start, bitch. And then I said, no, I'm keeping five back. And we bought the sister house. And I left that. And one day, there's a kid. And one day there's a kid. another, a friend of Marcos, his name was Juan Frankel, and he was from Arizona, Nogales, Arizona, I'm sorry. He had a friend come to the door, and I'll never forget it. You know, the house where my wife was, and he was a 50-year-old guy, and he was very, he was

dapper, I'll have to tell you. It was slick, blonde hair, blue eyes, and I said, Juan, you set me up. Didn't you? No, George, no. He's not a cop. I said, you're a cop? And he says, of course not. Yeah.

Turns out that he was a guy that very, he came from an extremely wealthy family in Kuyakan. Kulikana, Sinaloa. Yeah. His family, I don't know the exact year is after World War I that they moved to Kuyakan. And they had him and he was born and raised in Mexico. And his family bought a cattle ranch. They had German machinery. He took me to the factory.

And they tanned leather. They made the shoes. They had the retail stores. Okay. They had the complete monopoly on shoes. Right. And I said, so what's this deal about? And he said, well, we're not, it's not operating.

I said, what happened? Well, me and my brother, when my parents died, we went through all the money. So we need to get some marijuana smuggling going so we can kick things back in gear. I said, you want to smuggle. And I said, I said, what do you know, what do you got to offer? He said, I'm a pilot. And then I said, wow, how long have you had a pilot's license? And that's when he told me he was a German Luftwaffe pilot.

Holy shit. His name was Richard Timmerman. And what happened is the family also had a fish delivery business where they flew fish around Mexico and entered the states. And he learned to fly at an early age. Then they sent him for an education in Berlin. And I talked to him, you know, he had a tremendous library in his house. It was fascinating. but he

saw Hitler preaching before Hitler became in power and he saw a whole rise of the third And then he volunteered to join the Luftwaffe? No. He said they drafted him into it.

Wow. Even though he was a Mexican living in Mexico. He became a flight instructor. Wow. So did he fly for the Luftwaffe in World War II? Yeah, he flew one of the first jets. Whoa.

And he he got shot down in that article I sent you. I did the best I could at interpreting it, but it gave you an idea of who the guy was. He stole the plane, got shot down, stole another one, and finally they got word to the family in Mexico, and they were very powerful people. They were so wealthy.

And right in the middle of World War II, he told me, he said that General Eisenhower sent him to New York, German Luftwaffe pilot put him up in New York City and then got him a flight down to Kuya Khan Wow And why would he do that just because of who his parents were? Wow

And probably money Yeah But you know he was a lot of Nazis out Sure America did for sure They mentioned he was a spy and it flipped me out You know in that article It was written and that was a tribute

If he passed away and that was a tribute to him. Wow. And it mentioned that, you know, various things. And I being a spy, and I said, well, he wasn't a spy. I said, what is this woman getting his information? Okay, so tell me about it. So now these guys, he's over the hill, family's gone, he needs money.

What does he give you? Does he match your price? Or does he match Marco's price? Or does it get better? It gets better. You know, his dream was to, he brought me to this building. He said, this is going to be the new, you know, house of the bombarderos, the fire department. Yeah.

So. And this is in Kooliakar? Yeah. Wow. He wanted to be fire chief. He was like a big kid. I'm leaving things out, you know, like when I first met him, he had to prove himself. So he said, watch this.

He loaded up his trunk with some weed from. Nogales, drove right through the border with it. And I said, we're not doing that again. You're too valuable. What are we going to do for a plane? You went and stole one.

Wow. And we started doing airplane trips out of Mexico. So you're taking off from, he's taken off from where? It was in between Kuyakhan and Nogales. Okay. And he had some people there.

It was all paid off. It was a strip. with plane and Arizona is nothing but one giant landing strip. Of course. We found dirt roads and all I had to do is get wooden stakes and tape flashlights to them and drive them into the ground. And there's the runway. Wow.

We'd run down and turn them all on when we got contact with them. Yeah. And he didn't land the plane. We'd just throw out in our trunks and go. Much more efficient than crawling over the fence. Oh, yeah. How much are you getting over on an average plane run? Depends on a plane.

You know, some planes couldn't carry shit. And distance was another thing. The single engine seemed to outperform the twin engine back then. So we were doing single engine planes, and we were getting up to three, four hundred pounds on a plane. Okay. And it was really... Not a ton.

No. Not very much, actually, comparatively. You know, we got, the next plane we got was we went on board an Arrow commander, and that was like a new corporate jet. like a corporate type of airplane to take executives everywhere. It was a great plane. How much did you buy that plane for? Did you steal that one too?

No, we bought it. We bought it used. I think it was about $40,000 at the time. But it was cheap. And how much can you fit in that one? I bought a DC3 for $35,000. Yeah. Those are good planes, I've heard.

The DC3, a lot of smugglers. They were amazing. They never stopped. A lot of smugglers preferred that plane. Especially coming up from South America, they could make it all the way from Columbia to Florida or like New Orleans. No, they're bladder tanks. But they, another plane that was very good was, you know who Sky King was, the old show? No.

Well, he had this, it was a beach 18. It had two, on the tail had two upright. I've seen that. And it was a tail dragger, just like the DC3. and we could put close to 800 to 1,000 pounds in it safely. Right. You know, the three took a lot more, 3,000 pounds. And what are you putting in that?

What do you need to make a 3,000 pound run? Same thing. Well, with the DC-3, you need about landing strip had to be 500 feet, not 500 feet, a half a mile long. Okay. The beach and the arrow commander, you could get down and 1,200, 1,500 feet. Wow.

But you needed a half a mile with the DC3 and, you know, to have safe, a safe landing and takeoff. Wow. Did you ever start flying? I went for my license and then I just let it fall through. Yeah. I just didn't keep up with it. Did it seem to you better to let somebody else take the flying risk and you just grab the stuff when it lands and take off?

No, I wanted to be up in that plane. You did? Oh, wow. Yeah. I did once when we were a flying risk. smuggling up into Canada or in Alaska. I had a pilot from that, well, there was a guy that I had my, when you live in Tucson, you have people from all over the country coming to Tucson.

It was like the mecca, the bi-Mexican wheat. You know, so I made close friends, one in Seattle, one in Chicago, New Jersey, New York, West Virginia. They ate this stuff up. Huntington, West Virginia. So the guy in Seattle, we became really close-tight friends. Wow. So High Times came out with a magazine on the cover.

It said, Alaska, north to the future, I'll never forget it. And now my mind clicks. And I said, what are they getting for it up there? I'm going, you know, and I call Corey. I said, ask some of you from Canadians, man, because we're running weed up to Canada. and then we decided to also include Anchorage. And for Colombian weed, I was sending Corey a truckload of Colombian weed

when we started doing the Columbian. And we were taking that and selling it for $600 a pound, $650 a pound in Canada and the same up in Alaska, I believe, I can't remember the exact price. What was your price? We were buying it in Columbia for 10 bucks or something Yeah but there is varying degrees

Sure You know and hang on we'll get there So I want to keep moving us through So you're you've now got Kulia Khan weed flying in and landing in Arizona What are you moving a week How many runs are you doing a week? Just one

Okay You know No one every two weeks Okay So I was not somebody that was like What's a cowboy this thing Let's just go for it. Yeah.

You know, I really planned things out. Yeah. You know, I took trips down there, see how the road was, the highway. Yeah. You know, so I did my exploring. Right. You did your due diligence.

Yeah. And now you're meeting all of these different distributors from all over the country. Well, I asked them when they came to Tucson. How would you like to get it delivered? You know, you didn't have to come here anymore. Right. And they said, oh, that'd be great, George. What price?

So I gave him a break, like $110 a pound instead of $125. Wow. And they loved it. They, you know, and I would front them too, so they would make more money too. And would you take the product yourself up to Seattle? Yeah. Whoa. So you're almost like a long-haul truck driver.

I enjoyed being on the country roads, man. Wow. The road at night, there's nothing better. You go through Kansas and two in the morning and they're burning the hayfields, you know. Yeah. It's like really America, you know. But doesn't that get old? Doesn't that get old?

You're always on the road. Moving that kind of weight for people. That didn't get old. Wow. I liked it. I liked being between point A and point B. That's the only place that made sense to me. I wasn't happy in Mexico, Colombia, wasn't happy in home.

But put me between point A and point B. Wow. I was my best. You know, it was comfortable. Isn't that something? And you're just purely a middleman? No, I'm smuggled and the weed. And I would say they were more the middleman.

They would buy like 100 pounds from me and I'd front them 100. Whatever they bought, I front it. Yeah. And I reduced the price. So it was a great deal for them. They didn't have to get on the road with it. Sure. You know, and they got, they make their same money.

And you're still making, if you sell a pound for 110, bucks a piece and you're you're buying it for how much from uh making over a hundred dollars a pound so you're getting it for about five dollars from seven dollars okay and this is pretty good like give us an idea of what mexican brickweed looked like in 1972 oh god what it was coming up not from me but there are times i would get you know i was a middleman for a couple times like in sunset dollars and i would get a load of weed and sometimes a whole entire plant would be packed into it and they would brick it another time like they hadn't even trim the buds off of it oh my god then i found coke bottles broken glass and one time a finger

in the weed bill yeah it was it was like perfect each one was like a pound and three quarters yeah they called it a kilo but it was just a pound three quarters yeah and wow so it not even all of it it was smokable you got a goddamn finger out you got to get the seeds out stems out and clean it wow And, but it's always sold. Yeah. It always sold. There was no competition. Right.

There was no competition and there was barely any law enforcement. Well, Jamaica became competition first. And I remember, but there wasn't enough Jamaican. Right. Just think, you got six million people living in New York. Right. You know, how long, you know, look at the rest of the country. How long is a few loads of Jamaican going to last?

Yeah. It's going to get sucked up instantly. Yeah. Okay. Who were your, what were your biggest, markets at the time when you're bringing in Bud from Kulia Khan, when you're still in Arizona. What are your biggest buying markets? I was sent up to Seattle.

I sent some to New York. You know, each trip was different. I would like driving. Yeah. What were your biggest buyers, though, do you think? Like, do you think it was the northwest? Oh, northeast was the biggest. Of course.

The population belt and went up to Boston. Yeah. So how long did you stay in Arizona doing this with this Luftwaffe? ex-Lufthwaffe pilot. Until my partner ripped him off, I had a so-called partner that I met in high school, in junior high school.

I was selling firecrackers and he was selling protection. And typical New York junior high. Right. So he muscled in on my scam. He wanted packs of firecrackers for protection. And I said, fuck you. So I got in a fight with one of these guys

and he was like left, he was like left back two or three times. He was a big dude. And I got my ass whipped. And it was the last time I got my ass whipped. I took the next train to Jamaica Queens and joined a boxing gym. Nice. We used to my mom. My mom loved going to New York City.

And we'd take the Long Island train. Change trains now at Jamaica for New York. And I would always look down and it was like a sea of all different kinds of people. Yeah. It was a blend of every culture. And there was a boxing gym. Big name, boxing. So I went there.

And I said, I need to learn. This is what happened. I need to learn out of box. And he taught me in a box, man. And then I got, had so much, I was so angry inside from childhood and everything else that I just fought everything that walked. You know? So you went to business with this guy, your childhood friend slash bully? Listen to this.

He ended up getting shipped. off to Nam because he punched a principal or something. I wasn't there, but he did something to, you know, Mr. Brown, and Bruce was out of school for good, and I got detention. And back in Tucson, Sunset Towers, I walked into the apartment one day and he was sitting there with Bruce. Wow. Was he AWOL?

He didn't get out from Nam? No, he went through a non, but I'm sure he hit underneath a truck, you know? Right, right. on a hero. Or he was part of the My Lie massacre. And 71, Bruce got on a plane with a suitcase for a weed in Tucson. And I said, you should you want to do that? And there was no security, but still, you know.

Yeah. And you got busted. Okay. And then all of a sudden, we're driving around town visiting different connections. And Bruce said, oh, let's go down over here. And all of a sudden, we go down that street and the cops are busting people, this house. And, you know, there's Joey's house, and they were busting them. And then I realized Bruce's, he never went to jail.

He never went to court. He was working for the man. He's ratting. There you go. There you go. So I had to play, you want to keep your enemy close. Yeah. So I didn't confront them on it.

Right. I just let him keep having his hands in some money. Uh-huh. And eventually he got into the heroin really, really bad. And he just went bye-bye. So how did that make you leave Tucson? That's what I want to know. What's the next step after Arizona?

You couldn't sell the weed anymore. You got the Jamaican, like I said. It made people thirsty for more. And then the Colombian weed came in. And I remember sitting in Tucson, and I saw the first pound of Colombian weed. And I said, holy shit. There was nice, tight little buds.

Well, they had seeds, but not too many. Right. And it was like, wow, these things are nice. And it got me a lot higher. Yeah. And then I got this brick of, they called it wacky weed, you know. It was like almost blackish. And it was pressed really hard, you know.

And you'd have to like peel off. It was like paper thinnage bud. You had to peel them off. man, it was like doing, you know, asset. Yeah. And I said, I got to get to Florida. And it's a good time. Bruce is out of control.

I'm just going to take off. Wow. How old are you? 25. Okay. And you're... I left for good. When I started going there doing trips,

and then when I was 26, I was gone for good. Okay. So where in Florida do you end up? In Fort Lauderdale. Okay. And then I moved to New York. and I didn't like what I saw in Florida. And too many people getting ripped and a lot of cops.

So I said, I know Long Island really well. I'm going to work out of there because I said, I'm not going to be hauling weed that I bought in Miami up to 95. And New Jersey Turnpike was notorious with blowing people. It's hot, right? So I said, I'm not doing that. I'm going to buy a boat. I'm going to get the boat first.

and then reach out. Okay. And did you make Colombian connections while you were in Florida? Yeah. Okay. There's an old Jewish fellow. His name was Howard. He had to be 55, 56 years old.

And he was a hustler. He used to go up to the Catskills in New York. And, you know, like the Neville or Concord. And they had these shows going on all the time. Did you hear about them? Yeah, I remember the cat. Yes. Everybody talks about the Cats skills.

So he would go with his cousin Mo, who was like 70-something at the time, snow white hair. And his other brother, and the three of them would sit down at a table and start playing poker. And his doctor would come by who's on vacation. And it'd be three against one. And that's what he was doing. Okay. So what does this have to do with your Colombian connection? He was my connection.

He got me in touch with this other Jewish fellow. His name was Isaac. He lived in Boca Raton. and he had something to do with sewing machines, but he also owned three freighters. And he said, are you interested in working, you know, with Isaac? And I said, sure. I had what I went out and bought, which was a mistake, I bought a 70-foot, 72-foot Fed Ship. And the Fed Ship, I fell in love with it.

It was the Cadillac, the Rose Royce of all yachts. It was made in Holland. And in 56, it sold for $550,000. And I got it from the estate sale from Grito Grasso from Connecticut for 50 grand. His wife just wanted to get rid of it. Wow. It was sitting on dry dock. It was, you know, back then they put cotton between the strips of teak on the deck.

Okay. And then a little bit of filler. And everything went through and just completely destroyed the boat. So nowadays you can just put in putty. So now you've got a yacht to go out and meet the ships in the Long Island sound. So all I needed was a place to offload. Okay, I see. And then so these Jewish guys are the ones that have the connects with the Colombians.

Yeah, okay. Got it. So you actually never connected yourself with the Colombians at this time? No, before they gave me anything, I had to fly down the Medan. and lean. That's where he was from. Okay. And him and this guy, Raul Silvio, who's

his body god, and another guy, I don't want to mention his name. He, you know, he's... Whatever. Yeah. It's fine. Okay. So you, you went down and actually met the plugs in Medellin. Yeah, they sat down with me. We had coffee and we just

you know, gave him my driver's license and I had phony. Yeah. Yeah. It was easy back then. Of course. So, you know, I came back. And then they said, okay, this is what we're going to do. Howard's going to be the man that tells you where to be and when and what channel to go on.

Wow. So all I needed to do that back then you didn't have satellite communication. What we had was a Loran. And it beamed out to different locations, you know, and then it would give you, you know, it would triangulate things and give you a reading within. I would say 150 feet or where you are in the ocean. And that was good enough. Right. And he handed me a CB.

He said, you go on this channel. You know, it's only got a five or six mile range. Right. You know, single sideband skips over waves and can go a thousand miles. Yeah. You know, so that was great. And tell us how the ship, this was interesting. You were telling me about how this ship, instead of when it got to America,

unloading. It had different stops. Yeah. Like it had guys like you, these Colombians had guys like you all over the eastern seaboard all the way up to Canada and they would make drops and keep dropping as they moved south. The first drop was up by Maine. Yeah. So they went all the way north to Maine and then came south instead of the other way around. Instead of the inside. Right. Went way out, dropped off in Maine, came down, hit Boston. I was the next stop. And then they hit the Carolina. line is maybe Georgia, Florida after that. Wow.

Wow. Okay, so you were second stop. Third stop. Third stop. Yeah. Wow. And you were the only one in that area in New York with this connect, right? With this guy.

At the time, this was like early. There's only one, like two other people I knew in the New York area. They could have been more. But I only knew two other people that were smuggling weed into Long Island or New York or New Jersey. So you were so early in the business. Everything was in Florida. Yeah. And it was like Cowboy Central down there.

Yeah. And I got to remind me later. I know this story about that. So New York's wide open. It's wide open. It's a freebie, you know, unless you just fuck up. Yeah. And I almost fucked up.

Well, how much pot were you getting? 40,000 pounds. Wow. And I needed another boat, you know, so I got this. Palmer Johnson, another big yacht. The Palmer Johnson was cool because it didn't roll because I had a chining hole. And it's about water displacement. So they made the round bottom, you know, it was easier to get through a water displacement.

But it rolled, rocked and rolled, and it rocked and rolling with 40,000 pounds. I said, wow, this is going to be serious if it's a heavy sea. Did you know you were getting 40,000? Yeah. Okay. So you would place the orders beforehand. Yeah. I was from the desert. I knew nothing about boats. Right.

I went there and I learned a lot, man. Yeah. You know, and we got this guy that had a boat yard. And that was the big piece. We had to get the boat yard. And there was one, you know, we had to make sure no one was living aboard any other boats. Right. And if there were, they weren't going to be there. Right.

But I paid the guy, you know, $200,000 just to use his, you know, boat yard. Wow. And he could just say, oh, I'll never rat you. I'll say it. And I was just cowboying it. And that's where you were going to unload. Yeah, except it was the Great South Bay on Long Island. And it's notoriously shallow.

But I checked it out. You know, I looked at the draft, the most fed ship. And I thought, sure. But the weight brought it down even more. So I got within 10 feet of getting into the boat yard. So what I had to do was the Palmer Johnson. I stuck it at the end of the outermost part of the dock and brought the fed ship right up to it.

It was called the paraglid. And we had to unload. It was just twice the work. On load the fed ship onto the Palmer Johnson, onto the dock. It was like, God, it was exhausting. How many people were working for you? I didn't have enough for that because of that, you know, not being able to get all the way in.

I had five on the boat and I had four on the shore. And these are all local guys that you know? Yeah, all high school guys. Wow. So you're unloading 40,000 pounds. How much is each pound? What are you paying? Per pound, for 40,000.

You see, I was getting a lot, most of them on the arm from Isaac. Yeah. I could have used the money and bought it for cash, but Isaac wanted to make money too. Right. So it was like an 11,000 pound profit, grand, you know, gross. profit. Yeah. I would say I had, I ended up with a million and a half in my pocket.

Yeah. Okay. And I paid the captain, $200,000. I paid each guy that worked on it, $50,000, you know. Wow. You know, the truck driver I gave, you know, they were friends. I made sure they were going to have good lives, you know. I was generous.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, so. And that's one run. That was one run, but I should have gotten caught. I don't know how I didn't get caught because I came through the cut and you're right there at Fire Island and the Coast Guard station's right there. And I didn't think of the water line. That's another thing I learned, you know, it was underwater. Right.

You know, you got the boot cap. It's usually about this far above. It's because you have so much pot. Yeah. It's literally pushing the boat down. It's like sinking the boat almost. Yeah. Yeah.

And we got it off and I said, this is it for the fed ship. You know, I went out and I bought an 83-foot trawler. A trawler. Yeah. Okay. Could hold a whole 40. I didn't need two boats. No.

Nice. How much does a trawler cost back then? $125,000. Yeah. It was almost brand new. How long did it take you to move a 40,000 pound load? Uh, I moved it quick. I, you know, I actually sat there one day and I said, how did people smoke all this shit?

Yeah. Now, I told you. you about Virginia. Those mountain boys, they couldn't get enough wheat. I would put half the load 20,000 pounds, and it would make a stop in West Virginia and in Huntington, and then it would go on to Seattle, and Seattle to Canada and Alaska. So now you're not driving anymore. You're two big time.

You got bigger responsibilities getting these huge loads. Coordinating all this was a lot of work, man. For sure, for sure. All of a sudden, it's just not. me, I got like 17 people sometimes working for me. Wow. Sometimes I didn't trust people, right? Like I said, I would come by with a rental truck.

I'd make everybody, I said, whatever you're doing, you've got to drop what you're doing. Even if you're eating dinner and get in the truck. I locked them well in the back of the truck. I didn't want him to see where we're unloading. Wow. Now, did your driver after he made all these stops around the country? Did he then come back with cash? he came back caught cash and then my friend you know core he in Seattle he would just you know

ship the rest of the head bring the rest of the money back yeah we had a pilot in Seattle that was great he his name was let well he's probably dead by now he is name was Larry oh Larry he's dead yeah he had a Cheyenne 2 what a plane turbo prop it was beautiful man it was a corporate jet and he was hired by a big corporate to fly them around. Yeah. And he would fly. I had to go with him.

We went into Chihuac Airport, into Canada. It was right through the mountain range. Yeah. And it was about maybe 90 miles from Vancouver, maybe 60. I can't remember. But Chihuac was the place. What we did is we went through the mountain peaks. And that guy could fly, man.

It was all clouds, you know? And he was a guy. I saw, like, off the wing, I saw, you know, like slides of cliffs. It was insane. And we landed in TrueWack and we went through customs. And you're loaded? No.

We went through dry. And I had all my photography equipment. And I said, we're photographers. We're going to do a lot of road trips around, you know, flight trips. Yeah. You know, filming. Yeah. And it's all, no problem.

And then we went out cruising around. Then we snuck back through the mountains and went and loaded up and brought it back the same exact way. I see. And then we unloaded it, right? Customs were still there. But they weren't looking at us because we were already cleared. Right, right.

So then after you get your money back, how long do you have to get Isaac his money? Because back in the day, most of this pot from South America was fronted. It was on the arm, as you say. He was a pain in the ass, you know? Yeah. You know, he was always like calling up worried. Where's the money? Where's the money?

But I gave it to him when we got it. Yeah. I said, you kill me. You're not going to get anything. Right. So it sounds like... Just relax. And then his confidence built.

And he trusted me. Mm-hmm. So. So how long does it take to turn around from the minute you unload the pounds in Long Island to get in all the money back? Several weeks. Several week turnaround. So then how many drops were you doing? One a month?

Well. I'm sorry. How many unloading? How many ships? How often are the ships coming up with loads? I did maybe three trips a season. Okay. Yeah. Well, when I was, oh, I did the offloading, I did four. But when I started going all the way down myself, it was like three.

Okay. So you start going all the way down. So you just keep building this thing. You keep building and building and building. It was a steady progression. Yeah. From being at the elegant pool room selling times I asked to where I was at the moment. So what made you say, you know, I want to go down to Columbia now? I've got the, I've got to connect. he drops off 40,000 pound loads in my back door, at my back door. Now, I want to go down there. Is it for a better price? Like, what would make you want to take that kind of risk? Independence, you know.

It was also, remember I told you I liked to be on the road? Yeah. It was like going down there. It was a long way. It was 12, 13 days down. 12, 13 days back. You take a ship down there? Yeah. You take your trawler?

The trawler. Wow. Yeah, we had to, you know, get extra fuel on top of it. We had a 20,000 gallon tank, and I still didn't trust that I put in an extra auxiliary tank. And how many people did you have on the trawler? There was four of us. Okay. I hired, I was not the old man in the sea, okay? Let's make that clear.

Yeah. I hired the captain from, um, make Alice the tugboat line. New York Harbor. And then there was another guy that went to Skylar University, I believe, by City Island. It was a nautical engineering school. He was a graduate. So if anything went wrong with the engine, it was going to get fixed. Wow.

You know, I had it covered. So he had experts. Oh, yeah. I didn't care. I gave him the money and I wanted results, man. I love the times back then. We're so corrupt. It's like you have these legitimate.

people who are like, oh, you want to pay me a couple hundred thousand bucks to bring back huge federal amounts of pot? Sure. Yeah, as long as you're paying me. Like, try that now, you know. Oh, I wouldn't try it now. Before any of this happened, I went to my attorney, Gerald Lefcourt in New York, and he was a big-time attorney. He was great. He was a head councilman for the Black Panthers. He was with Abby Hoffman. He was big time. And I said, All right, Jerry. I'm giving you some money down, you know, because this girl, Monica and the way I found him. Who did the Night of the Living Dead?

George Romero. They recommended him. Okay. And they loved heroin. So we were doing heroin. Wow. And he was doing that movie for like $25,000, $30,000, the first Night of Living Den. Well, anyway, he told me to go see Jerry.

So I go see Jerry. and I give him my $10,000 down as a retainer. Yeah. And I said, tell me something. If I smuggle marijuana, you know, over 1,000 pounds, what is it? What is cocaine? What is heroin? What is pills?

Mm-hmm. And he said, well, the weed, any amount is only zero to five years. No, no. That was for heroin. I'm sorry. It was a five-year straight sentence. You know. For any amount of heroin?

No, of weed. Okay. So any amount of weed was. a five-year bid. And back then, they had a parole board. So it was a guideline system where you got 24 to 36 months with a max out of 39 months. Right. So you could be out in two years.

Yeah. For, you could have a gazillion pounds of weed. Yeah. You could be out in two years. No brainer. Yeah. And the Coke, you know, you said, you know, it's a 20-year sentence, but they're going to nail you for 60 years with this shit. Right.

You know, for selling, for racketeering, they're going to try to get. you, every way they can. Yeah. So I never got with coke or heroin. Yeah. They were bootlegging Kualudes back then. Kwayludes was a big deal. Yeah.

I loved those when they were around. Oh, trust me. It's one of my biggest regrets was never being around during the Lude era. Well, they had 50 gallon oil drums loaded with Kualudes. Yeah. And, you know, they were bootlegs. Where did they come from? They made them in Columbia.

Right, right. And they got themselves a chemist and they made. them. Wow. Press them out. The problem was you do one, you'll get slightly high, you do another, and you just load it. Yeah. There was no uniformity.

I see. So you passed on that. Oh, yeah. On that opportunity. 60 years, too. Okay. Wow. Yeah.

Okay. So there you go. You keep doing what you're doing. Pot. Yeah. It's pot. Yeah. So now you've got your trawler.

You've got your crew. You've got a lot of money behind you. You got all your connects. Everything's in place. You got your buyers in the States. And you got your now your plug, your growers in Medellin. Tell us about the process. How would you go all the way down there?

Where would you go? How much would you pick up? And what were the routes you took to get back? Okay. I didn't want to go through Florida. That was a no-no. That's going on the inside. You're going through the Mona passage by Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic.

And then you're going up the coast. and, you know, I thought it was suicidal, but a lot of people did it, and I got away with it for years. Yeah. But I went on the outside and went way out and went out and went out in the ocean and came around. That's why I had extra fuel times. But how did you get down the trip going down to Columbia? Oh, I took the inside going down. Okay.

You're going down, and now, do you have cash on you? Yeah. Okay. What are you taken down there? Are they fronting you? No, I'm giving them like a quarter of a million up front. Okay. You know, and that's covering the size of the weed anyway.

Yeah. But, you know, I was getting better quality weight. That's why I was paying Isaac, like $45 a pound down there, you know? Yeah. And plus I was getting them a piece of the action if I was going to take it for two weeks, you know, and he was going to give it to me on the arm for two weeks. Right. Okay.

So don't ask me the exact number. Because 45 is pretty expensive. We know that from talking to guys like you from that era. They would $10 was about the good wholesale bottom price. Depending on how much you were buying. Right. You know, like the guy that was doing like 30 million pounds. Yeah.

Yeah, he's getting a for $10 because he's doing so much. Did they give you any like scales? Like did they say once you hit this amount will give you a price break? Like did you any haggling with the Colombians? I haggled about quality. Okay. And that's why I was paying $45. I said, Isaac, this shit is commercial.

That was the, like, Mexican dirtweed, you know, that we call the Colombian, you know, commercial. Yep. I couldn't sell it for 175 in New York. So you'd rather, you'd rather pay more for higher quality and maybe bring back a little less quantity. Yeah. No. Same quantity, but just higher quality, man. Right.

Boom. The cash is right there. You know, you're eliminating a month of getting your money back. Right, right. Because you got competition. Like that other guy, you know, he's bringing all that shit in. He's bringing gold and red bud and, you know, he's competing. Yeah.

So I have to compete against people like that. So is it gold, Colombian gold that you're buying? A few trips, yes. And then he had some from the mountains he wanted me to try. Okay. And that stuff was really good, man. And it was like a dark green, dark rusty color. And it was just really good.

Okay. So where would the trawler dock? Where would you pick up? In Columbia? Yeah. In Maracaibo. Yeah. He had a place.

That's a little village. And they would roll, you know, it was notorious to be shallow water. But he found the place. And they were. would roll out this dock and they would bring us the bills. Now, I don't know if we can look this up. I could be wrong. Is Maracaibo not in Venezuela?

It's Venezuela. It's Venezuela. Right. Okay, so it's super remote up there. Yeah. Well, actually, Maracaibo is a, it was a city. We were like just north of Maracaibo. Okay, so you were actually going to Venezuela.

Yeah. Wow. Well, Isaac originally, that's where his boats would docked. Right. In Venezuela. So the Colombians would move their loads from the north, like, the Santa Marta region, and then they would move. No, no, not Santa Marta.

They were, I was getting them from the mountains and I was getting it. Which mountains? There's a lot of mountains in Colombia. Oh, God, what do you call it? I forgot the name. The Nevada, I don't know. It was, if you look, there's two, like two strips of mountains coming down. Right.

Now there's the valley that goes towards, you know, where they plant a lot. Yeah. And then you go, you know, that's a little. lower elevation of planting. Right. But if you go higher up in the hills, you're going to get better weed. I see. You know, in the elevation.

Yeah. Now, they had a cross, you know, over into Venezuela. I see. Okay. But to get to Santa Monta, Santa Marta is probably the same distance. Right. Okay. So your connects that lived, were based in Medellin, harvested, their people harvested the

weed in the mountains and then actually shipped it over the border and then got it straight to you guys on the coast. I never took a load without looking at it. Right. I will look at it all over, man. So how many pounds of weed would you have to inspect? You'd go through a whole... Oh, up 10, random bills.

Wow, okay. You know, but, you know, they're pretty uniform. And then, you know, he knew I was really fussy. If I got it up there and it wasn't what it's supposed to be, he knew he wasn't in his money for a long time. Right. So he's a businessman. Right.

And he must have loved you. So how much are you? picking up. 40,000. 40,000. Well, Medellin was really a trip, man, back then before Escobar. When I was there, Escobar was ripping off refrigerators and air conditionists. Right.

You know, down collie, I think. Up in collie. But, yeah, this is before the cocaine cartels. So it's really just different weed conglomerates. That's what Columbia was before cocaine. It was these different. It was kind of like Mexico. You had to cope, but not in the abundance.

No. The market wasn't built up yet. Right. So it was still a bad thing in New York if you were snorting Coke. A bad thing? A bad thing back in the 70s. Not a lot of people were doing it like that. I thought it was the surgeon general said Coke was nothing to worry about. I think it was a good thing.

I meant you had money. It became that way. Okay. In the later 70s. But I'm talking like in the early 70s, you know, You're a bad person if, you know, doing heroin, doing coke. Not everyone did it. Yeah, yeah.

You know? Well, yeah, of course not. So you're, you go to Maracaibo. You dock in Maracaibo. It took you about two weeks to get down there? No, about, yeah, yeah, two weeks. Wow. Wow.

You got all your food and provisions on board. You're all stocked up. We had 7,000 gallons of water, water tank. All the 20,000 gallons. I never mentioned the auxiliary gas tank that the engineer put in. But we could, you know, we could be out for a month and not run out of fuel. Wow. Okay.

You know, probably six weeks, to be honest, you know, with the extra fuel. Yeah. So how does it work when you get down there? Do you actually get on land to inspect everything? The first time we were coming in, I didn't know what to expect. I left something off, which was interesting. how I got there. You know,

can I step back? One step? Sure. Okay. I'm doing the offload. One of the last ones, you know, the fourth one,

the captain calls me up, and he tells me to come up to the bridge, you know, the, you know, I go up there. And he says, no more, if you got Playboys,

hustlers and, you know, sneakers, no more hustlers, you know, because the guys end up, you know, looking at

them the whole, and playing the whole way home. So the sneakers were okay because they were barefoot. But he said, look, go back to Medellin. They want you to go all the way down. Can you do that? So that's what got me to go down. And he was a German captain, and he's the one that told me, that's what you got to do. He said, that's where the money's at.

Yeah. So he liked me. We did okay, man. Right. So how much more profit? Did you stand to make from going down there as opposed to just offloading it in New York? I was paid a flat million dollars a trip in New York for offloading. Okay. And, you know, I took care of my people, so it wasn't much in my pocket.

You know, I had to pay the boat yard. I had, you know, it's expensive running boats, repairing boats. And, you know, it was the 70s. And, you know, you could buy a Ferrari then for, like, 27-5, you know? So the money we're making was insane. Yeah, yeah. So how much more are you making bringing it back from Columbia? I was thinking a million and a half in my pocket in profit. Wow.

Now, I didn't get it in one lump sum. It was always floating somewhere around the country. Right, exactly. But at the end of the day, I was making off the offload, maybe $300,000. They paid us a million. I took care of my boys. Yeah. I was making $300,000.

So that's quite an incentive to go back down and do it for you. So you four X your money, basically. Yeah. Going down there. Okay. So, yeah, tell us how it works when you get down to Maracaibo. We got attacked. The whole village was going.

Really? I went to my brother. He was next to me. I said, God, they're going to put us in a pot and boil us. Right. I didn't know what they want it. Then all of a sudden, you know, they roasted a pig for us. and I meant the police chief.

Wow. And the priest came and he blessed the boat. And I said, what is this shit? No way. Yeah, it was just a crappy little village. Yeah. But they had, you know, inland more, it was more populated. But, you know, we had to go to a warehouse to examine the weed and that's where they kept it.

But they were all making money, man. And they were like Venezuela was, they were dirt poor, man. Yeah. So did your Medellin connects meet you there? or did they have a, did they have like a helper there? Who met you when you first got down? Silvio. He was Isaac spotting on.

Okay. He was always jealous of me, you know. Because he liked being the ombre. He wanted to be his right-hand man. And he was like, you know, he was a bad dude. Okay. So then, and then they load him onto trucks and send the trucks to the boat? They bring it to the little huts on the beach.

And they rolled out the dog. And they would just, they had manpower, man. They just loaded them up. Wow. Yeah. It's like a goddamn movie just watching your bales getting loaded. Yeah. And you're not fronted.

You're paid your cash on delivery. Yeah, I put $250 up front. Okay. What's the whole load worth? Like to them? Like how much do you owe them? Well, the gross was probably, well, 40, 40,000 times. times, say 250 on an average from when I would get,

what does that come out to, 10, 11 million dollars? Something like that. Okay. So then the next time you come. I owed them $7 million. Mm-hmm. So I came out with $4 million. Okay.

Roughly. Yeah. I'm so sorry, I didn't write this down. This is like 50 years ago. Okay. So you're getting quite a lot on credit. I'm paying, he's got nothing to lose except his ship. You know, that 250s.

I'm talking about the Colombians. You owe them $7 million. Yeah. That's because they're like partners. Yeah. I wouldn't get the weed I was getting without it. Right. So then you would bring down the next run.

You would bring them down $7 million plus whatever you're going to put down for the next load. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So tell us about the load on the way back. You take the, you go away. Go on the outside. Yeah.

Tell us what the outside means. Outside, just open ocean, man. It's beautiful. You don't see land. You see more stars than you could ever imagine. And sometimes the seas got, you know, what I liked about it is the distance between the waves to get longer, you know. It's like you get close to shore and they start compacting. Yeah.

And, you know, we hit some bad weather sometimes. And, you know, it was pretty challenging. I looked at my brother. I said, you know, Bobby, if the Coast Guard came, and I think they'd be saving us right now. Yeah, right. It was hard. Wow.

I had to tie myself into the wheelhouse. Wow. Because it would start throwing you around. He couldn't even stand next to me. And, you know, we went on four-hour shifts. And where are the bales? Bails are in the down in the fish storage. Yeah.

Did you ever feel like water was going to come into the boat and damage them? No. Okay. No, we didn't get in that big a sea. Okay. You got to be careful with some of the waves. There were swells. I never hit any broken.

I was lucky. You can get, like, the wind can really tear up the ocean, you know, and you get that water coming in. We were just, it was a rolling sea most of the time. You'd throttle up and then throttle down on the backside and make sure the angles right. When I first thought I'd do it, I remember I buried the front light of it. the bowel and you know it's a technique you learned over time how long did it take you to get back same amount took about 13 days okay and then you do you get back where do you unload okay couldn't unload at the right that's that spot's compromise because that troller i think was eight nine feet

to draft maybe that so that was out way out of the question i found a guy that was the manager and maintenance man for an estate in the Pecomic Bay. And you know how Long Island has the North Fork and the South Fork? In between is like Gardner's Island and the Shelter Island. And that's the Peconic Bay. And I found a very wealthy man that had this huge estate. And I gave the guy, you know, some good cash. And he would turn his back.

and I had my aunt who lived next daughter me growing up. Her husband died and left her in debt. I rented a house on the water. And it had, you know, like neighbors, but not close. So that was my backup. I had two houses. Wow. You know, the other was so, just perfect.

Yeah. And you had no trouble coming in from- Deep water. It was perfect. And you had no trouble from Coast Guard on your way in? No. Wow. So you literally just pull up to a residential home. Yeah. Couldn't be easier.

It was an estate. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And then you just unload. Do you have your drivers there? No. Who's meeting you? That was an island. Oh, I see. And I got, I'm getting very specific now. I don't want to, you know, it was an island in the Pekonic.

And what we did was take it by van. Little by little, we took it across to East Hampton. And there was no worry. It was safe where it was. Yeah. Wow. You never had a load get ripped off? No.

I never got ripped off. Do you ever have to throw a load over the boat? No. Never had to ditch any bales? Wow. I don't know why they did that. You know, they would open up the seacocks in some of these boats and sink them. And then marijuana floats, man.

right up to the top. I'm going to get you anyway. Okay. So how many times? How long did you work like this going all the way down there? From 77 to 80. Wow. That's a long time.

I only did like three trips a year. Okay. You know, I stopped going on the boats. I just couldn't do it. It drove me crazy. So you started sending somebody else? Yeah, the captain. Yeah.

Okay, so you just let the captain go down there and handle it. Yeah, it was working itself at that point. Wow. Oh, so you made millions of dollars between these years. Wow, that's wild. So between these, are you doing how many runs, one a month, I guess? No, it was more than them one a month. It was, I did, I split up that one every two months, you know.

It'd take two months to basically before I'd go down again, you know. the growing season, I would fit three in, the beginning, the middle, and the end. You know, I just didn't want to overdo it. Right. And, you know, everybody else was going, like, cowboy and everything. Yeah. It was hard. From my childhood, man, like I told you, I don't trust.

Yeah. And I want to always know my limitations. What, but you're ball in, and you're still a heroin addict? Today? No, during this time. Yeah. Wow. But do you look, is it starting to wear you down?

Or do you still look and behave functionally? I would get clean, you know. I would go and use it for a week, get sick for a couple days. Sometimes I'd go three months and get really get sick for a couple days. Right, right. But, you know, I kept having breaks. When I went to prison, there was the longest, I could have got it there, but I didn't want to do it. Yeah.

So you got caught with, we're going to move through a little bit. This is a long story. but basically you got caught at a dope house with a small amount of heroin that you were using for personal use. I was going there to buy a diagram, a heroin, and it was on Woodhaven Boulevard. Which is where? In Queens. Queens, right? Yeah.

This is all enough. You can look it up on the internet. But you went and took a pinch and did time, like prison time over. Totally my mistake, man. You know, as careful as I was. It's weird as I was about trusting people. I heroin got me, you know? Yeah.

Took me down. Is that so, you never took a pinch in all these years from massive weed smuggling. It was just personal heroin use that got you locked up. Now, when did this, when was that first arrest? That was May 13th, 1 o'clock in the morning. I remember it, all 13th. 13th hour, 13th day. It was like, yeah, 1980.

And it was the day the Pope got shot. Oh, really? It was another way they remember it. John Paul, too. One. I don't know. I'm not that religious. Okay.

So, and is that what brought this smuggling run to an end? Yes, because I got five years. Five fucking years for one gram of heroin. There was more to this. story. Sure. The guy I was, the guy didn't mention, want to mention his name. He switched from marijuana to becoming a member of the Medellin cartel.

And he was doing a lot of, he was doing weed in the beginning. Then he did coke. Is this a white guy? Yeah. No, he was a Colombian guy. But you were working with him down there. Yeah. Okay.

And he was in with Isaac. Okay. And they paid everything off. It was so safe, you know. Did no one ever had a gun? You know, it was like, I never carried a gun. Yeah. Only later I carried a rifle because they started, you know, pirates in the Bahamas,

they started ripping people off with their boats. I wasn't, you know, to steal a boat to go do a run. Right. And they were killing people. Yeah, yeah. But I, you know, I never had, you know, if I was getting pulled over, I would get rid of the gun. I wouldn't, you know. But it may, you know, that may bust.

I was with Mar-Logulus. her name's Millie. Maraglos was a Dominican girl. And she came from a very upper class family in the Dominican Republic. And I took her with me at different places, different times, because she knew the language. I never did learn Spanish in all those years. And she had always tipped me off to what they're saying. Right. So she was with me, and I walked in through the door, and here was the DEA.

I had a gun just stuffed into the slide of my neck right here, get down on the floor right away. I knew it was either a rip-off or it was the cops. It turned out to be the DEA. I remember asking, you stayed a federal. I was hoping for federal. And he said DEA. And what happened was I was going there and the trips I made to that apartment previous to that bus, there is a couple of guys that were always hanging around.

round, you know, and one guy was peppy and other guy was Ron, and he, and the guy, Cooch, I call him Cooch, and he had a wrap bandana around his head, and I said, what happened to you? Oh, my fucking roommate, man, I apologize for the F-Bahn. He put a gun on my head, and he was going to rip me off, and the bullet split between his skin and his skull, and went like this. Lucky Duck. Yeah, I should, I want, I think he was in the courtroom with me. I wanted to push it all the way in.

Because, you know, the prosecutor goes and said, and look at Mr. Cooch. He's got a bullet in his head. The whole jury goes. But what happened is they arrested all of us, right? And what they try to do is get you all in one case. Because they called spillover of evidence. All they have to do is show one person. that's really dirty and everyone's guilty, if by association.

And that's kind of what happened. Okay. And then I later, I pick up the Daily News and some guy, you know, with Ron that was in my co-defendant that I didn't know, they were accused of gun killing two bartenders at the Shamrock bar in Queens. and they, I guess they were pros. They just boom, boom, boom, and Ron shot one on the ceiling and left. And what do you get?

You get 100 different IDs when you shoot one into the ceiling on your way out. But Gotti's niece or John Gotti? John Gotti, his niece was in there, right? And this guy was a foot soldier in his family. family. And I didn't know that. It was all news to me. And she actually was, and the bartender was her boyfriend. So she was really pissed. And she was going to help identify the people. Right. Goddy called her and said, don't do it. Right. So she took back her testimony. This is all, you can look at up. And this is one of the guys that's lumped into your case, one of the, one of these shooters. Yeah. And, and,

Pepe wasn't there for the bus and he was like AKA Pepey you know he was a fugitive. So they were looking for him. Okay. So you guys are and how to, they were just watching this dope house and trying to put a case on the dealers and then you

happened to be there. Is that how they lumped everybody together? From what I understand the guy Herbie that was his apartment. He was selling ounces a pure heroin man and that's how he got the heat. This shit It was fucking pure.

Yeah. You know, I think it was 86% or something, but they never saw anything like it. Wow. And it brought the heat. It's just very shocking. Nowadays, you would never, if they catch you with a gram of heroin in downtown L.A., they're going to write you a ticket. Maybe.

Maybe. Well, I had cops in the streets of New York give it back to me, you know. Oh, really? Yeah, I got, you know, it comes in a little cellophane envelope with a stamp on it. Yeah. And all they want to do is each house in New York City had their own like Mercedes or they stamped at different names. They kept track. If some really good shit at the street and people were dying, they know a way to go.

Right. So he took it, wrote it down, gave it back to me. Wow. But what I did learn is. So why do you think they took you in that time? Well, I got my discovery evidence. Yeah. You know, I went to jail and to the MCC in New York.

And they, you know, my lawyer, I couldn't get out. They would, they met it. They raised my bail twice. You know, they wouldn't let me out. They just began fucking with me. Yeah. And so finally, left court said, you got to call your mom on this one. I said, no, you call her.

Something later said, I know why. But I got out after three weeks, but I was on the 11th floor of the MCC with all these idiots, you know, from that apartment. And they were just, they were just trouble. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know why they, they're fucking with you like this. I still don't get it. Do you think they had a suspicion of who you were or what you were doing?

They had discovery. They knew. They mentioned me saying I was a mastermind behind a huge marijuana distribution network in the Oregon, Washington area, you know, sent it in. Seattle. Interesting. And then I was doing loads from Medellin. I was doing, people would take a pinch and they would do anything to get out.

And also, I didn't know. They didn't have enough on me. So they knew. But your name was still in a file now from people getting busted and saying, hey, I'm getting from this guy, George on the East Coast. That's all I know. I see. Now this guy, Raoul, that was part of Isaac, the other guy. split off but raloo they had a ricko case on him and they needed my testimony to get him on ricka which

with mandatory life yeah no parole and i wouldn't cooperate so they made my life miserable i see okay but you did finally bail out after three weeks uh and then how long before you uh took the plea deal for five years i didn't take a plea deal deal they the jury came back and they did a formal sentence. So you went to trial? Yeah. Okay. Wow.

Yeah. Wow. That was an interesting thing. That trial was really amazing. Were you working in that when you were out on bail? Or did you halt all smuggling activities? I did one trip from Mexico to San Diego by plane while I was out. But that was the only thing.

Okay. So then you, uh, what years were you inside? Well, from I would say I went in in 81 after I was out on bail And I got out in 85 Okay

Over three years Wow Like three and a half years total Yeah Yeah And you came home to What were your plans When you got out?

My plans Sent me to a halfway house They gave me this suit That looked like Elvis Presley wore it in the 50s. It was like the legs were halfway up to my knees. And I got out and I looked across the street and there

was the men's shelter for the Salvation Army. And I looked down uptown and there was the Empire's State building. I said, George, the only way you can go is up from here. CBGB's was on one corner. The Salvation Army was on the other.

Hells Angels Clubhouse was down the block. A very lively neighborhood. Yeah. Yeah. Does you have any money when you came home? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I stashed money. Yeah, nice. Okay. So you can get back on your feet now and you're clean. You're not on dope.

So what's the next move? Got out and I tried to get a job. When I went away, one of my cellmates was Fred Richmond. He was a gay congressman from New York. And Harrison Williams was another roommate. He was the senator from New Jersey. 27 years. He got busted on an app scam back then, selling like Arabs, like citizenship. Yeah, yeah.

So he was offered to get me a job driving a limo for him. And that didn't work. They wouldn't hire me. So then the guy said, come on, George, volunteer. You know, it was Salvation Army. They were do-gooders. All of a sudden, I was in front of Macy's ringing a bell with a red pot. in front of me by Christmas time.

Do you dress like Santa? No, I wouldn't do that. But the guy did, do good it did. And I'm bringing a bell. Wow. So I said, okay, I did my tour of duty right now. Yeah, yeah. So I called this guy up in the Rockaways.

I said, what's going on? And he says, wow, I got something for you if you want to take it. Now, I had to be back by 10 o'clock at night. That was the curfew. Because you're in the halfway house. Yeah. Yeah. So I went to see him and he gave me, I said, what the, what is this shit?

I said, it's not Colombian. He said it's Mexican. And, you know, it was skunk weed. Somehow in the time I was away in the time in Colombia, they were cultivating skunk. That's right. And skunk is the Sinsamea. Yeah. It was an Afghani strain, I guess.

And it was amazing. Wow. It was like, sorry, he's bad back. So the Mexicans have figured it out. They figured it out. They lost everything and they got it back, man. They had a monopoly because it was right there. Right.

You know? So he gave me 50 pounds and I took a chance. I went to one of the guys that was on my boat. I said, just take it, John. And, you know, I'll be back in three days. Wow. If you don't want to give it back. Wow.

And the next day he called me, said he got more of this shit. You know, and I said, yeah. Let's go. So the next night, I had $12,000 in my cowboy boots. Yeah. And my hand behind my head and said, I'm back. Wow. I tried to do the right thing.

I rang the bell, tried to get a job driving. And, you know, and I say, okay, I'm back. You didn't try very hard. No. That's okay. And I'm not blaming you. Then, like a day later, the manager of the halfway house, that had civilians being managers,

She comes to me and said, I'm going up to meet Bobby Jones over at Bloomingdale's. You want to come with us? And I said, all right. And, you know, there was no reason for it. And I could smell. She wanted something. So she said, George, that dress is really nice. And I said, can I get a dress?

What's your size? And she told me this size. I said, I'll take that dress. Then she came back and told me, you don't have to come back to the halfway house and to this date. I was supposed to spend six months there. So she cut five months off. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. I wonder why she did that. Money. I bought her a dress. Right. That's all it took. That's all it took. It was New York.

The guy at the front door the first night, he went and he said, you want, you know, you clean? I said, yeah, I don't want it to be, but I am. Uh-huh. He said, 20 bucks. I won't you weigh you. I said, all right. So I was back on the juice again. Oh, it was a better time.

It was a better time. So a month out of federal. prison after a three and a half year bump, you're moving hundreds of pounds of this new Sinsomia Mexican skunk. You're back on age and you paid 20 bucks and you get out of halfway house early. 150 bucks for the dress. Sure. Oh yeah. I forgot. 20 bucks for that guy at the door. Man, what a country. That's New York. That's New York back in the 80s. I was great. I love New York. Yeah. You know, it was the best. It was better when this country was corrupt. So I I decided all right.

So did you see something with this Mexican skunk? Did that blow your mind? You were like, oh, this is going to be a great trade. It's so awful. It belongs in my head. Right, because now I don't have to go all the way down to Colombia. The weeds better. Back to the old pueblo.

Right, exactly. Go back to Nogales. Back to Tucson. So is that where you went? That's exactly where I went. I started buying loads, you know, in the town, testing it out further. Send some to Seattle, send some to New Jersey, some to New York. Okay.

And yeah, they were buying it. So tell us how that economy worked. So back in the early 70s, you were paying, you know, $7 a pound, $5 a pound, $10 a pound for the brick. Now what is a pound in the mid-80s of Skunk cost you at the border? In Tucson. I didn't go across the border yet. Okay, in Tucson.

It was roughly anywhere from 900 to 1150 a pound. Wow. And that's your price. That's the wholesale price. That's expensive. Yeah. How many were you picking up at a time? Oh, 500 pounds.

Okay. So you had that kind of bank rule? Yeah. Okay. Got it. And where do you flip it for in Seattle? 33% of my money. Wow.

So what do you sell in one pound? If you buy a pound for 900 and Tucson, what do you sell in Seattle for? In Seattle? Well, in New York, I was getting 1250, 13, 15, 50 a pound. Seattle was getting a little bit more. Okay. And then we were still going to Chihuahua, Canada. We eliminated Alaska. Yeah. Oh, God, there's a story in Alaska I should talk about. On the Patreon. So 15, maybe 1,500 in Canada or something? Yeah. Okay, good. So you're making, yeah, making good money. 30, 40% margin on your money. Wow. Now, was there any quantity wise? Was it consistent?

Like, did you go through droughts at all on the skunk? Well, the skunk was seasonal just like everything else. You get there too early in the year. The damn stuff was good, but they picked it too soon. It was really green. Yeah. And if you went there too late, you were getting the dried out shaky stuff. Right.

So it was always pretty, you know, you got really good green bud or you got skunk. It was two different kinds. And who was your connect in Tucson? Same old boys. One. and they were all Marco, they were still all there. Marco and they were still all working. Yeah.

And are they bringing it over now, flying it like in the old days? No, they never got to that. Marco actually got caught on the border with 19 trucks crossing. Wow. Yeah, he took a big hit. But I went back to see Signor Timmerman. Right? Of course you're Luftwaffe Nazi.

And we started doing it again. Okay. So now he's got the scene Samia. Yeah. And he's making flights. Yeah, I grabbed Milagros and the take her with me and we went to this. That's your Dominican gal? Yeah.

Nice. Miracles. Milagros. She put up a lot. But she was beautiful. She did, she was a soap opera star for the Dominican Channel in New York. And anyway, we went down to this place called Guadalajara. We met Timmerman and we got into a rental car and he drove us.

to a place. Well, we let Millie drive when we got close because she looked more like somebody from the neighborhood than we did. So the both of us had blonde hair and blue eyes. And, you know, we get to a Paxine gun,

and now it's like really awful with the cartels. But back then it wasn't. And they really, they just started getting a foothold in places, but we were lucky. We went there and we started scoping out different airstrips, you know, and these federalis came up and said, what are you looking for? I said, oh, I want to grow seedless watermelons.

No such thing. Back then, there weren't. Who would know a few years later that it was? Damn, that could have been your idea, dude. That was, you were the first way. It was funny as hell. So, you know, for three, you need it. This was like in the valley before the Sierra Madres.

Right. So what we did then is, you know, we were staying in this, the California, Hotel California. There was three buildings in the town. That was one of them. Yes. So for us to go to this one area, we got to climb in the back of a pickup. Now, Millie was this spoiled Brad from our upper class family. They put us in there and buried us with potatoes.

Millie was screaming the whole way. And we rode all the way to the foot of the Sierra Madres. And there we went on, we got our mules. And we went up into the fields. Wow. Yeah. Because like I said, I wanted to see what I was getting, man. Wow.

Because they switch out on you. Yeah. You look at, you like this? Yeah. You know, okay, it's yours. You come there. It's something else. Right, right.

So I made sure. I even left my brother sitting there. Yeah. You know? for like a week until we could get back. So what did a Mexican pot field in the Sierra Madres look like? They cut them in, they were smart, man. They cut them in strips.

Yeah. They went, you know, maybe 10 yards wide, maybe, and they went all the way long, and then they let the, you know, jungle, and then they went again, and there was just long strips. Wow. You know? Just filled with plants. Yeah, I wasn't interested in that.

I wanted to see the finished product. So they showed me the finished product, man. It was just smelled like skunk, man. Yeah. You know, it smoked like skunk. It was skunk weed. It was the real deal. Yeah, I don't know who brought the seeds, you know.

I heard stories of people getting it from Amsterdam, but it was all bullshit. The Amsterdam thing was like a ruse, you know, you would send money to Amsterdam, but the people that had the shit was in the States. Right. But they got the seats. So who were your connects down there in the fields? They were all Richard Timmermans. Richard Timmermans guys. Okay.

So what kind of from there, did you guys pack the planes in those foothills right before? Okay. And then you fly them. Where are you landing him in Arizona? What area? Just north of Tucson. Okay. And still just with the flashlights?

So that technology is not upgraded. Well, it's upgraded. You can't possibly do it. Now they got. I know, but in 85s now. Oh, yeah. You were still doing that. Tim and Mim would do anything.

Right. He was on the top of a roof one day shooting ounces of cocaine taped to an arrow to some kid on the U.S. side. I mean, Timmerman was just, he was like a kid. Wow. He grew up a multimillionaire, but he was like a kid. Wow. You know, the crazy shit. He wanted to build a catapult one day.

And they said, no, we're not launching balas across the border. Just like a Nazi, always experimenting. Yeah. Just a real, just their weird people. Oh, but you know what his dream was? It finally came true. Going back to the original old days, he wanted to be a fire chief. So one day I wake up and there's two old LaFrance fire engines in my backyard.

And he goes and he says, well, Exchevilla is the president now in Mexico. He won't let me in. I got to get the connections going. So stay there. for about a month and then all of a sudden they were gone. And I went down to visit him in Kuyakon and he was a captain of the Bommoderos. Wow.

He had, he redid the firehouse, two brand, you know, like used fire engines and he painted what he really wanted to do. He bought a station wagon painted it red and put a light up on top. He was chief. Wow. A true psychopath.

And he's flying weed loads and shooting aerobes. and shooting arrows of coke across the border. Unreal. You had to love the guy, though. No, I love this. He was a very dapper. Like, you know, you'd see in a James Bond movie.

Yeah. You know, just cool as hell. So now, what are the size and frequencies of these plane loads? We were running Beach 18s. So 1,200 pounds. We had used ball. lighter tanks. But then we did a, I bought a DC3 because the Beach 18 got hot.

It was like, I saw it just explain. If you saw a Beach 18, you were a drug smuggler. You know, there was an identity with that airplane. Right. You know, it got that way from Jamaica. They used a lot of them there. Yeah. But the DC3, it was a wonderful airplane, man.

Yeah. Boy, it for 35,000. I put a ton of money into it, and it was flying. Yeah. So a thousand pounds at a thousand of bucks a shot, these are a million-dollar loads. And you're getting them off for, you know. We were paying about 25 bucks a pound for it. Yeah.

25 books a pound. Yeah. But we were getting the best. Yeah, you're right. You know, I wasn't buying the crap. Yeah. So you were really moving it. And then...

See, in Santa Marta, it was $10 to $60. almost. You know, if you were just me coming in and you wanted the best of the best, it was 60 bucks. If you wanted commercial shit, it was 10 bucks. But if you were the other guy, did the 30 million pounds, you could get the best of the best for 10 bucks. Yeah. And that's how it worked. Yeah. But you're, but I was small. He was big. Yeah. And that's kind of one of your keys to survival, too, it seems like. Yeah. So you're going to, so you're making almost a million dollars a flight. And a thousand pounds is not that much compared to, you know, what these Yahoo's are doing. Well, the three were bringing in 3,000.

Okay, so you would bring in as much as 3,000. Yeah. Okay. So, and how fast is that turning over? Same amount of time, wherever I took it, I had to front it, and it would take a couple weeks. And are you back driving it? Well, no, but I set up a different way of distributing it. I bought like a fleet of pickup trucks, and I bought these boxes.

I made these sheet metal boxes, and they were, you couldn't see over the, you know, it slid in. It was like 18 inches high, four feet by eight feet, fit in perfectly inside the bed of a pickup truck. And then I created it. And I bought solar panels, and I put it on top of the box, and I bought controls for another little box on it. And I sold it off and I had pamphlets made and I had hats and jackets said Solar Tech Incorporated. And I was selling remote fence charges.

So inside were batteries and the panels were, you know, charged the fences so the cattle couldn't get out at ranches. And my story was we were going to New York to the trade show and we were going to show it. Wow. So I had trucks going to Seattle. Some trucks gone to New York. Did you have drivers? Are you still driving? No, I had drivers.

Okay. No, I stopped doing that. Did they know what they were carrying? Oh, yeah. Okay. Because you know, you created a completely real company. It's a fake company, but it's completely real. It was believable.

It believable. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So you're not making the runs. You've got things are just working like a well-oiled machine. Do I got busted again? Yeah.

Right. And I think this is over heroin. Yep, it was Dallas Airport. I got to try heroin, man. Really? I mean, enough's enough. How long, how many years can I go? You can't do it anymore.

I guess not. I'm going to go searching. That's going to be the next episode of The Connect. Johnny goes to Afghanistan to really find that brown. You forget trying to wait there. Kidding, of course, guys. I'm just saying, you're, you. What's on the street?

You're fucking up a multi-million dollar operation because you like to chase that drag on. Yeah. It was, you know what? It's hard to explain what it's like to have PTSD. It's like you're always like on, you know, until I really learned how to deal with it. What did you have PTSD from? Childhood stuff, you know. And then I was kidnapped once in Columbia and then, you know, there's a lot of shit that

happened, you know, and it just adds upon it. And if you don't get regular PTSD taken care if it turns into complex PTSD. Right. What year, uh, what year did you take your second fall? That was 1990. It was like a 10 year period. So I got out, you got out the first time at 84. for your, you got this, about a six years of running these loads with Timmerman. Yeah. Okay. And you've made millions of dollars. And you're living in Tucson?

Yeah. Okay. Are you married again? No. I got married again, but I, let me see. No, I wasn't married then. Okay. And then what happens?

What happens is Oakle City bombing. that was 94 94 yeah changed everything all of a sudden I didn't want my trucks on the highway with a box that could contain fertilizer

okay you know so that kind of changed the cops were looking for everything everywhere I see I see so that was like so this was actually a 10 year run from when you got out 84 to 94 you said 84 to 90

to 90 yeah so what happened between I went to jail again in 90 oh I see okay so yeah tell us about that What was that over? I mean, you getting high.

I got stopped going from, I was switching planes from New York to get to Tucson. I had a switch in Dallas. And these DEA agents came up to me. And they were like a task force. They were appointed DEA, but they weren't real DEA. And they came up and they said, you look like a hijacker. And, you know, you fit our profile and we like to search you. And I said, you can't search me.

You can't search my luggage. I want to see an attorney. And he says, well, we can get the dogs. And that's what they ended up doing. And, you know, anything you touch with marijuana, like skunk, is going to get transferred. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had a quarter of a million dollars of cash on me, and that stuff must have stunk, too.

Totally, for sure. And he says, you sure you don't want me? You want me to cut open this beautiful leather at the shay case? I said, yeah, go that for it. I'm not opening it. But I had a half a gram of heroin in my wallet, and I totally didn't know. Oh, my. So they arrested me, and, you know, as soon as the dogs went crazy, and then they searched me, and that was it, man.

And in Texas, you know, they called up the U.S. attorney. He said, just take the money. That's all we want. Let them go. I said, oh, see you guys later. Oh, no, you're not done with the great state of Texas. So the state attorney, I guess the attorney general for the state of Texas said, okay, arrest them, book them.

For the half a gram. Yeah. So Frank Jackson, I went to find him. Left court recommending him. He used to play a wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins. And he represented me. I figured good old boy's system, ex-withball player, great. So, yeah, they hit me with 20 years.

I said, Frank, what are he talking about? 20 years. He said, I'm not smuggling this shit. It's a half a gram. And he said, well, this is Texas. They can do what they want. And these guys that were making methamphetamine, they got 60 years. And they went right before me in court.

So I was like, next. And I was saying, are they coming down? He said, not yet. And this is the real deal, George. And but back then, 33 days counted as a year because Texas was overcrowded. So they said, came back and said, you know, Johnny Black, that was his name. He was an ex-FBI agent turned to district attorney. He came and he said, okay, I'm going to give you 10 years.

You're only going to have to do, you know, 13, 14, whatever months on that. Right. And I said, you know, I see construction over there. You're building a new facility. What happens when you don't have, you have more room than you know what to do with? Yeah. You know? Right.

And I said, no way. And I said, look at my record. I can't stay out of trouble. I get busted for heroin every 10 years. Yeah. And he said, oh, shit. I understand. Came back, offered me five.

He went to see the judge with Frank Jackson. And he came back. And the judge looked at me. He said, you look like a decent kid, you know, white kid, blonde, yeah, blue eyes. I think you can get a break. We'll give you five years. You have, can you stay out of trouble for like six, you know, you could do six months. Can you stay out of trouble for four and a half years?

And I said, I'll try. Okay. He said, okay. So in other words, for people that aren't, don't quite follow legally, it's essentially a suspended sentence. It's six months in jail and then four and a half years. Oh, another six months on a halfway house and then you're on parole four and a half years. Right. Meaning if anything happens, you go back for the full four years. Right. Right. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

And so you said, okay, I could stay out of trouble for four and a half. Yeah. Okay. So you went and did six months in a Texas state prison? I think I did less and they shipped me out to the halfway house. Okay. And where was that? It was in the Oakland section of Dallas. It was just an old mental health. That was kind of interesting. Mental health facility.

Later I became a therapist, which was really strange. And it was dark and gloomy, but, you know, they let you out. And these people, you're around people that have no idea the scale to which you traffic drugs. They had discovery evidence on me. Oh, really? All that came back again. Okay. So all that stuff, all the paperwork and the.

snitches from the 70s, they had that on file. Yeah. So they had their suspicions of who you were. They sent me to Lewisburg penitentiary. Never got arrested before. That was a level five the first time. Yeah. I had a sue to get to Allenwood, which was a camp.

Wow. Then they stuck me on a bus for six months on a writ, made up writ. And I decided to drive around the country. Insane. And then in Dallas, I got stabbed the second day I was there with a toothbrush. Dallas County was worse than Lewisburg federal penitentiary. It was crazy. Wow.

I said, I went through all this shit in my life. I'm going to die from a toothbrush. You know, it was like, it was nuts. Did it do damage? No, I had money. So I, and their answer to the flu was to freeze the place. It was so cold. I went and I bought from other inmates, their blankets.

Yeah. I bought commissary and traded cigarettes with blankets. Yeah. And, you know, it was uh i'm at the toothbrush but yeah well you take a toothbrush you grind it down the concrete and turns into a sharp point but it gets a little shorter so it went in about an inch but it didn't hit anything okay and you know it was just that was it i went to the infirmary and they told me that uh there's only three white guys in our tank of 60 people so the one guy thank god hit the panic button yeah and he got the

the goon squad to come yeah they almost killed that guy that stabbed me. Yeah, we've heard about from guests about how brutal the Texas prison guards are. Oh, man. But, wow. Okay, this is... If you're black, you're really going to have a hard time. Yeah, but there's a lot of them, though. At least they're the majority. Um, wow. Wow. And all you had to do was just get off the dope and you would have had... That was my doubtful. I mean, this is one of the most successful marijuana, storied careers that I've ever interviewed. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people, you know.

So for four and a half years, you have to stay out of trouble. Yeah. Where do you go after you get out of the Dallas halfway house? I want to sell cause. Now, you must have had a bunch of money saved from this run. Yeah, but you still have to.

So you got a job. You got to get a job, right. Well, shit, you know, they give you a car for free. and you'd show up and you sold cause. Sure. So it was hustling costs. Where? It was a Mitsubishi of Dallas and Grand Prairie of Dallas for dealership.

And that was a different, that was like old country, Texas. Yeah. They was still, you know, that was a weird place. I was glad I was white and I was in Grand Prairie. Yeah, yeah. You know, Texas is a tough place, man. Yeah, totally. But I did, I liked their, they had a good sense of you.

They had a good attitude. I like the Texans. They treated me good. Yeah. I can't say a bad thing about them, man, except that county jail sucked. Yeah. The Texans are really nice and cool,

except when you break the law. Then they go all Old Testament. Yeah, the Wild West on you. Okay, so how long does you sell cars for? I'd sell rear. Okay. Then I made a phony job. I bought a, my roommate,

or not my roommate, My office mate and the car dealership. He had a house. He was never married and he's rented me a room for $175 a month. He became a runner for me. Wow. I corrupted him. But, you know, I moved in with him.

And I created, I built this like this, like this place, you know, studio. And I said I'm painting custom gas tanks for motorcycles. You know, I was always into motorcycles, and I was doing custom paint jobs. I was a good artist, and I did a couple tanks. I had them laying around, and it covered me with the P.O. And P.O. I was in a little trouble. Yeah. You loved me.

Piss and clean. Yeah. You're off dope. Yeah. Yeah. And then I went back, I started buying loads again, but doing a small time, just in the trunk of a car and sending my roommate to New York. He loved it. Wow.

So now all this time that you're away from the game, you still maintain your contacts for buyers and your suppliers. Yeah, I wasn't crossing the border anymore. I was doing everything in Tucson. Right. But you still had, I'm saying, like, did you have to make new, establish new connections every time you came back from prison? Or did you have enough suppliers? They were lifelong, right? From 1970s.

So you knew them, there was no problem. You'd always be able to get in touch with some guy when you were ready to start working. That guy Jim sat next to the cactus. He fell asleep. He was still there. And then your buyers up in Seattle and New York. They were still there. So everything was in time.

Would you let them know, hey, I'm in prison? Yeah. I'll hit you when I'm out. Yeah. And then you would call them when you were ready to work. God. Yeah. Lifers.

I feel like everything in the right way except I did heroin. Yeah. Okay. So this was like your, you told me this period from like 95, 96. your last run. This was like your retirement. Yeah. You know,

I was like, I could see their handwriting on the wall, you know, and I stopped doing everything, and I was sitting, and I bought a warehouse in Dallas, and I started like teaching,

you know, some kid came up, and he graduated at the art school or Academy of Dallas. He didn't have a drawer. So I taught him the drawer. And all of a sudden, I had 10 people coming,

and we were hiring models and what better, living having a nude model and teaching people how to draw, man. Wow. You know, I did that. And then I started getting old. And I said, I got to do something with my life, man. And, you know, with some help from people's ideas and suggestions, I, you know, on the drug problem I had, why don't you go to school?

Get your master's and become a therapist. And are you still running loads as you're going back to school? No, I stopped. Do you remember your last load and what went through your mind to make you say, okay, I'm done? Yeah, the car got pulled over on the way back to New York twice. And I said, that's unusual, man, you know. And they didn't check the trunk. It was right there in the trunk.

How much did you have? Except my roommate looked like the biggest dork you could ever imagine. Well, you want a dork. This guy would stop at a motel and not get in the other room. I'd go in the next morning. He had all these picture frames of these girlfriends, these fat girlfriends, you know, and like all around his bed, you know, and he had shorts with socks up to here, you know, halfway up to his knee. And, I mean, he couldn't ask for a better driver.

No, of course. I mean, he was perfect. So you would make these runs with him? I would fly there, and he'd make them. Okay. So he got pulled over a few times. How much work would you bring back at a time? How much work would you have?

I would only take like 200. pounds maybe. Yeah. Just, you know, I couldn't sit still. I had to, you know, I had to create. I like to create. You like to create. You liked working. Yeah. There's no question about that. Your identity and your self-esteem, I think, is that safe to say? Was built into you running pot? You know, that's, I'm going to give you a bit of psychology right now. Okay. After 25 years of being a therapist, I learned something which I didn't know earlier. When every behavior, human behavior can be explained through acquiring new or like increasing or maintaining self-esteem and competence. Right.

So, you know, psychologically, competence means how does this person adapt themselves to their world? And then how does that person get and manipulate their world to get what they need? So I didn't get a lot of, you know, guidance, didn't get like, I wasn't going to be a doctor or a lawyer. When smuggling came about, I just took it. It was a progression in my life of being, have ways of maintaining competence and not losing it and increasing it where I could. And increasing yourself esteem. Yeah.

You're doing esteemable actions. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. As an outlaw, yeah. Yeah. For sure. Where'd you go to school to get your degree?

I went to Phillips Graduate Institute in California. Yeah. And why did you choose psychology? It made sense, you know. You know, they made me go to meetings, like N-A meetings. And I never liked them. I hate it. I mean, it was the worst thing.

You know, I was like pulling nails. But I saw the need for people to, my brother, you know what really did it. My brother ran out of everything. And he hit a point of no return. You know, he could have had HIV. He could have had hep C. He looked like the Walking Dead. Was he a heroin addict?

Yeah. Okay. He stuck with the needle. Yeah. So to speak. Yeah. Anyways. And he just, he lost everything, man.

He took a roping on himself. And it was a worst loss I ever had in my life. It was the only person I had a connection with. growing up. Wow. And he was five years older and he was my protector. It took, you know. What did that do to your parents?

They were devastated. You know, everybody was devastated. Bobby was a great guy, man. Yeah. Wow. So there's something, that childhood, your parents really fucked you up. Yeah. See, he lived next door.

He was actually my cousin. Right. But he lived with me because his father died and my mother were. them. And that wasn't the best influence, but, you know, he got in a lot of trouble like I did, but... Your parents throughout this time, they're getting older, they're... I can't imagine getting any closer to you because they were never close to you, and now you're gone living in the shadows for decades. Did you maintain any kind of relationship with them? Did you check in, you know? My father died in 85, because he was 46 when I was born. Oh, I see.

And my mom lived to 86. No, 88. Okay. And, yeah, I maintained. I stayed in her house sometimes, Alcando and Tucson. She followed me out to Tucson. Oh, really? Yeah.

How strange that she, like, was kind of a loon, kind of crazy, but still wanted to be close to you. Yeah, she wanted it. It was like a love-hate relationship. She is a part of her that, what she had. did was confess one day that she had a relationship with a man that she worked for on wall street and he wanted her to leave my father and she was pregnant with me so it makes sense that she you know she kind of blamed me at that point here's this 80-something-year-old woman telling me at age 42 that you're just like this la la la la la but it made sense but and it made sense why i went down the road

I did. I had to build a sense of identity. Are you saying that your father that you grew up with was not your biological father? No, he was. Okay, okay. Yeah. Okay. But she was having an affair while she was pregnant with you with a- With a guy on Wall Street. Yeah. And he wanted her to leave my father. And then when she found out she was pregnant, that ended that relationship. I see. You know, I'm so worried, because this is what old people do. When they're getting ready to leave the planet, that's when the secret spill. I'm extremely dreading that day with my parents

when they sit me down and tell me that they're not actually my parents. I went and I told her, I asked, are you doing this for me or for you right now? You know, and she said, I have to make this confession. I said, why don't you go to a priest? Yeah, seriously. Why are you telling me this? I fucked Kennedy.

I got to tell the fucking priest. I got enough BDSD. I don't need anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but it sounds like you guys kind of had a relationship at the end of her life. We had a relationship. I really firmly believed that she loved me as much as she could. Because of what happened to her, she had limitations. It took me years to figure that out and to learn that. She was a good person. Things happened to her. And she just was limited, man. Yeah. Yeah. Especially

that generation. They were super limited. There was no communication. There was no how to on parenting. Did she know what you were doing? Did she know about your empire? Oh, yeah. Really? My father would cut out little different articles, you know, saying where they're fortifying the highways, and he thought it was cool.

And one day she busted me in the early 70s with 130 pounds of weed in my basement. And she took it away and hit it. And I said, you're not getting it. She said, you're not getting it back to you see a shrink. And so she found. a psychiatrist for me and Bobby to go see. And we went into, she had to get the best.

So we had to go to New York City to see some guy. Yeah. And after about six sessions, he wrote this thing on a piece of paper and went like this. And he left, he said, I'll be right back. And of course, I'm going to look at it. And said, mother, completely unstable.

And that was a message she gave me and my brother. Wow. Yeah. But you got your pot back? Yeah. She gave it back. And she said, I'm much do you make? I say, I make 33% on my money. So if I gave you $10,000, you can give me back $13,000? And I said, yeah. And she said, no, I can't do that. She thought about it. Wow. Wow. Dude, parents are rock and roll. They're more rock and roll than we give them credit for. My mom was cool in a way. She was not like other mothers, even though she had moments, she had transient

psychosis where she could just get psychotic at times and then she'd be normal. You never knew who you were talking to when you woke up in the morning. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry to hear about your brother, but the long story short as you went, you got out of the game after, for clickbait. How many pounds of weed lifetime do you think you moved? You know, growing some doing the early Mexican, I would say a million pounds.

Yeah. You know? I would agree with you. You know, if it was just Columbia, I would say half a million pounds. Yeah. You know? So it's easy to, you know, say Columbia because that was like, I looked at that as big time. Yeah.

You know, so that's why I always said half a million. But counting all the other stuff, a million. Yeah. Easily. Yeah. Yeah. And you never ever got caught. But a lot of people ratted me out.

Yeah. It was always on discovery. We're going to talk about, we didn't talk about the times that you actually moved to Colombia at Ecuador. I never moved to Colombia, but I moved to Ecuador for a while. Okay. So yeah, there's some really fun anecdotes and some other wild stories that we didn't get to that we're going to talk about on the Patreon. But I was really pleasantly surprised at this interview. Really? Yeah, I want to keep talking to you.

So tell us what happened. And just give us a brief synopsis of the work you've been doing in psychology for the last 25 years. Well, I got a job while I was going for my master's because I require every therapist to have 20 hours. Now, well, you have to have 20 hours sitting across from a psychiatrist. That's right. And I got a job in a treatment center in Malibu. It was incredible. that's, you know, you're talking about all the celebrities.

It was like helicopters and, you know. Wow. It was one celebrity that actually got sentenced to do three years in a treatment. So what he did, he bought a mansion. And he won with a pool house, right? Yeah. So he lived in the poolhouse, came and went as he wanted. Nice.

He had the treatment son are going. Robert Downey Jr.? I can't say this, man. Iron cladding. NDAs, maybe on the Patreon, you'll say it for us. But we played a bad game of bad meeting with them. Oh, wow. Wow. And then, and now you have a private practice?

Yeah, private practice. And I want to get back into treatment because I like, you know, when you hit the floor, you hit the floor running in treatment. You have 40 patients, schizophrenia, mixed with bipolar, mixed with depression, anxiety, name it, you know, and it's like, wow, you know, I had a comedian in my my group. I'm sure you did. This was great. I'm sure you did. Can I tell you real quick? Yeah, of course. All right. I ran a group and they had them. Somebody didn't come. So they merged two groups. And you can't do a group with like 20 people. So I said, what can we do? So I ran it around the

room and they said, let's just put our secrets in a hat and pass it around. And I said, okay. So before this was happening, this guy, he was a comedian, a stand-up comedian from England. I forgot his name, but he was funny as hell, man. And this girl, Kelly, she didn't want to go home and leave Malibu, so she jumped from a two-story window and broke a foot. Whoa. And so she sat down next to him. And she said, oh, my toes are cold.

So he ran out and he got a sock, one of his socks she put over it. So they had different secrets, this and that, this and that. And then they pulled one out and he said, I just jerked off in my sock this morning. At all place, like I knew that Kelly was going like this. He's squirming and I was just laughing my ass off. The rest of the group really didn't know what was going on. Wow.

They were laughing what he said, but they didn't know. The girls just put his sock on. What a life. What a life you've lived. Now, when you got this last question, you're out of the game. You went to school. Now you're a psychologist. What happened all your connects?

and all your buyers. Did you ever keep up with any of them? I'm going to tell you, I'm like, except for one person, I'm the last one alive. They all died? Yeah, I'm 74, man. Did they die addiction? Did they go to prison? Some killed themselves.

Some died of addiction. Wow. And the majority just died, you know? Maybe a product of addiction. They developed different problems. Yeah, if you do this life, if you're in that kind of life long enough, too, you're going to die. I feel lucky. For sure.

Whatever happened to the Luftwaffe, our favorite Mexican Nazi. That article I gave you on him. Yeah. That was like after his death, they did a memorial, and that was part of it. But I couldn't, I can't understand computers too well. So I got the best gist of it as I could. But when did he die? It said so in the article.

I don't remember what it said. And were there any big cases that got put on any of your people? He was born in 1922. So let's just say 2000. Yeah, probably. 2001, I think I saw on the paper. Wow. So did you tell them, hey, I'm getting out.

I'm done? We just, yeah, we kind of just walked away from each other. Wow. Wow. Amazing. Well, George, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on here. You don't really have anything to plug.

Yeah, I do. Oh, go ahead. Like your clinic. You asked me once, why did I reach out to you? Well, there's a girl named Laura, who's my best friend for many years. And she said, call Johnny up and see if you can get on his podcast. And here I am with a microphone in my face. Right.

Look at that. I feel like I'm in the grand jury again. That's right. That's right. Which is another story about that, too, that we'll talk. about on the Patreon. So shout out to Laura. I'm glad. Glad. Glad you reached out. And you're doing good work. You're doing good work. So let's talk some more on the Patreon. But thank you. Really an incredible life. Thank you. It's kind of like, it's thrilling to kind of go back in time.

And it's therapeutic in a way, too. Yeah. Just tell somebody like everything, you know. Good. I'm glad you got to relax. And I did the work that you normally are doing. So thanks, George. Yeah, appreciate it. And we'll switch over and talk some more. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show. What a career, what a life. Hall of Fame drug trafficker. Thanks for coming in.