The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Inside America's LARGEST Pot Trafficking Gang: How Florida Fishermen Became #1 Most Wanted Cartel

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

This is the story of the Saltwater Cowboys; a group of backwoods hippies that became the largest pot smugglers in American History and changed the course of trafficking in not only South Florida, but the entire United States. The surviving members tell us how the operation began and the massive federal takedown that landed them in prison, plus the aftermath of everything once it was done. This is a glimpse into a piece of American History as well as the people involved and how they changed their lives after being one of the most clandestine criminal organizations ever. Go Support Tim and Craig! Tim's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Saltwater-Cowboy-Rise-Marijuana-Empire/dp/1250051282 Tim's IG: https://www.instagram.com/originalsaltwatercowboy/?hl=en Tim's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/southwestfloridaoutlaw/ Craig's Boat Tours: https://www.captaincraigsadventures.com/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By BlueChew! Visit https://bluechew.com/ and try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code MITCHELL at checkout, just pay $5 shipping! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I hung out with the biggest pot smugglers in American history, literally. And I'll give you a hint, they were not from a Mexican cartel. Well, my family were already used to happen to coach an outlaw, you know. And then all of a sudden, they realized that these new rangers that they pulled in down there, they couldn't run these islands. So they said, we'll bring the marijuana in. And so then it became a way of life. This went on for nearly over 40 years and three generations, and nobody had to be.

a clue. And that's the phenomenon in itself to have an entire town of people remaining silent. We did 55 tons one night just to see if we could do it. It wasn't about the money anymore. It was just about getting the work done. If you don't hear it from me or somebody that actually grew up here, disregard it, man. What I'm describing to you is literally the beginning and the ending of Caribbean marijuana coming into this country. Last month, my team and I took a trip down to the swamps of South Florida to interview Tim McBride, leader of the Saltwater Cowboys, a group of redneck fishermen turned professional marijuana importers, who through the course of the 1970s and 80s unloaded thousands of tons of Colombian and Jamaican marijuana arriving off the coast

of southwest Florida. Thousands of tons. By the government's estimate, it was at least 100 million pounds. Wrap your head around that one. We worked, not just our crew, but the crews that were available working at that time, 28 nights in a row, night after night after night. And I did a rough calculation based on all I knew as a kid in those days, so the size of the loads were 25 tons, 30 tons, about 1.6 million pounds in 28 nights. So who are these guys? And how did they manage to become the most prolific pot traffickers in modern American history who were responsible for single-handedly opening up the North American market and paving the way for what became the first Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. To understand this, we've got to go back to the beginning.

And as always, before we get into it, make sure to leave us a like, comment on the video, and subscribe to the channel. It really helps us out. All right, let's get into it. The way that I've heard it sitting around as a kid was that my father was out in the boat and he was mullet fishing and some of the people, the first rung people that had started it up, They were strung down and couldn't move. And they didn't know what to do no more. And they were like, this is the end of the job. Their cops were everywhere.

He pulled up there on them and said, hey, what's going on? And then he realized, you know, people had ski masks on and everything else. And that person said something that was pretty serious. And my dad said, well, why don't y'all just tell me what's going on? And so they said what was going on. And my dad said, well, I'll tell you what. He said, let me behind the wheel of that boat. And he said, I'll make it happen.

And he jumped behind the wheel of that boat running through all the police and everybody else and got the job done. right here is named Craig Daniel Jr. He's friends with Timmy McBride. Craig's father, Craig Sr., is a legend in the area. He founded the marijuana smuggling business back in the late 1960s in the 10,000 Island region of Southwest Florida, from Naples, all the way down to Everglades City and a little town called Chuck Alusky Island, where the majority of the smuggling activities of the Saltwater Cowboys took place. Well, the 1830s were in Fort Myers. We were Indian agents there.

Then after that, we actually were Union soldiers, which is kind of crazy. Because I have sides of my family that were in the Confederacy and sides that were in the Union. Craig's family can trace its roots on Chuck Oluskey Island all the way back to the Civil War. Out here, we were just living off the land. Yeah, we were getting the birds, you know, the gators, fish, fishing. You see, Southwest Florida has always been a gateway for smuggling activities into the United States. During the East Indian Trading Company, when they hired boats and ships to keep watch on their materials that are coming through the Caribbean and back and back and back and the privateers went nuts and

out of control and became pirates. And these are some of the islands that they hit among. Back in the 18th century, pirates from Britain and Spain patrolled the waters of the Gulf of Mexico hunting for ships filled with gold coming in from South America en route to the coast of Florida. Then, centuries later, during the prohibition era of the 1920s... Then come the rum runners who started running through these islands and doing what they needed to do, and they were doing the same thing. This area became a key corridor in the rum-running activities of bootleggers coming up from Cuba into the United States. They were rum running from Cuba and Jamaica, you know, in the islands like that,

bringing it through here, sending it up north, which involved the, like I said earlier, the patriarch of the Kennedy family, Joseph Kennedy, was a... rum runner. And then, you know, that again went by the wayside of history. And next thing you know, we're involved in, you know, smuggling of marijuana. And then after about 70 years, you know, the National Park was created. And what that did was that really constrained us down and squeezed us down. Nobody was offered subsidities. They left our islands out of the park, but everything around us was parked. And so you couldn't go out there and make it living anymore. And so people did what they had to do. Times were getting tough. In the late 1960s, the federal

government declared much of the area around Chuck Alusky, a national park and protected wildlife reserve and enacted many restrictions on the crabbing and fishing that the people of Chuck Oluskey and Everglades City depended on to survive. The United States government, I'll start it off, started wanting to change the boundaries of the national park, which would have included Chuck Alasky Pass and Indian Key Pass, which are the only two ways to get into either Chuck Lesky or Everglades. And by doing that would have meant that you couldn't bring your catch through the national park. Well, how are you going to get your catch to the fish house if you can't come through the park

with it? That's the only way to get here. Now they want to change the size of the nets you can use at certain times of the year. What type of fish you can catch at certain times of the year. How much you can catch. This you can catch, those you can't catch. Then, as the hippie movement began to take rise in America and Colombian marijuana farmers from the Santa Marta region in Colombia began ramping up their crop to meet this new demand, this is when the saltwater cowboys came into existence. The reason is the reason that we're going to existence. The reason why there was always a gringo, like us guys stuck in the middle of this, is because the Cubans and the Colombians didn't get along with one another. They were killing

each other in the streets of Miami for Christ's sake. So they needed a gringo to intermediate the deal. So they would come to guys like us and his father and people like that who were in a position to work this little mechanism. They never meant to be drug smugglers. Now you're being constrained by the government that's supposed to be before you, not against you. So like Craig says, what are you going to do? In fact, when Craig Daniels Sr., who was the youngest of five brothers, first brought the idea up to his family, they scorned him. After all, these roughneck men of Southwest Florida were hardworking and God-fearing,

and a legal business up to that point was unthinkable on Chuck Olusky Island. They said, get out of my house, get out of my face. I don't want nothing to do with any of this and stuff. And my dad just said, well, here, he said, I'm just going to drop on the floor what I made last night. I don't know what it was. I mean, for, I think it's first night I'd ever smuggling, I think it was like $75,000 or something. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, but it was around this time that Craig Daniels, Sr. was introduced to some Cubans in Miami, who offered him cash to unload a couple

of bales of weed coming up from Columbia. This couple of bales turned out to be several tons, and for one night of work, young Craig made more than he could have made in two years working the crabboats. My uncle was like, you made that last night and stuff. And he called up my other uncle. And my other uncle come over there and they all started talking about it and stuff. And my other uncle, my dad said, well, he said, do you want a little bit of money? He said, can I help you out with some money and stuff?

He said, I don't want none of your money. He said, what, I want's a job. Despite their protests, the rest of Craig's family was soon on board. And just like that, the Saltwater Cowboys were. were born. At first, it was just a family business, but quickly, almost everyone on Chuck Alesky Island and an Everglades City got involved. If you look up the population of Everglades City, you'll find out that it's 387 people. And how many of those people back in the 70s and 80s were involved? At least half. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off

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Shop Total Wine and More, in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly must be 21. Here's how it worked. The Saltwater Cowboys were contracted, by the buyers, who were a small group of Cuban pot trafficking groups based in Miami, two hours to the south. The supplier, of course, were the Colombians. At that time, mainly located on the Caribbean coast in the Santa Marta region of Colombia, known for growing

the famous Colombian gold bud. He would go up into the northeastern mountains, and he would pick out his own fields and bring those down. And, um, Tots, you know, he wanted to do the perfect job. It was trial and error. You know, and, um, uh, I believe that, that, you know, after that, Once they started seeing how much pot we could move through here, the Columbians, then they started figuring out other avenues to ship it over here, make it easier for us to move it. So that way they could make more money. And that's when people just started running offshore, picking it up.

Once the Cubans in Miami placed their order with the Columbians, which was usually anywhere between 30 and 50 tons, but sometimes as much as 100 tons, the merchandise would be loaded onto a large cargo ship, the crew and the captain all being paid off, of course, and then sent on a 10-day journey north through the Caribbean Islands until it reached the southwest coast of Florida. And this is where the saltwater cowboys step in.

It was a three-step process, pay attention because it gets complicated. Step one, the cargo ship carrying the pot, what the cowboys referred to as the mother's ship. The captain of the vessels that's hired to go to whatever country that they're going to to pick up the load originally, it's up to them to decide how close they want to get to shore. You know, because now it becomes a game of cat and mouse. Now it's when your ass goes like this. It's time to get real. The mother ship would anchor about 30 miles off of the coast of Chukalesky Island,

just outside the line of international waters. That's where all the shrimpers were, all the shrimp boats were. And when you have radar on at night, you see a bear spot up the 30 miles from the shore out, and then all you see is dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot shrimp boats everywhere. So it was more advantageous for our boats loaded to hide within that shrimper front. and just become an extra blip on the screen. As the sun went down, Craig Sr. and his crew would approach the mothership in their crabboats. The motherships would come out here to the outer islands where the shallows began.

Smaller boats, 25, 30 of them, depending on how much they're coming to receive from us. And then average load would be 30 tons. So for large, 100-load operations, sometimes three or four crab boats would be needed. If you're going offshore to meet the mothership and coming back in, that's one of the highest-paid positions in the whole whole top to bottom in the organization because quite frankly there's three people on a boat there's three people in charge for hours maybe two three four hours it'd take to run that distance to get in because you're barely moving once the crabboats were anchored next to the ship the columbian crews aboard the mother's ship would start passing bales of pot down to the cowboys

and the crabboats this process alone could take a couple of hours our boat in an airplane and during the day it would look like a big pile of bales with a radar on top of it. Right. Because we'd actually stuck them around the bow, around the side of the boat along the windows the captains would use, and on the roof, just high enough for the radar to turn, and then from the deck up to that height all the way back to the back of the boat,

and then down under the shade that we would stand under to work during the day. Once the sun was down, under the cover of night, the crews would then drive in the crabboats, loaded to the gills with pot bales, right up to the coastline, where they would be met by other crews driving what they called T-craft boats. Each crew would have six T-Crafts probably, and, you know, so, you know, who's to say how many crews there was in the Daniels family? And so you'd come across here in the middle of the night with six T-Crafts loaded down after you just unloaded 40, 50,000 pounds of pot, and everybody on the island could hear it. These T-Crafts are really sleek, lightweight speedboats designed to be operated in shableness.

shallow water and ideal for navigating the narrow waterways of the 10,000 islands. So the boats that come out to get it from us through these shallows and through these waterways out here are shallow drafting boats. It would take anywhere from, say, if we had 25 tons just on our boat alone, it would take 25, 20-25 boats to come out there and get this stuff from us. Step 2. The crew on the crabboats would then start transferring the pot bales to the crews manning the T-Craft boats. And it was their job to get the bales safely onto shore. safely onto shore. 40 bales, whatever they could stack on these boats, two guys on each boat.

That boat's $30,000 for each one of those boats. Now that guy on that boat is paid out of that captain's fee, $30,000. Typically he gets half. They would load up with as much pot as possible without sinking their vessels. This is a typical waterway that's off the beaten path, if you will, for the lack of a better way of putting it. It's either Chuck Aleski Pass or Indian Key Pass, which takes you right into every city into the Barron River. But we would take those off beat paths that only we knew, like Craig

knows, that's why we're here where we are, simply because it's out of the way. We know it's, we know it better than anybody in the world knows it, or did at that time anyways. As kids, this is where we played. And then drive as fast as they could through the clandestine waterways. Boats going this way and stones that have emptied coming back this way, passing one another in the night without lights, all done without lights on. Until they made it safely to shore. How many T-Craft boats would it take to bring all of that onto shore? 50-ton load? Well, it wouldn't take any more than 20-25, because they could make two, three trips.

It was just constant back and forth until our boat is empty. Where they would be met by yet another crew who would quickly unload the bales from the boats and store them in any number of stash houses used on a daily basis throughout Chuck Alusky and Everglade City. They run through these islands and take it right over there. and put it in one, two or three of our buddies' houses that we've literally gotten furniture stuffed in the garage and fill the house full.

And then we have from sundown to sunup to get that process done. Sometimes, depending on how big the load was, the sun would be coming up as the last loads were finally delivered onto shore. Now, the next process to take over is the shore crew. You've got the guys that are taking it from the dock and throwing it into the house

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Boy, do we thank them for sponsoring the podcast. All right, let's get back into it. Step three, transport the pot to Miami. What would happen is that house would get emptied during the next morning. during the next day. The cars and the trucks and the vans and anything that can stick a bail of pot in is getting loaded and it's being driven during the day-night hours to Miami.

Additional crews of drug mules would arrive at the stash houses to pick up their allotted amounts and drive them two and a half hours south to Miami. The Daniels brothers employed every method of smuggling possible, from passenger cars loaded on top of tow trucks to hollowed out Winnebagoes. We've used dump trucks every now and then they come down and somebody would dump a load gravel in their driveway, we would two by four the tailgate open and stuff the dump truck full of bales and let him drive back out of town. They also had spotters placed on the highways heading out of town who would radio in the positions

of the local highway patrol. Once the smuggling cars safely reached Miami, they would head to their assigned location to meet the Cuban couriers. We developed what law enforcement now calls a dead drop. Our drivers would drive into a plaza in Kendall off of Chrome Avenue somewhere in West Miami, pull into a plaza and get out and go window shop, and we would have a person there with another Cuban counterpart that actually owned the stuff pointing out that's our vehicle, that's our truck, that's our, they would put a guy in it, go empty it and bring it back.

Our guy would get back in it and go get loaded again if there was time to make another run. This was a separation between the Miami crew and the Everglades crew, so no one ever met anybody. the adults who set up the crews and the jobs knew who the players were. And again, depending on the size of the loads, sometimes they would make two or three trips up and back to Miami in one night. And what's so fascinating to think about is that these saltwater cowboys never sold weed, not a single gram. They were couriers, beginning to end, delivering the merchandise from point A to point B. That's it. Typically, you get 11 bales in a car. You take their back seat out. You put one in the front seat like a

passenger and like that, they would go to Miami, they would take it to Miami, and then sell that load. Once that load begins to sell, that's when I get paid. And for their services, the Cubans paid them $175 per pound. Let's do the math really quick. If on a decent night, the Saltwater Cowboys unloaded 50 tons of pot, that's 110,000 pounds, times $175 per pound, that's a cool $19,250,000. for one night's worth of work. I've made as much as 75,000, 100,000.

It just depends on the size of the load, and how much they're willing to pay, you know, because, I mean, if you're buying it for $10 a pound and you're selling it in Miami for 500 or 750, there's a lot of wiggle room there, man. The money was endless. Crew members could make anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 a night, depending on their function.

Ordinary citizens on Chuck Alasky Island could make 10 grand, just for subletting out their house to stash pot bales for a few hours. This went on for almost 20 years. And get this. How many loads do you think in the 11 years that you were working? How many loads do you think actually got intercepted or that you had to chuck off the side? None that I ever had to. Not once did a load get intercepted, a car pulled over, or an arrest made.

Nor was there ever any violence. The Danielseses weren't like that. They never carried guns on their jobs. None of that. They were the type of people that you went to their house and they were sitting around the fire, roasting a hog, drinking a beer, playing the guitar. And they told their wife, you know, in the beginning before they all got into it that they're out fishing. No member of the Saltwater Cowboys ever carried a gun.

They're very proud of that fact. Everyone knows that marijuana ain't near as bad as any of those other drugs anyways, and it's not really killing people or anything like that, or causing anybody to go out and steal anything. And so everybody did it. The whole community did it. And everybody knew it was happening. These peace-loving redneck hippies had the good sense to avoid the violence that was sweeping

South Florida at the time due to the ursioning cocaine business, which, by the way, they were smart enough to stay away from. The reason why the marijuana drug smuggling got so big down here and so big with everybody is because they wouldn't bring the cocaine in like everybody else is bringing it in. And so they said that, you know, that's hurting the children and we're not going to do that. My two partners always, you know, alluding to, oh, let's do a load of coke, see a load of Coke. wanted to handle that stuff because you're talking about a whole different group of people.

Jesus, they were killing people in the malls in Miami. The Adeland Massacre had just occurred. There was more than enough pot money to go around. If you owe me $30 million, we would keep $30 million worth of your stuff here in Everglades or in Seipers or in Golden Gate or someplace and send the rest to Miami. And it would take a couple of weeks. We'd have to get paid out of that load as it sells. So it would be a couple weeks, two or three weeks maybe before we get paid for that.

load. But in the meantime, we've worked four or five, six more times. So when I say I'm getting paid, paper bags are getting slid at me for jobs I don't remember having done. That's the reason why. Sometimes a boat from a different region hauling marijuana would get pursued by Coast Guards so they would dump their bales into the ocean. And the next day, the residents of Chuck Oluskey would help themselves to floating pot bales bobbing up and down in the water. This became known as Square Grupper. If somebody said Square Gruper on the radio, Anybody in town with a radio and a boat, here's that, they're coming right through here and they're going out there looking for the shit because that's free money.

Timmy McBride was 22 years old when he first migrated from Wisconsin to the 10,000 islands to get a job working on the crabboats. On his first day out crab fishing, he learned he was instead going to help unload a Colombian pot ship from which he was paid $75,000. Think about that. Imagine stumbling into that gig. This was in the late 70s, too. The boat that I was working on would be contacted and given the coordinates and the destination

and where we'd go and at what time and the call sign for the boat that we're going to meet. But all that information was giving to him. Us as crewmen, we didn't really, we weren't keeping track of who's boss and whose job and who's what. I was getting paper bags full of money skillet across the kitchen table at me for jobs I don't remember having done. He spent the next seven years working in the pot crews and learning the trade under the two from Craig Daniel Sr. Taking this thing on myself was not done by choice. It just happened by accident.

It was a sheer happenstance. In 1984, when the feds finally swooped in with Operation Peacemaker and hauled Craig Sr. and the other ringleaders of the crew off to prison, Timmy stepped in and took over. A chance meeting had put him in contact with the Cuban buyers in Miami. I would be approached by only two people in Miami that I ever want to meet, and that was Carlito and Leo. I've named them in my book.

That's all you're ever going to get out of me. I didn't want to meet every pot selling Cuban or whatever in Miami. You go to Carlito and Leo. They come to me with your money, $175 for every pound that you want, whether you want 20 tons, you want 50 tons, you want 100 tons, you'll pay me $175 a pound once I get your shit to you. Tell me how much you want, I would order it. Who sent him on a private jet down to Columbia to meet,

with the boss himself, the head of the cartel in the northern marijuana region of Santa Marta, who also happened to be the cousin of the Orojuela twins, the founders of the Cali Cocaine Cartel, the most powerful super cartel in history. Timmy would walk the pot farms and inspect the bales and taste the merchandise. I would go down there and pick between rows of bales stacked this way into the jungle, stacked that way in the jungle, 10 feet high and I would be using the boss's pipe, and the boss is the only name I'll ever call it. this guy using his pipe to and a piece of bamboo pole with a pipe on the end of it cut by the angle like a syrenza that i could stick the bail pull out a sample and smoke it with the

boss's pipe and say well shit give me all the those you got the guys would kick them off the pile i would spray a mark on them they would weigh them and when i got to the amount that i was there to get they would say that's it and we go back to the house have dinner party the rest of the night i hop in a private jet that was owned by carlito and leo and i we paid just under 900 000 which is less than a week's work for any of us and bought this corporate leer that i could get to columbia in five and a half hours soon he got to the point where he was even entrusted to bring the re-up money down from florida on behalf of the cubans i asked him what his contingency plan was if a load ever got intercepted on the way to florida in other words who takes the hit

for lost product is it the cubans or the columbians and he told me basically it didn't matter these These guys were making millions of dollars a day. I could buy it in those days for $10 a pound. And sell it for how much? Well, it was selling in Miami anywhere between 500 and 750 a pound. And how much were you buying at a time? The most I ever bought at one time, 200,000 pounds, and then send boat after boat to go get it. That meant with just $300,000, the Cubans could order 30,000 pounds.

This meant that even after paying Timmy and the Saltwater Cowboys, their 5 million, they're 5,000 million-dollar handling fee, this $300,000 investment would net the Cubans almost $12 million. $300,000 investment is a weekend of borrow money. Yeah. For a guy like me. Right. And some of the people that I grew up with. It was impossible to lose money.

Where do you hide millions of dollars? What do you do with that money? Anything you want. It was during this time that Timmy also began importing weed from Jamaica, which was experiencing a booming demand for their Indica bud. which was of much higher quality and far more expensive than the Colombian gold. What country grew the best pot back in that era? Was it Columbia or Jamaica? Hands down, it was Jamaica.

Jamaica, right? It was Jamaican's lamb's bread. He even worked with the Zion Coptic church, which was made famous by the documentary Square Gruper. These guys were like white Rastafarians, basically, and some of the biggest weed traffickers in South Florida at the time. The Ethiopian Zion Copics, who ran the Jamaican Gonja, you know, empire, which, by the way, at one point in time was supporting the entire island nation of Jamaica and their government was supported by Ganja. They export of Ganja into the United States. So we were removing literally millions of pounds of Ganja out of Jamaica. And at times,

bringing it right to the Coptics mansion on Steyer Island in Miami. Timmy was responsible for taking the smuggling operation that had been founded by his predecessor, Craig Sr., to the next level. I've seen 40,000 pounds of, of Jamaican lambsbred come in kilo bricks, individually wrapped kilo bricks, stuffed in another burlap croaker sack that had marlboro cigarettes on the side of it. All these little kilo bricks inside of each individual package like that, a whole 40,000 pound load like that. So much stuff was coming out of South America that at one point in time they ran out of burlap to put it in. He built lookout towers along the coast of Chuck Alusky Island. He upgraded the T-Craft

boats and the radar and the sonar systems for for the crews on the crab boats. The wheel was already invented. We just made a little more sophisticated with new equipment, new technology. You know, we had parabolic microphones, which the older generations never had. We had handheld radar, which the older generations didn't have.

They were, and even still, even when I was running, we were, there was no GPS. We were running off of what was called low-ran. Long-range aid to navigation is how we navigated the waters out here and got our waypoints, you know, out of that technology. But that only helped to make the loads bigger, which made it more profitable.

And formed packs with other pot hauling crews. I was not only using the Everglades crew that I grew up with. There was also a crew in Goodland. There was one in Marco. There was one in Naples and one in Pine Island. So if it wasn't able to bring it in this direction, we would go another direction up north and even as far as Steenhatchee, which is up in the panhandle.

He paid off local sheriffs, prosecutors, and even judges. And that's why. In 1987, when the feds raided Chuck Oluskey Island and Operation Peacemaker Part 2, Timmy knew about it beforehand. It was a gigantic, multi-agency operation. Involved in each of these operations, there were over 250 federal agents from every branch of law enforcement from across North America, descended on this little freaking two-island town and started grabbing people. Well, when that happened, now we're verging on the 90s.

Caribbean marijuana, quite literally at that point in time, stopped coming into North America. That's the significance of what it was we had done for three generations. Timmy himself went on the run for a little while, but then eventually turned himself in and ended up taking a plea deal for 10 years, of which he served about 7, not bad for transporting 100 million pounds of weed. They were giving out sentences that were like 36 months. Yeah. You know, ridiculous sentences.

Well, they weren't having the desire to effect they were intended. So they changed the mandatory sentencing guidelines because of us the mandatory minimums across the board. So now when you get caught doing what we're doing, you're going to, you have one indictment that's a mandatory 10 to life on one, two, three, four times over. So you have a 40 year mandatory to life sentence and a million dollar fine on each count. And it was this second operation peacemaker that wiped out the gang for good and effectively ended smuggling in Chuck Aleski and the 10,000 island. region of South Florida.

That literally ended marijuana, Caribbean marijuana, from coming into the country of any significance. This was now the late 1980s, and the Caribbean smuggling routes from South America for both cocaine and marijuana had all but closed down. The Caribbean marijuana now went to North Africa and into Europe. That's where that market went, and it still goes there today. And the new cartels from Mexico began to monopolize their grip on the drug smuggling business into America. I asked this guy from Homeland Security to be honest with me and truthful and tell me what you think of percentage-wise, your success of interdicting marijuana coming across our southern border from Mexico.

It didn't take him but half a second to answer me. He said, maybe 1%. And I said, thank you. That's the most honest answer to anybody in law enforcement has ever given me. Furthermore, as marijuana strains became better and better, first from Mexico and then in the early 90s out of Humboldt County, California. there was no longer a demand for the Jamaican or Colombian weed sent over by the tunnel load. The new generation looked at that stuff as garbage. So the Saltwater Cowboys would have eventually gone out of business even if the feds hadn't taken them down first.

Still, their place in American drug smuggling history cannot be denied. They were the OGs, responsible for introducing marijuana en masse to North America. They literally invented the market. Along with the Colombians and Cubans, it was the Saltwater Cows. Cowboys who changed America for good. Now life is more exciting for me than it ever was. I make just as much money as I ever did drug dealing, and I have a good time.

I don't have to look behind my back, and life is blessed to have a beautiful family and stuff. And I must say that I still get high, I still get drunk, and I still sling stuff. But I just get high in the Lord, drunk in the spirit, and I sling the word of God now. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. Thank you so much for watching.

loved watching it as much as we loved making it. Make sure to leave us a like and a comment and subscribe to the channel. We will see you next week. Take care.