Tim McBride details his 1979–1989 Everglades smuggling empire, moving up to 20 tons of Colombian marijuana via crab boats and a network of 120 radios. He recounts evading law enforcement with "dead drops" in Coral Gables, hiding millions in cash, and bribing officers to blind radar during the Yucatan Gap transit. Despite meeting Manuel Noriega and facing life sentences under new mandatory guidelines, McBride emphasizes his non-violent operation contrasted with the cocaine trade, promoting his book Saltwater Cowboy to correct historical narratives about cannabis smuggling. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Tim McBride and the Curry Video00:02:24
Hello, world!
Tim McBride is a former marijuana smuggler and pot hauler living on the edge of Florida's Everglades.
From 1979 to 1989, Tim ran the southern waters and the Caribbean with a band of modern day pirates known by locals as saltwater cowboys.
Night after night, Tim would offload up to 20 tons at a time from cargo ships that would make the trip from South America.
Similar to how Mexico does today, Colombia supplied 42% of the marijuana.
Consumed in the United States in 1984.
The major percentage of this traffic was controlled by Tim's crews working with smaller crews and several large Colombian organizations.
Tim's story is fucking crazy.
Highly recommend this podcast.
This is one of my all time favorites.
Without further ado, please welcome Tim McBride.
When I was preparing to do that Viceland video, I asked John, the guy I showed you, the superintendent, and we'll show you in a minute.
I said, you know, any of your other buddies hanging around, man, that might want to, you know, get involved in this thing?
He goes, yeah.
He says, I know the two perfect guys, right?
And he says, these guys love to talk about themselves.
I said, that's perfect, man.
That's what I'm looking for.
So he says, Ron Curry and Ron Guthrie, Ron and Ron.
Right.
So fast forward, we're having lunch at a Panera Bread, and just then we're talking about what's coming up, you know, what they're going to do with the you know, on the video and, you know, for the docking.
Yeah.
This Ron Curry, he looks over at me and goes, you don't remember me, do you?
And I said, no, should I?
And he says, well, yeah, I boarded your boat one night.
Oh.
I said, really?
And dude, I've only been boarded three times ever and I remember him perfectly.
And I said, you're going to have to give me a little more than that.
So he starts telling me the story about I'm coming out of the Southwest on the Fort Myers beach just after sundown and he'd throw the blue lights on me and stop me.
And I said, oh, yeah, that's the night I let you stop me.
He goes, what do you mean you let me stop you?
And I said, dude, I had, you know, 60 mile an hour on you.
I could have left you hanging.
But what I didn't need was you on the radio and everybody out here running around trying to chase me and find me when 20 minutes out or 25 minutes after you stopped me, I ran north to Pine Island and unloaded 47,000 pounds.
The Night I Let You Stop Me00:02:58
He goes, no, you didn't.
And he looks over at his boss, John.
He goes, yeah, he did.
So Ron goes on.
We get to be friends and he's telling me things.
You know, and he was going to, you know, work together with me on putting our own podcast together.
Yeah.
You know, true crime kind of shit with the real guy, the real guy from CIA and customs and, you know, me, the guy they were chasing and shit, you know, and he said, he told me this one bit of information, which is really why I kind of, if you're on it, whether I want to put it on here or not, he says, you know, when we arrested you, came to your house that night, he says, there was two MIB, Metropolitan, MBI, Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation.
And he was in the picture, he says, when they arrested me and walked me out of the house, and see, all they had was a warrant.
For me to arrest me not to search the house not to take any not to seize anything All they had to do was clear the house to make sure nobody else was in there And then take my ass out of there and take me to jail.
I'm sitting there in my underwear on the couch and you know, they're going through the house and shit and Finally, they say okay, let's go you go to pick me up and I said wait a minute Dude, I got my you know, I'm sitting here in my fucking underwear and he's I said just take me back to that hall, you know back room back there.
We all tackled me.
I mean, like five of them tackled me, and I can feel the guns sticking out of my face and shit like this, you know.
And I said, back there, you know, in the room where you tackle me, the hall closest to the wall, just open it up, grab shorts, grab jeans and a shirt.
I don't give a shit.
And I had two closets, really, actually.
I said, the one closest to the wall.
Guy walked back there, and he wasn't that.
Ten seconds, he goes, holy shit.
And I yelled back, wrong closet, right?
He opened up the closet, and I had six of these, probably, I don't know, they're like three by three safes.
Three by three by three deep, and I had six of them stacked on top of one another in there.
And he goes, he comes back out, throws my clothes at me and goes, what do you got in those safes back there?
And I said, well dude, show me the piece of paper that says that you can go through my.
I'll be glad to go open them for you.
You know, and he kind of quieted down that and it, you know, they took me out of there and they put us, you know, supposed to put a seal on the house.
So here I am, 35 something odd years later.
I'm talking to Ron and i'm going through his memorabilia, his shit from his career, and he goes, you're gonna love this one, he says at he says um, he shows me this picture.
He says, this is yours.
He says, after we took you out of the house, we had those safes opened and we looked inside of them and we had this picture taken and our boss said, you motherfuckers, put every single fucking dollar back.
The same way you found it, lock those safes up, wipe them down and get the fuck out of this house, because had they Taking that money, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
We never got busted.
The case would have been dropped and all this stuff because they didn't have a warrant to seize that.
Seized Millions and a Sealed House00:15:07
Wow.
But what they did do before they put it all away was they took a picture of themselves with it.
So he shows me the picture and he says, you be kind enough to block out these MBI agents' faces because they'd really rather not be seen.
That's what they found in my closet.
Oh, my God.
God, how much money is that?
6.7, almost $7 million in cash.
Can I show this to the camera?
Yeah.
$7 million in cash.
We got to send this.
What's that?
That's fucking crazy.
Can you see it?
No, you can't really see it too well.
Here.
That's too bright.
That's all right.
He'll put it on the screen.
Okay.
It's all right.
We'll show it later.
Yeah.
That's crazy, man.
Don't ever tell anybody we did that.
I'm like, okay, dude, because that would have been his ass.
He's retired now, but yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's just one of the fuck.
We don't have to, we might have to edit that out of the podcast or what?
We can leave it out.
Yeah, stick it in there.
All right, fuck it.
What's it going to do, arrest me?
I already did.
It can't do anything more than eat me now, man.
You know, after nailing me, you know, when this was all, you know, when this first started out with this, you know, the first day I was busted, 38 of us went down.
So, how much time did you get, what did you get sentenced to?
I was originally sentenced with 160 years mandatory to life.
and $16 million in fines.
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Back to the show.
Because what was taking place at that time and history proves this and anybody with any brains can look this up and if you're doubting my word on this, that's the federal sentencing guidelines didn't change to mandatory minimums until around September 1st, 1987.
So if your crime happened before September 1st, 1987, you were considered under the old law, which gave you good time, statutory good time, and parole.
Plus the judges, their magistrates, if you will, had at that time discretion out the ass, let's put it that way.
You know, they could take a lot of things under consideration when they're sentencing you, like, are you a family man or you've ever been in trouble before, you know, and that kind of stuff, you know, your demeanor and, you know, are you cooperating or are you participating and all that kind of crap.
Well, those sentences up until that time weren't having any real great effect on anything, really.
And, you know, a great example of that is I had just somehow managed to come across an article, and you can find it if you look it up.
If you Google.
Daniels Brothers Everglades.
And an old Miami Herald article will come up, front page article, and it reads, the headline reads, The Cocaine Cowboys of Miami Have Nothing on the Daniels Brothers of Everglades City.
So the story goes on, the article's reading through, and the magistrate, these five brothers are standing in front of the magistrate being arraigned for their crime, pot-hauling.
And four of the brothers had been arrested, had never been arrested, but Craig, the youngest brother, who was, you know, my buddy.
This would be his second time.
So the judge goes, you know, you can hear him rifling through this shit.
And he goes, I have absolutely no, I absolutely don't have any knowledge on how to sentence people like you.
He says, there are no guidelines for people such as you.
He says, I'm at my wits' end.
I have no idea.
You know, he says, and he looks over at Craig, the youngest of the five brothers, and he says, you do realize this is your second time around, Mr. Daniels.
He says, so.
Why don't we do this?
He says, your four brothers, first time around, 36 months.
And then he looks at Craig.
And he looks at Craig and he says, Mr. Daniels, he says, now remember, second time around, he says, does five years sound like a long time to you?
And he's asking him.
And Craig goes, oh, hell yeah, man.
That sounds like a long time to me.
And he got five years.
This is after reading their list of seizures.
And the list of seizures read like, I mean, Jesus.
Around $15 million in holdings in the Netherlands and Chile's holding company and a number of properties around the Caribbean.
Here in the United States, they had timeshares, hotels, motels, houses, cars, boats, buses, airplanes.
I mean, all kinds of shit.
They seized another $8 million in cash, plus they seized 580,000 pounds of Colombian weed.
Now, Who's got a half a million plus pounds of weed laying around?
Well, we do.
So, this is what they seized from these guys.
And these are the sentences that they gave them 36 months and five years.
And what year was this again?
This was in 1984.
1984.
See, they came, they did two operations, or three actually, three operations in the 80s.
They did, the first one was in 1983 called Operation Everglades.
Over 250 plus federal agents from nine branches of law enforcement across the United States.
Every end of the spectrum was there, man.
I mean, they were everywhere.
And it wasn't the, it didn't result the way they had intended it to, because the, intelligence of the first generations and I'm considered a third generation pot hauler I was the part I was with the kids second generation is those guys and, and their fathers and uncles and older cousins and the generation before them was their, like grandpas, you know, and so on, like that, because it was generational.
So um um, these guys are, you know, they're standing there and they're, they're getting these sentences and you know, Craig gets, five years after having had all this stuff seized, all this money and all this property and all this stuff like this.
The guidelines only provided for that.
The judge had no other recourse but to go by what the book told him to do at that time.
So skipping forward, here comes 1984.
I mean, the first time they came around, they hardly found anybody because two weeks before that, they knew two weeks before they were coming that they were coming because their intelligence was such that everybody left town.
Oh, they're coming, leave town.
So almost a year to the day, here they come again.
250 plus almost 300 federal agents from DEA, Customs, Secret Service, FBI, you name it.
They were in there and they shut the town down and a little bit of Naples.
It only took one guy to block off the road into the Everglades because there's only one road in there, and it was kind of silly.
That's how they blocked the road off.
Jesus, this is a no no, this is a major look at this guy, hot hauling hat and a shotgun, hot hauling operation, and this is their roadblock.
What are you going to do with that shotgun?
Because there's only, what do you think you're going to do with that thing, man?
Fuck, dude.
There's only one road in and one road out.
I mean, how many guys do you need to watch the fucking road, right?
And I thought, so, um, plus you guys are getting around on airboats, anyways.
You know, so the second time around, I mean, it was, it was kind of comical in, in, in, in most respects because there were more reporters on this 130 acre island.
There were more reporters and cops on the island.
There were people being arrested.
It's kind of funny.
They're trying to block a road when you guys get around on boats.
Dude, yeah, I mean, you know, and what's crazy too is, you know, what we were masters of hide in plain sight.
You know, we'll get into this in a little bit about how it's done, the mechanics of it.
You know, most people, it just blows most people's mind.
And that's when I start getting into, yeah, right, dude, you know, this kind of shit.
But, dude, you know, I'm not sitting here, you know, you know, and St. Martin's Press didn't verify, you know, my story or what it is I'm imparting without some kind of, you know, sources.
Because the publisher of St. Martin's Press, Susan Robbins, she asked me, she says, what about validation?
You know, because all this craziness I'm writing about, you know, hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of tons of pot.
And I said, well, validation.
Well, let me see.
Who would you like me to introduce you to?
The Supervisor for Customs, DEA, FDLE, which is Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Sheriff's, Naples Sheriff's Trident Task Force Officer.
FBI, CIA, who do you want to talk to?
I'll introduce them to you.
And she said, perfect.
That's all the validation I need.
Write the book, right?
So everything that you read in here, and people have asked me about embellishment when I'm talking about unloading a boat with 55 tons on it.
I said, well, embellishment.
I said, there's no room for embellishment.
To embellish on what was written would have made it, first of all, sound so ridiculous that it would be comical.
Well, that is comical.
55 tons, that is almost so ridiculous.
It's unbelievable.
But, you know, I mean, people don't know the story, which is why I'm sitting here with you, you know, and guys like you to try to get them to understand that, you know, if you were smoking weed in the 60s, 70s, and the early 80s, dude, this is how you got it.
You know, there was no growing the shit like they were growing it all over.
Some guys were experimenting little bits here and there, you know, with a plant or two and like that.
But, dude, if you wanted weed to smoke, you literally had to go to another country, load a fucking boat full of the shit, and bring it back.
There's your weed.
This is how it was done up until the late till the early 90s.
There's a reason for that, too.
What is this?
Naples man arrested for how much weed?
I'm not sure who that guy is.
Captain Tom, what's his last name?
Storer of Collier County?
Yeah.
This is just the, that's the sheriff.
Oh, it's the sheriff.
It says Daniels.
Oh, Daniels.
Scroll up to the top.
But this is like, after 30 years, he got caught again or something.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Huh.
Yeah, see, the Dan is our prevalent family in Everglades.
So they were the first people to get busted?
Well, they were, no, actually, the way the chain of events works is the original pot hauler, his name was Lauren Totch Brown.
Totch was his nickname.
Totch was a legend in the Everglades.
Really?
Yeah.
He was the guy who blazed the trail for pot hauling.
Out of necessity, because these are the days when you United States is expanding their borders of Everglades National Park to try to include our passageways into Everglades City and Chuckaleski Island, where we bring our catches.
You know our stone crabs and you know grouper and what have you?
Um, what they had tried to do at one point was create a law that says that you can you're not allowed to bring your catches through the national Park.
Well, how the hell you're going to get to the Fish house if you got to go through the national Park to get there?
Right.
That wasn't going to happen, so it was a big deal going on, and they tried to shut us down.
Then they start, and then they go into rules and regulations.
You can only catch so many of a size.
The IFQs.
At a certain time of year.
Yeah.
Only certain types of nets are to be used on mullet and pompano and that type of thing, you know.
And they just started crunching down and making life a little bit harder on everybody down there, you know.
And then this pot holland shows up, you know, and Totch gets approached, and he's, you know, he's, okay, well, I get no, so he, gets his boat together and his crew.
He goes to Panama, goes around the corner and up the river to the grass, up the grassland to find the red bud that everybody was smoking at that time.
And trial and error, I mean, it wasn't an easy thing.
I mean, he had his problems, but he finally wound up working it out.
So he's bringing these loads from Colombia, South America, you know, to the guys, to the Cubans in Miami.
And things are getting a bit dicey over there, you know.
And he says, look, why don't we just bring this shit over here?
You know, he says, look at this, 10,000 islands.
We live here.
This is where our kids play, you know, you get the shit in there.
It's ours.
So why don't we just bring it around there?
So if you saw the dock on Viceland, that's exactly how it played out.
Miami was the focus.
Nothing going on over here in Everglades.
Cocaine Cowboys fucked everything up, man.
I mean, everybody wants to be the guy, you know?
And in particular in those days was a woman by the name of Griselda Blanco.
Oh, yeah.
She was the godmother.
Now, if anybody knows this story, and I pretty much know it intimately, you know, without the Hollywood bullshit that goes into it, you know, when you see it on television.
She and her husband actually got Pablo and his partner, Carlos Lader, brought them out of the gangs in Medellin.
They were selling weed on the streets in Medellin.
Showed them how to gather the coca paste and create the cocaine hydrochloride.
They were setting him up to use him as a conduit from Colombia to the United States.
Gazelle had it where she was using models and beautiful women and putting in the bras and this kind of shit.
That was her first gig.
She started out in New York.
Stone Crabs, Pablo, and the Godmother00:16:58
Got busted with a kilo, disappears.
Two years later, she shows back up in Miami under her real fucking name.
Hello?
Nobody picks up on it.
This is our.
These are the people protecting us.
They don't even know that this woman's back and she's using her real name in Miami.
She winds up being the murderous, torturing, brutal son of a bitch that ever loved if you know the story.
Yeah.
That's like how.
I've seen Billy Corbin's documentaries.
Billy Corbin made that, yes.
That's how.
Escobar became the murdering infamous son of a bitch that he was.
He learned it from her because that's just how these people were.
She was the kind of woman where if you got her shit and you paid her back and she didn't like you, she'd kill you.
If you didn't pay her back, she'd kill you.
If you took her shit and whatever, she'd kill people like she's ordering pizza.
So that's where the focus began over there, the cocaine cowboys.
And what we were doing on our end of it was taking these idiots money, they're bar money, you know, just for instance, give me 300 grand.
I'll take it to Columbia and I'll buy you 30,000 pounds of Colombian red buds, 10 bucks a pound, you know.
So by the time I get your shit back here to the United States, it's upwards around $500 a pound at that time.
Buying for 10 in Columbia and selling it in Miami for 500?
500.
So.
This is another fallacy that I try to disprove, you know, when people think about violence.
Dude, you're in Colombia or in South America.
I worked with Noriega several times.
Never met him.
Got a handwritten note from the guy one time, but never met him.
And just people like this.
People in Colombia and Jamaica, you know, like that.
No, I'm not scared.
What the fuck?
I'm a kid.
I grew up in this, you know, doing this with these guys.
How old are you?
I'm 20.
First time I ever unloaded a boat full of pot.
I had just turned 21 and it was 15 tons and I never did one that small.
Jesus Christ.
How long does it take?
How many guys do you have unloading 15 tons?
Well, there's and how long does that take?
There's three guys on the big boat that go out to meet the mothership.
That's us.
This is the hierarchy of how it all works.
A boat that goes offshore to unload from the mothership, that crew gets paid the most.
Because when you think about it, if we're taking 30,000 pounds of shit and putting it on our boat, Three guys are responsible for the whole load for about five hours to get it into shore.
So that's big money.
Yeah.
And while we're doing that, we, you know, there's always safety valves built into the scenario, no matter where you are and what you're doing.
In this case, and I think I gave you this, we're using this boat.
Oh, yeah.
The picture of your crabbing boat, right.
That's me on that side.
That's my buddy Mark.
He's the first mate on this side.
Yeah.
Here, pull that up, Austin.
You have that, right?
You got this boat?
Yeah, we got the crab boat.
That boat has hauled millions of pounds, literally.
Millions of pounds of pot has been on the deck of that boat.
Not only the deck, we're filling it up around the bow.
We're stacking it up on top here just so the radar turns.
And then from that level all the way back, it's that high.
This goes down to about eight inches of water line.
That's how heavy the boat gets.
And we plug the scuppers in the back so the boat doesn't sink.
So how many pounds can you fit in that boat at one time?
I think we put about 45,000 pounds on there at any one time.
And this is not hiding it below deck, all the subterfuge bullshit.
This shit's, I mean, if you were to fly over this thing when it's loaded, all you'd see was the radar turning and a big ball of pot going through the water.
And that's what it looks like.
What happened?
You can't find the boat?
It won't open.
That's the only one that won't open.
Oh, fuck.
That sucks.
And then, you know, the reason why, you see, it was our job as the guys on the boat to sample the shit.
So when we get back to shore, we're like yeah, take some of this man, it's good, you know, like that, and then everybody would have a stash of it, right?
So um, it was never a problem, load the boat, kick back.
Captain's doing his job.
He's watching the radar.
You know we got a 15 mile radius.
Anything comes within that.
We keep an eye on it and it looks like that target's coming toward us.
We get off onto that.
That's right.
That's the speedboat.
That's my chase boat.
It's running right next to that load.
You got a picture of that one up there.
Yeah, we have that picture too.
Hopefully you can pull that one up.
That's me driving the boat and a buddy of mine just out for a cruise.
This boat drives.
Like a Scarab or something.
Like a go fast boat.
This is a go fast boat.
Chris Craft.
Okay.
Okay.
Nearly 600 horsepower.
And it's a deep V offshore.
I mean, go fast 60 mile an hour before your ass hits the surface.
So those guys are following you.
They're behind you.
I've got this boat.
If it's not my boat, that one right there, it's somebody else's boat that we've hired to run alongside of us.
We've got this giant fucking ball of weed going through the water that's maybe doing four knots.
Right.
Because it's, I mean, it's loaded.
You're chugging.
And if something on the radar looks like it's coming at us.
You know, what the hell are you going to do?
Right.
Well, you jump on that son of a bitch and you go.
You get the fuck out of that.
You just leave the weed.
Let them have it.
Because the guys running the boat don't own it.
The captains, the owners of the vessels, are never on them.
The guys that own the vehicles and the trucks and all that stuff for transportation, the owners are never involved.
There's always somebody else.
And there's a reason for that as well.
If somebody were to, if we were to jump off and get onto that chase boat and, you know, off into the night, they're never going to find us.
We are on the radio the minute we see we're getting boarded to the guy that owns the boat, our captain.
Call it in.
He calls the cops, the local sheriff's department.
It says, dude, I just looked out and noticed that my slip, my boat's gone.
So he reports it's stolen.
So, and the vehicles are the same way.
Vehicles get stopped.
These guys get out and haul ass because we have, we're, let me back up a minute here so it can all make sense for you.
We unload the freighter.
We bring that 30,000 pounds in.
20, 25 other little smaller boats, T Crafts, T Crafts or mullet boats at that time.
T-Craft, this is it without its twin 235s.
Okay.
Really wide, really shallow bottom.
Right.
I don't know if you can see.
With twin 235 Evan roots hanging on the back of it with vertical and horizontal trim.
Right.
So as long as that prop will go through the water, that boat will go through the water.
So we're running these.
We're unloading our big boats onto this, 25 of these.
They're running them through the shallows, through the backwaters to the island where we literally taken the furniture out of one of our buddies' houses.
And we start stacking and filling this house full.
And if there's more to be had, then we just move to Tommy's house next door and start filling his house.
This all takes place between sundown and sunup.
By the time the sun comes up, the entire load, regardless of how big it is, is in somebody's house and waiting to be taken to Miami.
If by chance, and this happens, the entire load meaning how many, how much?
40 tons.
40 tons.
How many trips do you have to go back?
How many times do you have to go back and forth if a boat can only hold 30,000 pounds?
Well, then we take three boats.
That's fucking nuts, man.
We take three of those big boats.
Like my big boat.
Right, right.
We anticipate the size of the load or they tell us what's coming.
Okay.
You know, there's 60,000 pounds.
We can't get 60,000 pounds on one boat.
Right, right.
So you take another boat or you take three boats and make the loads a little bit lighter, move a little bit faster.
It all gets done quicker.
Everybody makes the same amount of money because they're just, I mean, The math tells you how much money there is.
It's ridiculous.
So in this case, it's just one boat took the whole load.
We brought it in.
They come out like flies on a garbage can, these little boats, and they take as many trips back and forth to the house till our boat's empty and the house is full, close it up and lock it up.
Now, if the vehicles, the vans, the cars, the trucks, whatever it may be that is transporting the material to Miami, some of them get loaded that night.
Well, it's coming off the boat and then you drive it into town and park it in the driveway and leave it there, you know Just park it in the driveway everybody has a two meter radio.
We got like 110 of these things because to do one of these jobs say even just a 30,000 pound which I never did one that small before ever after that.
They were always bigger than that Takes about 50 to 60 people sometimes more to make one job work.
That's why when the you know The article comes out in Life magazine, and we'll get to that.
And it talks about a town of mostly women and children because the entire male population is going to prison.
You know, that's because you can't keep using the same guys night after night after night, dude.
You're going to bust their asses because I stone crab during the day and I'm pulling 350 stone crab traps.
Which will that's that's a job that'll break you.
Oh, dude, it's a it'll make a man out of you.
Oh, yeah, because these traps.
I know a lot of guys live right down the street here that stone crab all day, every day during stone crab season.
We had 7,000.
Traps.
We pulled 700 a day.
I pull 350.
The guy on the other side of the boat, we have twin pullers back and forth.
Yeah.
While he's pulling his, I'm dropping mine.
While I'm clearing my trap, he's picking one up.
I empty mine.
I drop one in his place.
We were picking up, dropping off, picking up, dropping off all day long like this.
And that's bust-ass fucking work.
These things are like anywhere from 50 to 60 pounds a piece, these traps are.
And if they're not catching, then the captain says, pick them up, boys.
We pick every fucking one of them up and stack them, move them somewhere else, drop them out, just like they do on Deadliest Cats.
You've seen this.
Yep.
And the way it's done is not that much different than the way they do it.
Of course, their operation is far worse than what we've got to get.
Oh, yeah.
Those guys are not even going to make that comparison.
They're fucking out of their mind.
Yeah.
Stone crabs in the Gulf is nowhere near king crabs in Alaska.
Where we can pull 350 a day, it may take them a week to pull 350 traps.
So it's a whole different ballgame.
But the way it's done is very similar in the way they have that big round thing spinning.
Yep.
They put the rope through it.
Yep.
And then it goes into a coiler.
Yep.
Now they're running, you know, eight, nine hundred.
Feet of rope and that thing spinning is called a shiv.
And the way it works is it's like two pie pans stuck together like that.
And you put the rope in between them and it cinches it and it starts to pull it.
It'll grab it and you know start pulling on that rope.
But halfway through it, it's a little thing sticking out down here called a knife.
The rope comes around, but it's not actually a knife, really.
It's just what it's called.
It kicks the rope back out so it doesn't continue to spin and wrap around that big thing that's spinning, right?
Falls out on their feet.
They put it in a coiler, ours just.
Coil on the deck of the boat because we're, at the most, 60 feet.
You know something like that.
So in that way it's very similar.
But dude, we're busting our ass all day pulling traps and then we go out and we move.
You know, say um 20 tons, 40 000 pounds, that's um average about anywhere is between 800 900 pieces.
We're moving, we're handling 900 bales a night, sometimes two, sometimes three times a night.
So If you're making that much, you're going to make a ton of money.
My first time out, see, these guys, when I came down to Florida, I came right down.
I had a gig in Hollywood.
I was working with Sammy Davis Jr. for a few years, but that's a whole other deal there.
We'll talk about that some other time.
But I wound up coming back, and a buddy of mine came back home.
I grew up in North Carolina.
My father was 82nd Airborne.
Went to school, went through my high school years in Wisconsin, of all freaking places, freezing my nuts off.
And so I do this gig out in California, come back to Wisconsin.
A buddy of mine that lived next door to me calls me up and says, dude, I'm moving to Florida tomorrow.
He says, my brother-in-law is running a fish house on Chukuloski Island, this little island I'd been to years before for vacation, just visiting.
He says, I'm going down to work on a crab boat.
I said, want to go?
And I was a machine, you know, I had taken back up a machinist job at that time, and I didn't even give it a second thought.
I said, shit, yeah, man, I'm in.
So just like that, I packed all my crap, and I was, you know, I was gone the next day.
We drove all the way down and got to the end of 29, and the dead end, 29, dead ends right on Chuck Oleski Island.
Wow.
And that's where I started.
And how did you get first introduced to Holland Pot?
Well, the thing of it is, is, you know, when you just show up like that, people are, you know, it's such a small town that people are sideways glancing at you, you know.
Yeah.
Who's this guy?
Who's this guy?
You know, they're always eyeballing you in that way.
But because.
Of the people that I moved down there for, my friend Mark, his sister and brother-in-law ran Ernest Hamilton Stonecrabs on Tukuloski Island.
So they were part of the family there.
Everybody knew them.
So Mark was, his sister was there, and I came down with him, so everybody knew where we came from, so it was cool.
We weren't cops.
We weren't infiltrating.
We weren't, you know, and all that kind of stuff.
You know, it kind of got around to, oh, it's all cool.
Well, Mark gets a job on this crab out, and the other guy on the stern with him, there's only three guys on the boat.
The other guy on the stern with him is from Michigan.
And the captain, Billy, he's really not digging this guy, you know, because there's so they decided, I said, dude, you know, I'm helping build a house for Mark's brother-in-law, you know, at the time just to kill some time, make a little bit of money.
And he says, look, we're going to get rid of this guy.
We want a job on the boat.
I said, yeah, fuck yeah.
So they worked this guy to death.
I mean, and you can do that too, dude.
I mean, it's bust-ass work.
I mean, we can, you know, tear a motherfucker up.
Fishermen don't fuck around, man.
No.
They're one of the hardest working dudes ever.
Fuck, dude.
My back is shot because of this yet now.
But he quits and they bring me on.
Well, I already knew the rundown.
You get up early, three or so in the morning.
It takes you two, three hours to get to the traps near the lines.
And the traps are set in lines.
We have buoys that are about the size, a little bit smaller than a soccer ball, a styrofoam buoy, with a number on it.
And we use what we call catch poles.
We have like a one by one piece of ladder that's maybe six feet long.
We fiberglass a shark hook on the end of it and grind the barb off of it so we can grab that line, pull it in.
Whereas the deadliest catch guys, they throw the grappling hook out there between two bags that are floating and there's a line between those two bags.
They catch that line and pull it in because, I mean, they got a mammy fucking thousand pound trap to pull in.
Ours are only 70.
So we grab that buoy and as fast as I can put it through the block around the shiv.
That's already turning and the trap's coming up like that.
So you know we start doing this um by day and um, I go out there and you know they explained it all to me.
So we're headed out that first day and I just happen to wake up, the bunks is in the wheelhouse and I happen to wake up and look out like this and the sun's up and i'm thinking nah, we should have been started by now.
I mean, the sun's up, Captain Billy, he's got a big grin on his face.
He's looking over at me and goes, you know, he says, Timmy, he says, we're not going to go pull traps today.
He says, buddy, we're going to go offshore and unload a pop boat from Columbia tonight.
Unloading the Pop Boat Offshore00:15:49
And I said, cool.
You know, they kind of shanghaied me into it, man.
But, you know, knowing me, you know, they knew I'd be cool about it.
You know, so it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek sort of a thing.
I said, all right, cool, let's go, man.
So that was that 15 tons that night.
So we did that.
And the very next day, we get on the boat, we get ready, we'll go out, and, you know, we're going to go pull traps again.
And here we go again.
I wake up, no pulling's going on.
He says, okay, tonight it's 22 tons.
I said, okay.
Two nights in a row, nearly 80,000 pounds of, you know, 80 tons of fucking weed.
But I got paid rookie pay at that time.
It was only $5,000 per load, per night.
That was rookie pay.
But now that captain understood he's got a crew that's ready to bust ass and willing to work.
Now my pay changes.
Now it goes according to the size of the load we're hauling in.
So if the load's 50,000 pounds, you know, or 75,000 pounds, I'm getting paid 50,000, 75,000 bucks a night, a night.
And there were times when we were working, you know, two, three times a week, a night a week, sometimes four nights a week.
And we're not the only boat.
There's other boats out there.
You go to this one, you go to this one.
I mean, they were stacked out there like a fucking parking lot, man.
Ridiculous if uh, in one instance we go out to to unload this boat supposed to be 60,000 pounds of shit on this thing, and it was a freighter, you know, it was like 460 foot freighter or some shit like that.
So um, there were three boats just, you know, assigned to do the you know offload, to meet the mothership.
So we go offshore, we get together and we're diving or swimming or fucking off all day long, you know, having a great old time getting stoned and sitting and uh, at about four in the afternoon or something like this um, just out of nowhere, This little Cessna single engine comes roaring across the over the top of the boat and you can't hear a fucking airplane coming when he's down on the water.
You don't hear it until it's right on top of you know.
So here comes this plane and it Comes up and it just misses our low-rand antenna.
And that's how close this fucking guy was.
It turns out to be Daryl.
He's the guy that's doing the job.
This is his job.
He's one of the five brothers that were working us all.
Okay, so he's he buzzes us like that and he goes up like this and he turns and he comes back and he throws a milk carton out of the fucking plane.
So we ease on over there and we fucking, you know, open it up and there's a note in it and it says, one of you guys got to flip a coin.
I don't give a shit.
One of you guys got to go unload this boat over here.
Because there was shit being unloaded all over the place.
What the fuck?
So we were going to go with the original load.
So it was up to the other two.
So they flipped and whatever.
So it was, he goes, that boat takes off to go unload that boat.
We're waiting to unload our 60,000.
So the way it works is, um, The horizon on the water when you're out there, if you're familiar with this at all, being from Florida, your horizon is typically eight miles before the curve of the earth puts it out of your sight.
Depending on how big the vessel is above the water line, that can stretch to eight, nine, nine and a half miles sometimes at the most.
So you're out of sight.
You're over the curve of the earth, out of sight.
At eight miles?
At eight miles.
Okay.
So we sit off the horizon.
Until, you know, about 8, 9 o'clock, somewhere like that, about two, three hours before sunset.
Call signs.
All these boats have different call signs that are given to us prior to us going out on the job.
So this one's Felipe, Felipe, Zoro.
Felipe, Felipe, Felipe, Zoro.
He says it twice.
The captain says it twice.
Then he hears it back.
Felipe, Felipe, Felipe, Zoro, come on.
So they know it's us coming.
So nobody else coming to that boat, they're not going to be shocked and surprised.
Here we go.
We pull up to this fucking freighter and this goddamn thing.
The deck's 16 feet at least above my head.
And, you know, we pull up there and there's nowhere to tie off.
So Billy, the captain, the two captains have to keep the boats up against the side of the ship because there was probably, God, I don't know, there must have been 80 guys on this boat, man.
And they were going down one hatch, single file, going down one hatch, coming out another hatch on the other side carrying a bale on their shoulder.
One right after the other, throwing them off the edge down to our boat down below, landing on the deck 16 feet down.
Bam, these are smashing the deck and you know, we're trying our damnedest to not get hit right, moving them out of the way and I, all of a sudden, we hear that's hard to up, one of those land on your head.
We're here.
Oh dude, it'd kill you.
I mean, this is 70 pounds of compressed weed, dude.
And um, the deck starts crunching, crunch the fiberglass, because these are hitting like bricks crunch.
And we're thinking, oh, God, there goes our deck.
But because we couldn't keep up with the 80 whatever guys throwing this shit, they're not only throwing on us, they're throwing it on the other boat too.
You know, they're loading us both at the same time.
Right well the bales start to stack up and they start hitting one another So that solved the crunching of the deck problem now all we had to do is you know Organizing dragging them and putting them anywhere we could put them before you know fill the hole up put the deck lids on fill the deck You know around the wheelhouse on the bow on top of the boat wherever we could stick this shit.
So we figured you know Captain Billy he's in the wheelhouse and he's kind of doing we're all kind of doing a rough count We figured 400 pieces roughly thereabouts would be half the load They would have the other half.
So we're getting to where we're thinking we got about 400.
And I'm looking up and the captain, he's leaning against the rail peeling an orange.
And it's all fucking shits going on, right?
And I look up and I go, how many more?
And he says to me in this half-assed English, he goes, 50 more.
I'm like, okay, so we're counting.
50, 60s.
Jesus Christ.
How many fucking more?
And he goes, 50 more.
I think that's the only number the guy knew because he just know English, right?
He's just yelling, 50 more, right?
So they keep throwing these goddamn things.
So now we're at the point where, you know what scuppers are on a boat?
No, what's a scupper?
Scupper holes are where, you know, when you're working, you're doing, you're bringing water and rain and splashing on the deck, the water runs out.
Oh, okay.
Back of the boat.
Yep.
Those are the scuppers.
Well, now we're so loaded, the scuppers are starting to go underwater.
Oh, shit.
And that's going to sink the fucking boat because, I mean, once you get water on the deck, it's in the engine hatch, it's in the fucking builds, it's all over the fucking place, so.
We take a knife and we cut open a couple of life vests, pull the wadding out of them and stuff the scuffers and plug them so the boat won't sink.
While we're doing this, this shit's still coming.
And Billy says, he's yelling.
I mean, we've got this shit stacked up to where we can't even see inside the wheelhouse hardly.
Because we just left a little space for the door to open up.
And Billy says, we're getting the fuck out of here, man.
He starts the boat up.
But whoa, big black smoke and shit bellowing out the back end.
And we start going.
These fuckers are still throwing bales off.
I mean, for as far as we could see these guys up into the horizon and with binoculars, they're still throwing bales off.
Are you worried about going?
You're still eight miles offshore, right?
Dude, no.
Eight miles is the horizon.
Right.
We're probably 30 miles.
You're 30 miles.
Yeah, we're out in this.
Are you guys not concerned about running out of fuel with that much shit on the boat?
No, we're all prepared for that.
That's why the chase boat, because when you're coming back loaded like that, dude, you're not.
There's going to be four, five, six hours getting back home.
Oh, yeah, easy.
So, we always usually used to start a big load like that.
We'll start loading before sunset, you know.
And then once sunset gets going on, now we have all this time to get into shore and then get it into the house.
So, we know, you know, the biggest thing is trying to get the mothership to come as close as we can get them to get to the shoreline.
You know, the closer the better, obviously.
And some of these guys, they want to stay in international waters, they want to stay out in the.
There's a dividing line between the shrimpers out here and the stonecrabbers.
Shrimpers stay offshore, so many miles offshore, and the stonecrabbers have so many miles inshore for their traps to lay because a shrimp boat will take your whole fucking line, man.
I mean, they can screw up a trap line and nothing flat.
So we had our boundary, you know, and we respected that.
So the boats would come in to where the shrimp boats are and hide amongst them.
So they're just a blip on the radar like 70 other shrimp boats out there.
So we got to run out there to them and unload the shit, you know.
Like that.
So we're, you know, and then we have this long truck back in.
That's why the chase boat, that's why the radar and all this kind of stuff, you know.
So it's, you know, it's, you know, the way I wrote the story, it's a bit jovial, you know, but in reality, there's a lot of seriousness to it.
You know, I mean, we were kids working for the adults.
We were the humpers.
We were the machine.
We were doing the work and the adults are going, hey, here, go here, go there, go there.
They're not handling this shit.
We are.
So you bring it in.
We're met by the little boats.
Little boats take it, put it in the houses.
And like I said, what doesn't go to the houses goes to, you know, park in front of somebody's driveway.
Two meter radios that have five different digits to use as a combination.
Virtually unscannable at that time.
And we have communication is key.
Everybody has to be in communication with everybody else.
We've got like 120 of these radios just hanging around.
So we got one.
So the next day, when it's time to start sending this shit to Miami in broad daylight, as soon as the sun comes up the next day, that's when the shit goes to Miami.
And vans and shit across alligator alleys.
Cars, trucks.
Dump trucks.
We'd have a guy bring in and dump a load of gravel in somebody's driveway, fill it full of fucking weed and send it out of town.
That's a 120 mile trip across Florida, you know.
So these drivers don't own the boat, don't own the cars.
They don't own the vans and those shit like that.
So there are also at that time, you know, at that stage of the game, another safety valve designed into the workings is we have been anywhere between six and eight or ten spotters driving that route back and forth to Miami.
In staggered form back and forth.
So all day, you'll all day, as long as we're moving this to to Miami.
Then what happens is we take it and we take it to a designated spot in somewhere in you know west Miami, like Coral Gables or Kendall or someplace like that.
You're typically a plaza in Kendall and just a little strip mall or some kind like that, and our guys will drive in park, get out, go window shop and I have one of our guys with the Cubans on the other end who own the, pointing, that's our car, that's our truck, they put a guy in it, they go unload it and bring it back.
This is a dead drop.
This is when the term dead drop first was coined back in those days.
So the major effect that that had was that the guys that were taking the weed from us in Miami didn't know where the shit was coming from in Everglades.
And our guys in Everglades didn't know where the shit was going in Miami because that guy took it and unloaded it.
So if either one of them got popped, nobody could tell them where the shit came from.
Right.
You know, plus if a guy's driving, say, from Everglades to Miami and he gets pulled over, we've got pickup trucks and cars.
They all have reese hitches, trailer hitches.
Some of them have the low slung, you know, like big tall trucks need the low slung like this.
Well, we'll get those, pull them out, turn them over so they go out and up.
It's a little ball on top of it up here.
Right.
And if you get stopped, pulled over, whatever like this, first thing you do is get on the radio and say, hey, I'm busted.
You.
Wait for whoever stopped you to get between your vehicle and theirs.
Throw your fucking thing in reverse and mash the shit out of that car, boy.
You've got a ton of fucking weed or two tons of weed in this van, truck, or whatever it is, and you smash this fucker with that thing that's going right through his radiator.
He ain't going nowhere.
But you're not going to outrun his radio.
You can get in that thing and haul ass and get out of sight of him, and one of those 10 spotters will pick you up because they're already there.
Right.
You get in the car and go home, and the.
The call's already been made to the guy that owns the vehicle, so he's made.
He's like, Dude, I just looked out my driveway.
My car's gone, my truck's gone.
Somebody stole my shit.
Well, that immediately relieves him, the vehicle, the boat, whoever.
It relieves them of any responsibility of what that thing has been through because it was stolen from them.
And they get it back.
Wow.
What a very thorough operation you guys had going, man.
Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this is 30 years of shit going on here.
You know, these guys had it figured out.
Now, going back to the cocaine cowboys story, it seems like just from the conversations that I've had and throughout history is from by and large, most of the pot haulers converted to coke haulers because there's more money in coke, right?
There's more profit.
Easier to move.
Easier to move.
Folk-wise.
Why didn't you convert?
None of us wanted to have anything to do with that simply because of the, first of all, the people involved in it, for one thing.
We're just maniacs.
I mean, there's no trust.
There's no nothing.
There's no family to it.
There's nothing oriented in that way whatsoever.
Plus, the amount of time you get for being caught with cocaine, which was significant, was it?
Oh yeah, it was way more, way more significant than than getting caught with a boatload of weed, you know.
Plus, you know, mostly it was the gang the, the environment, the type of people that you know that were working with that.
I had an opportunity several times to move coke.
It would have been so easy to do, but I didn't do it for those two reasons and I did it for a third.
I didn't for a third reason.
The most important one, in my opinion, is now the way this works is, if you bring a load of pot in and it gets to Miami, you don't get, Okay, here's your money.
You don't get paid those millions of dollars right away.
That shit has to start selling.
You get paid out of the shit that's sold out of that load.
So it may be a week and a week and a half before I start seeing money.
So that being said, our guarantee for the payment is I take, if I do this arbitrarily, 30,000 pounds of shit for you, okay?
You owe me $5 million for having done the job.
That's what typically it costs to do that.
Okay.
You paid $300,000 for this load.
You're making $9,700,000 profit on something that only took me eight days to get to you.
So I'll give you all your fucking shit except for $5 million of it that you owe me.
That goes to Fort Myers.
Thirty Thousand Pounds for Five Million00:15:16
You lose your shit in Miami for whatever fucking reason.
I'm getting paid.
I'm going to sell that shit because I got a buyer right now ready to take it.
My crew didn't risk our lives to move this shit into the country and not get paid.
So now when it comes to the cocaine, dude, I'm not keeping $10 million worth of your cocaine and little payment.
Fuck that shit, dude.
Just do it all, have it all, and then risk getting paid or not getting paid.
So it really wasn't worth it, man.
I mean, we were set up and geared up for pot hauling, you know, simply because in the area in which we lived.
You know, there are times when we start to bring a load in and there's unusual traffic on the island.
And that's when it's immediately determined that, okay, the load has to wait and we'll put it out in the woods.
Now, in the early days, the guys would build what they call a million-dollar pad.
They would take the bales to find the driest spot out there on one of the islands.
And I'm talking about literally 10,000 islands you can pick and choose, in which we knew them really well because that's where we fucked around.
Find relatively highest spot on the ground on the island that you can lay down You know a bunch of bales and then pyramid stack them on top of those if the tide comes up and it happens to ruin the ones that it's sitting on There's a million dollars.
That's the pad.
That's the million dollar pad We take all the bales that are dry leave the shit in the woods However many bales that took so that's all come that's all figured into the gig.
That's funny so As the kids took over, those guys wound up going through their, you know, the process of being arrested and all that kind of crap and shit.
They left us kids over.
We didn't believe in million-dollar pads.
You know, that's a lot of cash.
It's wasteful.
It's a lot of pot.
It's wasteful.
What we wound up doing, it was a little bit more work, but it was a little bit more ingenuity involved in it.
And we had to do this one night because there was too much traffic on the island.
We brought, I think it was around 42,000 pounds, just over 21 tons, I think it was.
And we had to stack it in the woods.
So what we did was we found a spot about three miles south of Everglades up into the islands and broke down dead trees and dead branches and built pads, literally built six different pads to set this stuff on and bucket brigaded them from the boats into the woods and built these pads and put the shit on to keep it dry.
And I paid a guy $15,000 to spend the night with it.
So he had a radio to spend the night with it so nobody could show up and come back and, you know, help themselves to it.
That's one of the most fascinating things about this whole time, this whole like era in history, right?
There's like this 10 to 15 year period in South Florida, whether you're there, where there's so many opportunities to make so much fucking money, whether it be weed or coke.
And it's just, it's insane the amount of people that I've been able to meet that have made so people that just, they were just lucky enough to be born at that time in that area of the world.
And they made so much ungodly.
Godly amount of money and and you, you you're right about, you know, one thing is that it's it's pretty much being at the right place at the right time.
It's not something that you can that you just sign up for.
You drive here and you sign up for it, kind of thing.
You've got to kind of be, you know, grew up with it and that's what.
That's what happened to me and on all us kids.
We all grew up with it.
Dude, I have, you know, when I started taking in in upon myself to do loads on my own when the first and second generations wound up going to prison um, I can tell you that I can, I can uh, lead up into that story.
Well um, it wasn't.
Uh, it was then when we started amping up the you know the way it was done up until the second and the third generations wound up going to prison.
It was well boats, it was, you know, it was radios, it was um, you know um, mechanics fixing your boats, you know, and a lot of visible stuff.
Yeah, you know that really didn't need to be that way um, but it worked because at that time there weren't people weren't looking for this.
They were particularly weren't looking for it uh, on the scale in which we were working.
I mean, it was just outrageous.
I mean, it's, it's, I find it hard to even say sometimes because it sounds so ridiculously stupid.
I mean, I, I did a calculation one time, uh, and he actually did it in my book where our crew worked 28 nights in a row.
Some of the guys would say it was more than that, but I left it at 28 nights in a row.
And this is 20 tons, 25 tons, 30 tons every single night.
I mean, there was shit going and coming in cars and every, and this is why half the town was involved in it.
Right.
So we're just, you know, going crazy, you know, crazy stupid.
And then when the first and second generations had their go, had their run, Operation Everglades I, which was kind of a bit of a failure, Operation Everglades II almost came a year to the day.
This time all the grown-ups and the adults and everybody that was visible at that time just sat around on the porches at 2, 3 in the morning waiting for the show to start because it was coming.
There was nothing we were going to do about it.
So Operation Everglades II came and it was a bit of a success, I guess you could call it that.
But what they weren't expecting was the magnitude at which this was all taking place.
The sheer volume of stuff that was being moved, they had no idea.
Um, so when they took those guys all to prison, you know here, you know, us kids are left.
We were the infrastructure.
We're the ones doing all the work.
The adults are pointing, doing this, go here, go there, you know, you know, pick this up, move.
Sometimes we'd have to take stuff out of one house, move it up the river and stash it to where you can load it out and get it out that night because we have full, put more in that house.
You know, I mean, it was just that way, right.
So 28 nights, some thought it was more than that, but I did a rough calculation to the tune of about 1.6 million pounds in 28 nights.
Went through that little bitty 129-acre island to Miami during the day.
Because there's only one way in there and one way out.
So when the Everglades Seafood Festival came around every year, boy, that was a winner, man.
Because, I mean, there were so many cars, and a town goes from 500 people to 30,000, 40,000 people, man.
I mean, it's time.
Right, right.
Let's go.
Let's move the shit.
There's vans and truckloads of this shit going through town waving at people like this.
Waving at the cops even, you know.
99 times out of 100, we're waving at the cops as we drive right on by them because that's the only way to get out of there.
And I had a funny thing, and I'll just jump ahead real quick.
I have to say this.
When I was being interviewed by two Secret Service agents when I got arrested, I said, first question out of my mouth to them was, do you know the geography of Everglade City?
Yeah.
And I said, well, how many roads in there and how many roads are out of there?
And there's one.
Yeah, there's one.
And I said, well, how many direct routes from Everglades City to Miami are there?
There's one.
Yeah, there's one.
And I said, well, how do you think all those millions of fucking pounds got to Miami?
It didn't go by pelicans and porpoises, for Christ's sake.
It went down that one goddamn road, the only goddamn road that there was.
And nine times out of ten, we're waving at you as we're going by, you know?
Shit.
It was just that ludicrous.
I mean, that's hilarious.
And, you know, this is a thing that people have a hard time wrapping their mind around.
Yeah.
You know, because, I mean, I'm skipping around a lot, you know, but I mean, some things just need to be said in order to, you know, to complete that bit of a story and make it, you know, somewhat believable.
Right.
You know, did you ever have the thought of like, you know, man, I should just hedge right now.
Quit.
Quit right.
Quit while I'm ahead.
I don't want to go to prison.
I got millions and millions of dollars in these safes.
Man, you know how many times.
I've been asked that question.
But, you know, honestly, it never occurred to me to quit, you know, because first of all, I mean, clearly you weren't doing it for them.
You had enough money to last through this.
Dude, the money after a while was a pain in the dick.
Right.
I mean, I'm just, it was more about getting away with it, you know, that was, you know, getting paid because, Christ, there was this period of time when I'm getting paid, you know, I'm getting bags of money shoved across the kitchen table at me for jobs I don't even remember doing.
You know, this job happened like four weeks ago.
You know, here's another one.
This one was that one.
This one was that one.
And then I got like a stack of bags of money that I don't remember doing.
So what was the motivation then?
Like, what was the best part about it?
The thrill.
Just the thrill of it.
Just not getting caught.
The camaraderie of it, you know?
I mean, we're all kids, man.
Right.
And we're running the fucking show.
Yeah, you're in your early 20s.
You're not even fully fucking, your brain's not fully developed.
Just babies.
I'm sitting here 63 years old, and I'm thinking, wow, 20 years old.
And I'm thinking, you know, when I think about some of the shit that I did, my ass goes, you could cut a cigar with that fucker, man.
Oh, that's hilarious.
But this is just how we grew up.
This is all we knew.
As kids, we only knew multi-ton fucking loads.
I dumped more shit out of my fishing boots than any three guys can smoke probably in their lifetime.
I mean, that's just how stupid it was.
And I say that because, let me give you a little bit of a history here from beginning.
In the beginning, when we first started hauling bales off of these boats, they were just, I mean, coming apart.
They weren't even packed.
They weren't compressed.
The compressed bales hadn't come along yet.
This is in the late 70s, early 80s.
This is loose bags.
I mean, dude, they were like taking the shit in heavy mill plastic, stuffing it with their foot, seemed like, and then duct tape that shut, stick it in a burlap bag, and stitch that shut, throw it in a pile.
They were irregular.
They were elongated.
They were small.
They were big.
They're 30 pounds.
110 pounds, one of these fucking things was.
It was like a big torpedo.
There was no rhyme nor reason to it.
It was just pack it and get the shit out of here kind of thing.
Well, when we take this shit off the mothership, you know, we're responsible for that fucking load.
You know, that's our deal.
That's why we get paid the big bucks.
I've been paid as much as $125,000 a night just to bring a load in.
And I'm only working seven hours, you know.
But the thing of it is, is once that shit comes ashore and it gets off our boat, we've got to clean that fucking boat, man.
And we're taking hours with knives and screwdrivers and little cracks and shit because this is sitting in a colombian weed in those days was seedy.
I mean, it was seeds coming pouring out of this shit.
And we're unloading boats where we have to sometimes get down inside the boat and help the crew because these freighters, like the holes way up the fuck up here.
Yeah.
You got to build a pyramid of bales to stand on to get the shit up.
And it's falling apart.
And it looks like, you know, you look like a goddamn McDonald's Happy Meal with your fucking seeds on your face and shit.
You know, it's just comical.
So.
You know, this goes on and we finally got to a point where, you know, we take a roll of visqueen, a roll of plastic and some duct tape.
And on our way out, you know, we sun, sun's going down.
We radio our call sign.
We're head to the boat, put this visqueen out and duct tape it all down and make a big bowl out of the back of the boat.
There you go.
Yeah.
You know, so when they throw this shit in there, you know, we get back home, unload the shit, unload the shit, unload the shit, go offshore, pull all this plastic into a ball.
tie a chain and an anchor to it and throw it off the boat.
So smart, man.
Like painters when they put a drop cloth down.
Fucking right.
Because if anything becomes suspicious during the evening and they're out there running around looking at boats and they're boarding boats, if they find a seed on your boat, you're fucked.
They'll take your boat.
It's as simple as that.
So we get together and we're thinking, okay, this is the early 80s when the advent of the commercial and the household trash compactors first started coming into the commercials and into the scene.
So, a couple of the third and first and second generations get this light bulb goes on and they say, Well, why don't we take about a dozen of these fucking things and a few generators down there and show them how to do this?
You know, that's how a bale of pot looks like a bale of pot now.
Really?
Because of our guys went down to Columbia and said, We're, you know, we can't be responsible for your bullshit anymore.
Right.
You either get your shit.
It's not their problem.
It's your problem.
It's us.
Right.
It's our asses.
It's on our boat.
They're not going to prison for this fucking shit.
That's how the advent of the square grouper came about.
When you look at a bale of pot today, it looks that way because our older generation made them look that way.
That's insane, man.
And that's the God's gospel truth, man.
You can hate on me all you want, but I'm not sitting here telling lies because I like to.
That's just the way it was because we were responsible.
So, having said that, now they're more consistent.
They're easier to handle.
They stack better.
So now what happens?
The loads get bigger because they're not these god-awful fucking pieces of shit anymore, you know?
So now they're stackable.
And our boats designed to haul crab traps are perfectly designed to haul bales of pot.
So they're stacking in there really nice, man.
And now we got some.
And we were stacking them in there to a point where sometimes the boat would.
That's what they look like right there, yeah.
Sometimes the boat was, you know, you're pitching and rolling on the seas.
Like Legos.
Yeah.
They're pitching and rolling on the seas a little bit, and some will fall off and shit like that.
Hence Square Grouper.
That's how they get the name Square Grouper.
Nobody really knows today who first came up with it, but I know it came out of Everglade City because, I mean, where the fuck else would it come out of?
Right.
And I don't, you know, I don't go on telling these stories like we are the only ones that ever did it.
We didn't invent hauling pot.
We weren't the only ones that ever hauled a bale of pot.
I never said that.
And I would never take anything away from anybody that has ever done it because, man, it takes balls.
Go to another country to people you don't know, load your boat, bring it back, and get away with it.
They were pot hollers all over the place.
Square Grouper and the Tuna Gangs00:04:35
What my story is designed to do is to help you understand the history of it all and how a small town in Southwest Florida can be the hub of the marijuana industry throughout North America and nobody know a fucking thing about it.
Yeah.
A little 500, 600 person town is responsible for the bulk of the weed coming into this country.
That's so awesome.
It's, you know, that's wild.
And I felt the story needed to be told because I, you know, what prompted me really was I saw Billy Corbin's documentary, Square Grouper.
Yeah.
And it was, you know, I like his style.
I like the way he does the animations and, you know, and he's really good at production when it comes to that sort of thing.
But the actual telling of the story, in my opinion, he missed the greatest story ever to be told.
He talked about the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church out of Jamaica who set up an operation in a mansion on Star Island in Biscayne Bay in Miami.
Right, right.
We hauled millions of shit to that island for them.
I mean, really?
Yeah.
And there was another group of guys at that time.
This guy's a funny fucker.
His name was Robert Flattorn.
He was they called them the Black Tuna Gang because everybody in the group had a gold pendant made of a tuna.
So if you're part of that clique, you had a tuna.
I like tuna, but whatever.
They got into pot hauling back when President Carter was making quasi moves toward legalization and bringing that on.
So they figured they're going to blaze the trail.
They're going to go to Columbia, figure it out.
They even used the High Times magazine.
I don't know if you're familiar with High Times.
Oh, yeah, of course.
They used to give you the pot prices in the magazine.
They were using that to figure out what their prices would be.
So they set up headquarters in the Fountain Blue Hotel in downtown Miami in a penthouse suite.
And their claim to fame was like a half a million pounds or some shit like that.
The Zions, the Coptics, their claim to fame was like a million pounds of weed moved in and shit like this.
I got a hold, and I first heard George Young's story about him flying Mexican weed into the country and this and that, and his association with a guy named Diego in the movie, who in real life was Carlos Slater.
That was who they're portraying.
And another guy who I happened to find a phone number on the internet for just out of the blue, his name was Brian O'Day.
And he wrote a book called Hi, Life of an International Drug Smuggler.
His claim to fame was about a half a million pounds of Asian weed that he brought into the Gulf of Alaska, processed it on a fishing vessel, put it in boxes and froze it and brought it to the docks in Washington just like it was the regular catch.
you know, a box of actual frozen fish sitting around with one of his guys every now and then to bump one like then they just spill across the deck and be fish everywhere.
So, you know, that's fish.
Right.
It's not weed going into that truck.
Well, I'm taking these guys' claim to fame, you know, the Zions, the Tuna Gang, George Young and Brian O'Day.
And I put all their shit in a pile and I said, fuck, that's not even a year's work for us, man.
You want to hear a story?
Well, back the fuck up.
Here comes a story.
So that's when I started writing this.
And what I did at that time was I went back to Everglades and, you know, writing a memoir and writing about the history of, you know, this genre, if you will, I needed to make sure that the stuff that I was writing just didn't come from what I thought took place or I knew the guys.
This guy did this.
I went back and talked to the older generations.
I sat down with Craig, the youngest brother, and I wrote about what he told me, you know, about you know how things went for them and how they were arrested and how they were.
You know, they were shunned in prison, and when they walked through the prison yard, it would open up like this, and they would let through because they were whispering about the Everglades cartel, you know, which was a fucking joke, right?
But people gave them the ultimate respect because of just the sheer volume of shit they managed to move, you know.
Rubber Bands and Family Arrests00:13:49
And so I wrote a little bit about their story in the book, you know, and that little bit about them being sentenced in front of the magistrate with these ridiculous sentences.
you know, which brings me back around to the mandatory minimums.
Right.
You know, and they weren't having the dramatic effect that they expected it to have, you know, the busting and then all this kind of stuff.
So they said, okay, mandatory minimums across the board.
We're going to take away discretion from the magistrates and the judges across the country.
We're going to give you a slide rule, rather, you know, if you will, here and here.
And whatever times.
It dictates that you get, that's what you're stuck with.
There's no more discretion amongst the judges.
They can't help you, you know, necessarily.
So your hands are tied.
The amount that you're busted with equals a certain amount of years is what that means.
Well, what happens if you're over 2,000 kilograms, then you're major.
My indictments were, there were four of them.
They were a mandatory 10 years to life on each count.
They didn't actually catch me with anything.
These are conspiracy counts.
Right.
Conspiracy to possess, to import more than 2,000 kilograms, conspiracy to sell, and some other crap.
How do they get your name?
How do they know who you were?
Um, that was interesting because um, the the way it works is, you know, when I was a kid doing this work um, along with all the other kids, you know, we never knew who the boss was, we never knew who was paying us and we didn't give a you know who was paying as long as that paper bag got slid across the kitchen table.
We were all happy man, we didn't need care.
So when I started taking, you know, and doing doing uh, jobs on my own, which only happened because they everybody, went to prison, and then Two guys that I happened to know in Miami, just out of it, you know, serendipitously, how it happened was I drove the Winnebago full of that 55 tons of shit because I didn't have enough drivers.
I made 75 grand the first night hauling it inshore, and they paid me 35 grand to drive this fucking Winnebago brand new to Miami that had about 11,000 pounds of bales in it, and it couldn't go to the Dead Drops Plaza because you got within.
40 feet of this fucking thing.
You could smell it right.
Oh, it had to go right to the house, okay.
So what they needed, what Darrell needed, was somebody he could trust to to do this.
So he said, and I go over there just to see what's going on, and I get shackled into this thing.
And he said Timmy, come here.
He says, and he would like you to drive this to Miami if you wouldn't mind.
I said no, like that, he's up, you know it's.
It's a 35 000 job, you know.
I said well, I just made 75 grand that night.
I didn't give a about the money right, but because of who it was it was asking me I felt obligated, okay, he's the boss.
This is no.
Okay, what the fuck?
So we put airbags in the springs of this thing.
And you inflate the airbags and it lifts this Winnebago off the ground.
So its ass is not sparking the highway when it's going down the road, right?
So I'm driving this behemoth down fucking 41 all the way to Miami to Chrome Avenue.
And I hang our right and I go off and I'm driving down back into this orange field.
And there's this looking castle.
It looks like a castle.
It doesn't belong there.
And I pull up to a side door and the guys jump out.
They start unloading the shit, taking it into the basement.
And guys were teasing me before I took this ride.
They were telling me about, you know, people have been murdered in this house, man.
And these guys are, you know, these guys are insane fucking Cuban freaks, you know, like this.
Really?
I just was hearing it, you know.
It didn't occur to me it was that way at all.
And it wasn't, really.
When I got over there, I had to spend the day.
They'd asked me to spend the day because when the loads quit coming for that day, I was to drive a car with money in it back.
home because I drove to Winnebago.
I needed to get home.
So I don't know how much money was in this fucking car.
It was jam-packed full.
And I was there all day, you know, playing cards and, you know, goofing off, getting to know the guys and shit like that.
So fast forward now when everybody gets busted and shit and they go to prison, they go to jail and these guys still got work to do.
They only knew one face.
They never saw any of the other crew.
Nobody ever drove to the stash houses.
They were always dead dropped.
Nobody knew anybody.
That was the way it was kept.
You don't know them.
They don't know us.
I never saw your face.
I don't know who the fuck you are and anything like this.
But me, I was chosen to drive straight to the fucking house, spend the day with these guys.
So now when everybody gets busted and, you know, it wasn't two, three, maybe two, three months later, I get a knock on my door and open the door and there's this guy, Jorge, from that fucking house in Miami.
Timmy!
It took them three weeks to find me.
They knew my name was Tim.
They knew what I looked like, but they took them three weeks and they found me.
And they said, Timmy, man, we got shit backing up.
Can you do this work?
And I just, you know, without even thinking about it, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know.
What did they want you to do?
Haul the pot for them.
Okay.
The grownups weren't there to set the deals and go buy the shit and all that.
They're in prison.
These Cubans still had work to do.
They needed us to continue doing the work.
Well, the infrastructure was still there.
Like I said earlier, the kids that did all the work, I mean, we were all there, you know, because they got the visible guys at that time, the older generations.
They had no idea the kids were doing this.
Fuck, they were.
20 year old, 19 20 year old kids driving boats full of pot through the islands, and they never never, occurred to them.
So I went back and got.
Everybody was there.
The only thing I had to figure out was how much to charge the, where to go get the, you know, and all this kind of stuff which I wound up getting from one of the other generations, you know, keyed me in on their connection and how it's done and how to pay, and the price I had come up with, you know, on my own, was pretty close to what they were charging, because By that time, I had worked almost every position.
I was a bail handler.
I was loading cars.
I was unloading freighters.
Whenever they needed somebody, I worked it.
And then I got paid that pay.
Well, the pay scales are different for every job you do.
The bail handlers get five grand a night.
The guys that drive the cars will get 30 grand a trip.
They pay their drivers out of that.
The guys that have the smaller boats that come out to get the shit from our boat, from the mothership, those little boats making it through the islands.
They're about 35 grand a piece.
They pay their guy on board out of that.
We're on the big boat with the load.
I make 75 or 100 grand a night.
So that's how it all works.
So I just reverse engineered the math and came up with a number about how many people we needed for this.
And it was really close.
Now, there's two ways to do it.
There's pay me $175 a pound.
I'll go to Columbia, Jamaica, Central America, wherever the fuck you want to get your shit and put it on your doorstep in Miami for $175 a pound.
Or.
You can pay me $145 a pound.
You go get the shit.
You bring it out here offshore.
I'll come and unload you and bring it and put it on your doorstep in Miami.
I'll do it that way.
But most of the guys opted for me to just do the whole fucking thing because they didn't want to bother with it.
And that's how it worked.
Wow, man.
And I just managed figuring that.
So I went from being this guy that was running offshore unloading boats.
It's just all of a sudden I'm the guy that's now you're making it all happen.
Yeah.
So, you know, yeah.
So I get the first job in.
Everybody's paid.
Everybody's happy.
So we do another one, another one, another one.
That's when the guy started, you know, with me about the cocaine.
You know, it's too low to go, dude.
Hey, man, it's so fucking easy.
I'm like, no, for one reason, there's, you know, a whole different crowd of people fucking around with that shit.
And I, you know, and then I told him about the holding money kind of thing.
I didn't want to do that either.
But little did I know that the two guys that the only two guys from Miami that I mentioned in my book are Carlito and Leo.
Carlito and Leo, as it turns out, wound up being two soldiers of Griselda Blanco.
Really?
Holy shit.
I didn't know this until I was researching my own shit, you know?
Wow.
So, and then it finally occurred to me.
I'm thinking, yeah, okay, what?
So, you know, we're counting money, you know, and the loads are getting bigger.
So the cash is getting more.
Some of the jobs are going for, you know, $25, $30 million.
And I'm taking my cut out of that while they get their cut.
So I've got to count.
I'm counting, you know, at any time, my crew's, you know, 10, 12, 15, 20 million for my crew.
I've got to count it.
So we had at one point four money machines that the banks use, you know, going constantly.
And we had hundreds in one bedroom, 50s in another, 20s in another, 10s in another.
And fives in the garage because, I mean, five dollar bills were ridiculous dude, nobody wanted them.
Crazy because just burn them right, it's just 50.
I mean, fifty thousand dollars and five dollar bills is big yeah, as big as this table, you know.
But the thing of it was it was when I got paid, or anybody did, really you had to take.
You couldn't just take hundreds, I had to take multiples of denominations, you know, spread it out a little bit like that.
So um, you know why was that?
Well, it's because, I mean, it's just a fair thing to do.
Okay.
Somebody's going to wind up with a fucking garage full of fives.
Yeah.
You know, who's going to want that?
And, you know, 80% of them, $5 bills.
I got a bundle of them one time, $5 bills.
They're shrunk wrapped, you know, in probably about a one by one square like this.
Open it up and they were moldy.
It was mildewed because money mildews.
Yeah.
And they put these goddamn rubber bands around them and the bacteria on the rubber bands starts to.
The money starts to deteriorate and the rubber bands.
You know how a rubber band gets after a while?
Oh, yeah.
It falls apart and shit like that.
Well, that's because money's nasty, you know?
And I've gotten paid with $20 bills that were mold flying out of them and shit.
Because the money's just being handed like this.
Isn't you ever getting time to spend it at that level?
Right.
So I get a, you know, I do this job.
We're over there counting money and I should be in Columbia.
Or I should be helping my crew with another load, but i'm stuck counting goddamn money, you know, because now our paydays are getting up toward, you know 15, 20 million.
It takes a while to count that kind of money man, people just don't, they don't grasp.
They see these movies.
You know of a guy, you know, carrying around a bag that's got a million dollars in it.
He's running, he's slinging that.
There's no way he's slinging that bag around.
How long does it take for one of those money machines, or three of those money machines, to process 10 million bucks?
Days days days non-stop, non-stop.
Because not only doing just hundreds, you're doing hundreds, 20s, 10s, fives.
You're doing all these denominations.
So when the guys go into the room, they shovel in a bunch of money into a fucking laundry basket, bring it out to us.
We're popping rubber bands and stuffing this thing in, and it's counting, and we're ledgering, and it's just taken for goddamn ever, man.
So just out of sheer screwing and fucking around in those days, with triple beams and the cocaine and that kind of you know guys, would you know, do a line.
They'd throw their bill on the, on the scale and just around.
That weighs a gram.
Weigh it.
Every bill, no matter what denomination it is, weighs a gram.
That's crazy.
Look it up on the internet, dude.
That's insane.
They'll actually tell you now on the internet how much money weighs.
So if every bill, no matter what denomination, weighs a gram, there's 28 of them in an ounce, there's 16 of them in a pound.
Dude, it's just math from that point on right.
So Now we're taking these baskets, setting the basket on the scale.
We have to count the bundles that we throw in there.
The first time around, say hundreds, 20, or 10 years, we're counting the bundles until we got a million dollars worth of, say, $20 bills in this basket.
And it weighs X amount.
We have to subtract the weight of the rubber bands on the bills.
So if there's two rubber bands on each bound pack of bills, that's two grams.
So we had to count the.
The bundles, so we could subtract the grams for the rubber bands, and the money comes out exactly on the dollar.
That's fucking crazy.
110 pounds in $20 bills is a million dollars.
110 pounds in 20s.
In 20s.
22.2 pounds is a million dollars in 100s.
I remember reading in the book that Pablo Escobar's brother wrote.
I think it was called The Accountant Story, something like that.
I remember he wrote because he was the one who was like, Accounting for every single expense.
I remember he said that they were spending around 10 grand a month on rubber bands.
Accounting for Every Expense00:03:58
Yeah.
You know, it's funny you should bring that up.
It reminded me.
We were taking so much shit.
I mean, dude, you have to read the book Saltwater Cowboy Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire.
You can find it on Amazon, just about anywhere.
We were bringing so much shit.
Out of South America, they were running out of stuff out of bags to put it in.
First, we're getting coffee bags burlap coffee bags because coffee is a big product, and they got us you know, they got burlap bags coffee burlap bags all over the place.
Well, we used all of them that we could use now.
We're getting, uh, um, and it's the first time I'd had ever seen this.
I never knew Purina made horse chow and monkey chow and you know, cat chow for lions and like that for zoos.
Oh, wow, I didn't know that either.
So now we're getting.
Bags that are got Purina monkey chow written on the side of them because they're out of burlap bags.
When we're using every fucking bag in South America, sugar, sugar, you know, those, then they started going to the nylon woven out of the burlap kind of thing.
And we used every kind of fucking, I saw a whole boatload of weed, 40, 20 tons of shit boxed in Marlboro containers.
Really?
That's funny.
They said regular Marlboro cigarettes on them because we were taking so much shit.
They were running out of stuff to put it in.
When was the first time you actually went down to Columbia yourself?
Oh, that was in, I think, late 84.
Okay.
Somewhere like that.
And what spawned that decision?
When Jorge showed up at my door that day.
Oh, really?
And he knocked on the door and said, Timmy, we got shit to do, man.
Can you do this?
And I said, yeah.
So I go back to Everglades and find everybody and say, you know, we're going to work.
We want to do this.
We want to work.
And they said, okay.
Um, what we need you to do is we need you to go get it.
You go pick it out, you weigh it, you go get it and you go the first one.
You bring it, you take care of all of it, bring it for us.
So Carlito and Leo had a jet that their gang used.
It was a, it was a corporate layer at that time.
Okay, and um he said, come on, let's you know.
He says I took my buddy, um Franco, he was um Spanish dude to translate for me.
So we hop on this plane.
It's only like a five and a half hour flight, depending on the wind speed and all that kind of shit.
It's only five hours to South America.
So I agreed.
I'd go down there.
I'd find the shit.
I'd test it.
I'd try it.
Weight and make sure they're getting a good product, and you know, I get it back for them, you know, send the boat for it, and you know, like that.
So, hop on the plane, me and my buddy, and we fly down there and we land, and they pick us up in a Bronco.
Really, yeah, this thing was badass, dude.
It was, it looked like, um, you remember that, um, Romancing the Stone?
Do you ever see that movie with Michael Douglas?
I don't think so.
And he's got this Colombian guy, he's got his little mule, his little mule's a Bronco.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it was just funny as shit.
So, that's hilarious.
We get there, and I meet the guy, and he was just, you know, I didn't meet him the first day.
Yeah, we flew in we went to the house and you could see the house from the plane from the jet before we landed I mean, it's this huge beautiful home out in the middle of nowhere and the the landing strip was carved out of jungle Floor it wasn't paved.
It was just very well maintained and when you're flying out there and all you're seeing is a sea of green and then out pops this little strip of White out of nowhere and you were to land a lighter jet on it.
That's where they're landing this little fucking jet right on this thing.
It was designed made perfectly for it Wow So we get there and he takes us to this apartment at the back of the house.
And this is, you know, five times bigger than my house at home, you know, the apartment.
The Bronco Mule and VHS Tapes00:06:07
So we're hanging out.
And it sounds rather cliche, but he had a VHS.
Just come out of the Betamax, which were the great big giant bucking ones.
Then they went on to the VHS and watched Scarface.
We put Scarface on.
They held bowls of Coke all over the apartment.
Really?
Yeah.
So we're in there just chilling from the trip, you know, and I got fucking whacked, you know, and I can't eat.
Right.
Oh, no.
I'm doing one of these, you know.
So we walk through the garden.
We get into this thing.
We have dinner and shit, you know.
So we're having this party, and there's all these women in the house, and there's guys that I met from, you know, that day we were out weighing the shit.
And what we were doing was weighing is the boss shows up that afternoon.
He comes into the house.
He doesn't speak a lick of English.
And he's got this t-shirt on it with a big smiley face.
On the front of it, it says, Have a nice day, like this.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And he walks past me and he gets back.
On the back of it, it's the same smiley face with a smoking bullet hole in its head, like that.
And it says, Or else.
On the back of it, I thought he's got camo type fucking army fatigues on with a gun belt on and a host pistol and combat boots on.
He's got this goofy fucking smiley face t shirt.
What the fuck?
And it said, I couldn't, I get to, this picture's in my mind of this.
smiley face and then he walks past me and it's got a smoking bullet hole in it.
I'm thinking, this guy's fucking insane.
So he says, you know, he's talking.
How was your trip?
Blah, blah, blah.
He says, do you want to see your stuff?
And I said, yeah, let's go.
He says, and he's first one out the door.
He grabs an AR and heads for the truck.
His two boys grab ARs and my guy grabs an AR and I'm figuring, oh, fucking, I never handled guns in my life, man.
We didn't do guns.
Right.
You didn't need them.
Didn't need them at that level, you know, and I'll get to that too.
Um.
So I grabbed one.
I go out, we get in the Bronco and we drive and we're going through brush and bush and all kind of, and we get to truck stops and as soon as the guy opens the door, smack me in the face with this Colombian weed smell and burlap.
That smell i'll never, i'll remember for the day I die.
It's just a.
We said, make a cologne out of it or something you know.
But um pulls these leathery branches and leaves apart and like there's this mountain of dude.
It looked like an Incan ruin.
He's got These bales stacked as high as your ceiling here.
What's that, about eight, nine feet?
And they're probably 20 feet wide in rows of maybe 40, 50 feet long going off into the jungle like this of bales already packaged, already ready to go.
And he hands me a bamboo pole about seven foot long with a piece of pipe on the end of it cut, slashed like that, like a hypodermic.
And he's sticking the pieces of bales like this and he's pulling it out.
And we're using his pipe.
We're testing it.
I'm smoking this shit.
I said, well, how many of them buckers you got up there?
And his guy's up there.
He's kicking them off.
He's kicking off every one of those you got.
And I got a spray can in my hand and I'm putting my mark on the bales.
Right.
They're weighing them as I'm going through and picking them.
And when I picked out, you know, 20 tons of whatever shit I need and I got my mark on them and they're all weighed up, we go to the house to have this party.
So that's when we have the Coke and we go and then we begin to meet the people in dinner and the after-dinner party and all this kind of shit.
So there's all these people around the house and I'm sitting in a chair and he's sitting in front of me and we're translating back and forth.
This guy walks in.
I hadn't seen this guy before.
Comes up behind the boss.
This is what I call him.
I'll never say his real name.
I always called him a boss in the book.
And he's like this in his ear.
He's up behind his head.
He's like that.
And he gets this real ashen look on his face.
And right away, I'm thinking, uh-oh, what the fuck?
And he gets, that's his drink down.
He gets up and he's like fast-paced walking out of the room.
I put my drink down.
I'm fast-paced following his ass out of the room.
He goes down the hallway into the kitchen.
Out the door, out the kitchen door, onto a veranda, down these fucking veranda stairs into the backyard and he bolts off running and i'm on his ass.
I mean, i'm following this fucking guy.
What?
What made you want to follow him, dude?
If the guy that owns the fucking place is running out of the house, my ass is going too right.
So he dives into the bushes.
All those floodlights are pointing toward the house, so we get into the jungle behind the lights and you can't see.
I ran about 20 feet past that bucker and like dove, like a sprinter, off the starting blocks into the bushes and I laid there And I'm waiting for all hell to break loose, man.
And I'm sitting there sweating and fucking mosquitoes the size of dragonflies.
And all of a sudden, I hear this voice out the back door of the house, Spanish like this.
And then I hear this fucking guy laughing.
And now I'm thinking, what in the fuck is going on, man?
I mean, you know, I'm drenched with sweat.
I got shit all over me.
And he's, yeah, I see him now.
He's in the floodlights.
He's walking up to the house and he's, I'm brushing myself off.
And by the time I get back to my chair, he's already in his chair with a drink and he's, you know wiping the sweat off his sit.
I sit down, he looks over at me and he says, says to the guy standing next to him, and that guy walks over to me and he goes, where in the hell did you think you were going to me?
Yeah, and that's when I told him what I told you.
I said, you know, when the big dog gets up and runs out of the house this is what I told him runs out of the house, my ass is going too.
And he started laughing.
He's cracking up laughing.
Right turns out, he gets this message that his wife's Coming up the mountain.
Oh, shit.
He's got guys all the way up and down.
She left town knowing we were coming.
She was going to stay with the in laws while we did business and take the kids and just be out of the way.
Well, he's having this fucking party.
There's whores everywhere.
You know, and there's all kinds of people in this mansion, right?
And here he is.
Chase Boats and Life Sentences00:15:48
So he figures if he runs out of there, he ain't there.
He's not responsible for what's going on in the fucking house, right?
Right.
Turns out it wasn't even his wife.
Oh, my God.
That's what the joke was.
That was hilarious.
That was my first trip to Columbia with this fucking guy.
He just turned out to be an okay guy.
He's just typical Colombian looking, hair greased back, long.
And you refer to this guy as the boss in your book.
Boss.
He's the boss.
Is this the same guy you dealt with every time you, every time I went to Columbia?
Oh yeah, did he ever get popped, or did he never?
Never, he actually, you know we, of course, you know, throughout the years, we all lost contact one another.
Right, this shit went down.
I didn't want to run into anybody right, even some of the guys that were I grew up with we, you know, kind of, or you had to actually, because when you're an ex-con, you can't hang around with ex-cons, you know, or you violate some.
But um um Yeah, we didn't remain friends, but we were good friends while that was all going on.
He actually, if you remember, of course, you know the story Blow, the movie.
Well, there's a scene in the movie where George and Diego, Carlos Slater, take their money to Panama and put it in a Panama bank.
And George makes the comment about, wow, I give you $30 million and you give me this little book back, you know, and they take off.
Later on, when he wants to get out um um Diego Uh, starts working on Norman's Cay in the Bahamas, right on that island.
Right, that island is actually called Norman's Cay and it actually does exist.
Okay, and it was used exactly for that, because Carlos later used it for that who Diego is supposed to be in the movie, right?
So story goes on, George decides get the out of the business and all this kind of, and he goes back down to Panama to get his money and the guy says we should have called.
He said the president of the bank says you probably should have called because um your, your money has been appropriated by the, the government of Panama.
Two years prior to that, three years prior to that or so, my guy in Colombia told me when I was I did a job for Norie Ag.
I told you this, I didn't know who it was, for the guy wanted 60 000 pounds and i'm like i'm gonna fuck who, as long as Carlita and Leo bring me the money, I don't meet anybody, right?
I don't need to know anybody.
But you guys, I give you, you pay me, and this kind of right, exactly.
So they wanted 60 000 pounds and at that time I could do 60,000 pounds, but I had to go to the boat twice because I couldn't get it all in once.
I didn't have enough boats to work to go at that time to get it all in one shot.
So I was going to do this very serendipitously with the same boat.
So we get 60 pounds.
I said, show me the boat.
What's it look like?
Give me a schematic.
Let me show you how you're going to load this fucking thing.
Because if you're going to sit out there all night long, you can't just have the shit laying everywhere.
Especially if I approach it and leave it.
Now you're wide open.
So I find in the drawings of this vessel, in front of the vessel is called the folkshole.
And in front of the folkshole is a maintenance hatch that you get to, a maintenance bilge.
Just big enough to put 30,000 pounds of shit in.
But there's a maintenance hatch, a maintenance closet you go through to get to the hatch to get down to the bilge room to check whatever needs to be checked.
And those are all watertight drawers, doors, because they're going to the bilge of the boat.
Then I said, don't press your bales any bigger than you can get through that hatch.
Put 30,000 pounds of it, put half of it down there, shut that hatch.
And if you've ever been aboard a boat, a vessel, or any kind of seagoing giant ship, where they have watertight doors or where they don't have watertight doors, they have a threshold that you have to step over.
Right.
You step through and into the room.
The threshold is usually 14, 16 inches tall.
Well, when you close the hatch to the bilge down below, it only stuck four inches above the floor.
I said, put half the load down there, shut that hatch.
And the maintenance hatch wasn't any bigger than twice the size of your table here, the room itself.
I said, put five inches of concrete in there on that floor and cover that fucking thing up.
And they'll never know it's there.
Put your brooms and your buckets and your shit and your eggs and throw them all back in there.
So when I come the first night, get the first 30,000 pounds in the main, Is in the main midship hold.
I'll get that the first night.
You put that on deck, I come and get it.
When I call you the next night, you jackhammer that hole open, take that other 30,000 out and get it ready to go, and I'll take it then.
So I get the first 30,000 and we're headed back in.
We're about two hours into our trip, and I get a frantic call from the captain of that boat, dude.
He's talking about, send your chase boat back.
He says, a plane looked like the Marine Patrol or somebody, a Coast Guard, just flew over the boat.
He said, send your boat back for us.
And I said, you know what?
Fuck you, dude.
I said, how in the hell do we don't know, how do we know that they don't know we're out here?
You know, that's my getaway.
I paid for that fucker, not you.
Right, right.
You know, this is the game we play, dude, is pretty much what I said to him.
I said, you know, hey, this is a game you play.
Right.
And whether or not something would happen, whether it did or it didn't, it's just the way it is.
Right.
Well, as it turns out, the next day we're unloading, they're sending this shit to Miami, getting ready, you know, keyed up for the next night.
Turns out that they went out and boarded the vessel.
He has the four cents to call back to Panama and saying, we're being boarded.
Panamanian registered vessel.
So they reported hijacked at sea out of Panama.
When they boarded the vessel, there was residue from the first 30,000 pounds of shit that was in there.
Right.
In the main ship hold.
Right.
So they confiscate the vessel.
They arrest the crew and the captain and shit.
And they tow the vessel into here, into Tampa.
Right.
They held the boat for four months for evidence.
They couldn't keep the vessel because it was a Panamanian registry and it was a stolen, it was a hijacked vessel.
Right.
Well, because of all the residue and shit that was in the first hold of the boat, they never knew the other 30,000 pounds was still in there.
Under the concrete.
Under the concrete.
They deported the boat back to Panama.
Noriega put another crew on us.
No fucking way, man.
That's so crazy.
Oh, man.
It was just like, you know, and at that time, it didn't seem like anything to me.
It just seemed like, wow, it was a stroke of luck.
That was, and that's.
That's when um, Jorge George shows back up with this handwritten note from Noriega to me, in Spanish, and all it said was he says, I said holy, my friend, how in the did you do that?
That's all it said.
And you know, and I wish they'd have kept that thing man, because it's, you know, be worth it.
Oh my god, could you imagine.
And, ironically enough then, when I was busted in 87, or 88 88, it was um, this was, they were just coming to the end of operation.
Um um, what the hell was it?
It'll come to me, but when they got Noriega, they captured Noriega and they brought him to the United States.
They put him in Miami MCC, Metropolitan Correctional.
That's where I was.
Oh, really?
They put him in the same fucking place I was.
But we never knew one another, but they put him in the SIG, you know, where you're so what?
Segregated?
Segregation.
And it's a whole different yard that you can get into and stuff like that, but we could see each other through the fences.
You knew what he looked like?
Oh, yeah.
Who didn't know what Noriega looked like, man?
That's a pock marked face and shit.
Just a short fucking guy.
It's a piece of shit.
Really, nobody I ever wanted to deal with.
But I didn't have to deal with him directly.
I'll take his goddamn money for sure.
But yeah, that was kind of ironic.
We wound up in the same place together at that time.
But he wound up doing, he finished his time here in America about five years ago and he was extradited to France where he'll probably die in prison in France.
Oh, he's in prison right now in France.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, wow.
But that's my little run-in with that, too.
Fucking crazy, crazy shit.
How does it make you feel nowadays seeing the shit that's going on, especially in like, In our country and in Florida, with like the where they're regulating the pop business, and I think there was like some company.
I just read the other day that some company this happened like in March or something.
But a company called True Leave bought another company for like two and a half billion dollars.
Harvest, a company called Harvest, was purchased for two billion dollars for Florida dispensaries.
Well, crazy.
I'm kind of thinking I should get some credit back or some shit, you know.
But I didn't do too bad.
You know, I mean, you read the book, the book really tells, you know, the whole tale from A to Z.
And when they changed the federal sentencing guidelines to those absurd mandatory minimums, that means that meant none of us were getting out of prison.
Right.
I mean, well, you only meant, what did you actually get charged with?
You mean time-wise?
Yeah, initially.
160 years mandatory to life.
160, oh.
And $16 million in fines.
Because there's a $1 million fine.
Yeah, look at that.
$2.1 billion blockbuster deal with Arizona's biggest marijuana company.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Yeah, they bought, I think it was TrueLeave.
Yeah, Florida.
So TrueLeave, the largest marijuana company in Florida, bought Harvest, the largest marijuana company in Arizona, for $2.1 billion.
Probably pay it off in the first year.
You know, at the prices that they're selling the shit for, dude.
I got a medical card, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to go spend.
You know 60 on it.
Oh, it's so low of a fucking price it's insane.
You know it's really insane and it and it and it it's.
It's worse for the patients.
You know, because I know what it costs to grow this.
So does anybody else that grows it.
They know what it costs very little.
You know upfront costs.
Yeah, because you're doing hydroponics, you're doing lighting, you're doing all this, all this new type.
Yeah, you know that's going on.
It's an expensive to start up and you very rarely, within the first five years or so, see any red.
You know, it's just that way.
But at the prices that they're selling the shit at, man, you'd think it would be, I mean.
It's insane, man.
It is.
It's just stupid.
Well, at least they're not putting people in jail, though.
At least they're not fucking locking people up for 10 years for selling a dime bag.
Right.
You know, and that's another thing, too, when I was speaking about the mandatory minimums, when they arrested us and our crew, I was one of the first 38 to go.
I don't know if you have that picture or not of that front page.
Yeah, we have it.
What wound up happening is after that first, you know, they said it had 150 tons, over 150 tons.
After the first two, three weeks, what they realized was that nearly 400,000 pounds was only about a week's work.
That's when they knew what kind of a can of fish they opened up.
Then when they started affecting these arrests, the first 38 went and then so on and so on.
And it happened by way of, you asked this earlier, by way of a guy that was part of the crew.
Had been part of the crew for raised and born and raised there.
Right.
Was doing some crazy cocaine shit in Colombia and got himself busted and put in prison.
Well, the U.S. government found out that he was in prison down there and who he was, where he lived and all this kind of crap.
And he was associated with us.
They went down there and offered him a deal, said, look, we'll get you out of here if you can do this for us.
We need, you know, this is what we need.
Well, they got him out and brought him back, put him right back into our group.
We never knew he was gone.
We never knew he was in Colombia, never knew he was, you know, had any problems or anything like that.
He just all of a sudden, you know, he was gone.
Now he's there.
Hired him as a chaseboat driver.
Oh, no.
For a job that I put together with 57,000 pounds.
Because I was splitting the load between two places, Pine Island and Everglades City.
And he was the chase boat driver on the Pine Island side of it.
So they knew about it right from the get-go.
Now, what happens is the bus goes down.
Nobody gets caught.
It was in the paper, actually, back then.
They called it the Pine Island Dump.
Because there was weed everywhere, man.
Then everybody took off.
Like flies, gone.
This guy who they who they caught I'm gonna say any names.
Yeah, the guy that they caught you know starts telling some of the younger crew You know these guys dude.
It's over.
They got you man.
They get you they know your name.
They know who you are blah blah blah They've changed everything around now.
It's a mandatory 40 years brother You're gone at least 40 years No doubt about it, and there's no parole none you do 85% of your time and When you tell a 19, 20-year-old kid that, he's going to tell him he's fucking grandma.
Oh, yeah.
You know?
Oh, yeah.
So it started out with just a couple of them, you know, a couple of the younger guys that they knew they could roll.
And then that's when the shit started to happen.
You know, people started to become invisible because names were being said.
And it began a domino effect.
But along with that domino effect, and this is an interesting part about it.
Now, this was given to me, information given to me by the supervisor for United States Homeland Security here in Southwest Florida.
And the supervisor shows for United States Customs at the time told me that they understood that, you know, while they're affecting these arrests, that they're only arresting kids.
All the adults have already been arrested, man.
There's nothing but kids left.
So giving a mandatory life sentence and all these ridiculous million-dollar fines to a bunch of kids just didn't really kind of sit good with them, didn't sit with them.
So what they did was, by design rather than by accident, they incorporated within these plea agreements to the people that they're catching, these kids that they're catching, they say, look, You tell us everything you know, everybody you know, everything that you've done.
We'll give you immunity from prosecution from everything that you've done except for one count.
We'll hold one count back so we can, you know, we got to give you something.
Yeah.
You know, and at that point, depending on your cooperation, how substantial or whatever it may be, would determine whether you're going home, you're getting parole, you're getting two years, you're getting a year.
You know, what are you going to get?
Now they can sentence you if you cooperate.
Guidelines state they can now sentence you below the mandatory minimums.
That's the only way you're dodging a life sentence is if you cooperate.
So what happened was by the language of that cooperation plea agreement was by giving them immunity, Jimmy can tell on you.
Freddie can tell on you.
Your name's already been spoken.
You got immunity.
Cooperation Deals and Immunity00:15:16
You can't be hurt.
They get immunity.
They get immunity.
Everybody's telling and running and saying names, but they all have immunity so they can't hurt one another.
And it was an amazing thing about how they did it.
And it didn't matter that at the time that a lot of the guys are saying a lot of the same names.
All that told the government was they're getting all the right people.
But putting kids away for life, for hauling pot, when just the year before their fathers and uncles and grandpas and cousins and shit are doing 8, 10, 12 months and getting hot and going home and you're going to get a life sentence for it.
Didn't really set easy for them, but what it did manage to do was glad the government was able to find its conscience.
Well yeah, I mean it was, it was unprecedented.
Yeah, you know, in the fact that, you know if it hadn't have been, you know us kids, you know if it had been a bunch of guys toting guns and shooting.
And then right, that was another thing dude, when none of us carried guns right man, we could run around with cutoffs and bare feet.
Right, you know, that's our.
That was the right.
The clothing you wore, that was the island garb man, You know, you worked on the boat, you go out crab fishing, you got on a pair of slickers and a pair of boots, fishing boots, and under that you got a pair of cutoffs on.
So what they weren't willing to do at that time when they pronounced these significant sentences, these guidelines, was put away kids for the rest of their lives.
So what they did was they offered them this agreement, and within the agreement was that clause, was that escape valve, which allowed everybody to say, look, dude, they said your name, John.
Dude, you're going to prison.
But if you cooperate with them, tell them me, tell them my name.
Give them Jimmy's name.
Give them Fred's.
Give them Paul's name.
Tell on them.
Cooperate with them.
You can't hurt them.
They already got immunity.
Right.
See?
So it worked out great.
And it comes to a guy like me.
Fuckers, they want to know who I'm seeing in Miami all the time.
Where am I flying out of the country to?
Two, three times a month.
And we know.
We got pictures of the plane.
You get on and you get off.
You know, they had everything, man.
And I said, well, you know what, guys?
I said, this is something that you're going to have to figure out on your own.
I said, because if I start that shit, I'm opening up a can of worms that just can't put the lid back on.
Even though throughout all the years that this was done, it was, you know, our fathers and uncles and grandpas and people like that and us kids, not a single shot was ever fired.
Not a gun was ever seen.
I never saw a fucking gun.
That's funny.
That's crazy, man.
And there's a really very simple reason for that.
It's because of the sheer volume of money that's being made.
Right.
And the amount of money being put forth.
To make that it was very insignificant to make you know, but what made the cocaine aspect of it in Miami?
Why was there so much death?
There was like an untold amount of death in Miami because it was very easy to bring into the country Because of you know if you bring a 10,000 pounds of cocaine in the country you can do it relatively easy 10,000 pounds of fucking weed would fill this room, right?
You know that and the fact that there's more money involved in it Lot more money because you can take that pure cocaine you can chop it down to make you make one kilo into four But by the time that kilo gets to the United States, it's worth, at that time, I think kilos were about 30 grand.
Now they're somewhere around 65 grand.
But you can turn that $30,000 into almost a million if you're a dealer.
So that's the reason for the big deal of the cocaine.
Then the crack came along.
So now you're making more money off the cocaine by selling the crack rocks and that kind of thing.
I really don't know how the chemistry works or how the math works on all of that, but I just know that it's a something that we never agreed with, really.
I mean, we all had our share of Coke and we'd do it, you know, until we got sick of doing it, but wanting to get into doing that now.
And people ask me, well, do you think it's the nature of the drug, the nature of the cocaine, the people that you're selling the cocaine to?
It's that stigma.
It's that whole crowd.
It's that people you're selling it to.
At that time, it was considered for the rich, the wealthy, the fabulous.
Well, then Miami became a wash in it.
And now Grams were going for 120 bucks.
Now they're going for 50.
Or you get an eight ball for 100 bucks or some shit like that.
Now everybody's doing it.
And everybody's making money and everybody wants to make money.
So everybody wants to be that cocaine cowboy, man.
Everybody wants to be the man.
And you start killing them.
You're killing your competition.
That's what started the war.
In 1979 or 1980, somewhere between in there, Time magazine wrote an article about Miami and they called it Paradise Lost.
I remember that.
It was across the front of the magazine, Paradise Lost.
And that's because Miami was being run by the cartel.
Literally.
And they called on the United States government to come down and help because they couldn't handle it.
Right.
Now you've got cops running around with.38s and they're being, you know, shot at with automatic weapons, you know, AK 47s, you know, military style weaponry.
Right.
The first hint of this was the Dade Land massacre.
There it is.
Yeah.
There it is.
Exactly.
Wow, man.
The legendary Times cover.
Yep.
And what led, and what brought that to?
On was that fight.
What turned it into a fight with the United States government rather than the state government was that they called it the Dade Land Massacre.
These guys, these cooking cowboys, Cubans, went in there to ABC liquor store to kill two guys.
Two guys.
They killed everybody in the store.
Plus, they shot anybody that was walking around in the parking lot, too, and then left.
That set the pace.
That was a whole new ballgame.
Now the cops are outgunned.
You're going to go up against an AK with a 38?
I don't fucking think so.
So they had to rethink their whole strategy.
They had to bring the United States government in.
That's when the whole shit went down.
So that's when they said, look, we got this under control.
Now let's see what's going on over here.
That's when they started knocking on our door.
Although we weren't violent in any stretch of the imagination.
We weren't violent.
And there's no way that that crap that was taking place in Miami could have ever found its way to Everglades City and that being taken over because it's a little fishing village.
It's been there since the early 1800s.
It's family-oriented.
It's 10,000 islands.
You don't know shit, dude, unless you're raised there.
I can lose you in 30 seconds.
And you'll be one island away from town and not know it.
And you'll probably die there.
It's just the way it is.
So you don't come in and take an area over like that.
You take advantage and make use of the people and the infrastructure that's already there.
That's why nobody fucked with us.
Nobody wanted it because they couldn't.
We had the vessels.
We had the know-how.
We had the ability.
We had the the wherewithal.
So that's how it managed to go for as long as it did.
It's incredible.
And how you were so close.
You were just a hop, a skip, and a jump away from that metropolitan hellhole called Miami.
Yeah.
And, you know, there was so much going on.
It was so much killing and so much of that going on that, you know, it gave law enforcement a bad taste in their mouth, regardless of which product you were messing with.
They came in at Everglades City with shotguns and rifles.
And, you know, I mean, The guys are, you know, the captains running around yelling, make sure your rifles are loaded, make sure your shotguns have got plenty of ammo.
And you're like, what the fuck?
Yeah.
Are you raiding a village in Nam or something?
Right.
Oh, fuck me, man.
Most of the guys that the second time around, we're just older guys.
And a lot of them didn't even smoke weed.
Right.
They just did it because they were supplementing an income that the government tried to fuck them out of.
So they sat on a front porch, smoked cigarettes, just wait for the show to start.
Nothing they could do about it.
Oh, my.
Incredible, man.
Fucking fascinating.
Yeah.
So there was talking about this guy, Ron, my buddy.
From the CIA.
He was involved with, we had done a job one day, or one night actually, pretty ballsy sometimes, and we brought this boat right into town, right into Everglades City, loaded with bales below deck.
You can only get so many pounds, you know, you could probably get maybe, depending on the size of the boat, maybe 15,000 pounds of bales, stuff just right under the boat.
We bring it right into town and park it and go away from it till dark and then come back.
Well, somehow somebody walked.
Past.
There the tourist or somebody is looking at the boats and shit and they smell the fucking weed and they call the cops and they bust the boat.
Here comes the you know the DEA and you know the Sheriff's Department, everybody in there and my buddy Ron when he's showing me those pictures of my money and the MBA and my MBI guys, like this, he's got a picture of himself and and his other buddy Ron in the bilge of our boat.
The boat was called um um risky business, the crab boat, and they got pictures of him down below, you know, amongst the bales.
You know hey, you know big deal, and they got them perfect name for your boat.
They got them lined up on the dock.
The bales are stacking up.
They got pictures of them like this.
And that's so long story short.
The boat gets confiscated obviously, and they tow it out of there.
Well, these boats, when they're taken, you know, like this, they go up for government auction.
Anybody can go bid on these boats.
So what do?
What do our guys do?
Go to the government auction and bid on their own boat and buy it back.
Wow, they go.
I shit you not.
That boat should be in the museum.
They put it in.
Check this out, though.
They get to the auction.
They don't care what the cost, you know?
Right.
Outbid everybody on the fucking.
They got money to spare.
Right.
So they get the boat.
They bring it back.
They re register it.
Change the name to Still Kicking.
This is like a big fuck you.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
That's fucking awesome.
So you ended up doing four years.
Yeah.
Four years total.
Did they get all your cash?
That picture?
They took it.
They, I mean they put it back in the safe.
Yeah no no no, that wound up going to the government, took all your money.
Well, the lawyer took a lot of it.
Yeah um, in cash.
You know lawyer the, the attorney I hired here in town.
It was too high profile of a case for him right, so he was kind of freaking out a little funny.
Usually attorneys like the high profile.
Yeah well, this wasn't your typical dime bag salesman.
But um, he says my father-in-law is a pretty high-priced, you know criminal attorney out of Baltimore.
He said, let me give him a call.
He cost me 750 grand.
Oh, just to start off with, you know, but he, he did wonders.
He, you know he was, he was worth every dime I paid for him.
Oh man um, what it wound up being was, excuse me, the?
Um, i'm sitting here at my attorney's office and, and he's when I sit down, he slides what's called discovery.
I'm familiar with it.
Yeah, this is all the evidence that the prosecuting attorney has against you.
They Can't hold anything back.
They have to give you all of it.
No surprises.
And that fucking thing is this deep with paper.
Wow.
Everybody that said my name that knew me as who I was.
Wow.
Because a lot of people don't know.
I mean, there's hundreds of people.
I mean, five crews.
There was an Everglades City crew.
There was a Goodland crew, Marco Island crew, a Naples crew, and a Pine Island crew.
We're talking anywhere from 70 to 100 guys on each crew.
There's no way that maybe just a handful of them know who the boss is.
Like I told you earlier, nobody gives a shit.
Right, right.
But ultimately, it comes to light that, yeah, I'm the guy.
doing the shit and I'm setting the deals up.
Actually, I was set up one day and didn't realize this until after I had gotten busted.
I was sitting in a bar in a club down in Naples owned by the ex-sheriff's son.
And I was having a conversation with a guy about unloading his shrimp boat, you know, talking money and deals and when.
And we, you know, walked away from that and nothing really came of it, which usually happens.
And I get busted that day.
That day I get busted.
They get hauled into Fort Myers.
I'm in the federal building and I'm talking to the guy and this guy looks over at me and goes, get big white, fuzzy beard and he's got white, white hair.
And he says, hey Timmy, remember me.
And I'm looking at him like this.
He's a little bit older.
I just do this at him like this and I said, oh man, you're that fucker.
Had a drink within the bar that day, aren't you?
He said that to me.
I was setting up and I was set up by that guy who owned the bar doing a deal for this.
But they never busted me for that because there was nothing, you know, to come of it.
But ultimately, when they did figure out, you know, who I was.
That's when they wanted to know who's in Miami and who's in South America and all this like this.
And I said, look, you might as well just shoot me.
Shoot you and your whole family.
Shoot everybody I know, my family and all this kind of shit.
Because, you know, even though there was no violence involved ever in anything that we did, you pop the cork on one of these fucking guys and they're going to do exactly what they're very good at.
And that's shutting you the fuck up.
So I couldn't tell them anything.
I couldn't tell them anything about that.
I had to take my lumps, you know.
But my saving grace came.
When everybody else was getting this deal.
I mean, we're talking about hundreds of guys I had.
You know there were kids 19, 20 years old, bail handling and um, my saving grace came um, after you know, like about seven, eight months of sitting in Fort Myers County jail uh, two United States Treasury officers came to visit me, a man and a woman, two identical brown vested suits, and they pulled out their little gold badges, slapped them against the window.
They had me all chained up inside this room with a you know burger king thing that you're talking to.
And um um, I said you know right, I right out loud.
I said you know what I said.
If this is about cooperation, I said you just open that door up and, you know, send me home or send me back to my cell, because it ain't happening.
Susan Daltuva, who was the United States prosecutor who was prosecuting me at that time, she was in the next room.
She heard me say that.
She comes running into the room.
She goes, no, Timmy.
She says no, cooperation isn't really what we're looking for, because we know that's not possible for you, she said.
Radar, Wiretaps, and Marathon Engines00:09:52
But what we would like to know is how you guys were able to do this for nearly a decade and we couldn't catch you.
And I said, well, game over, I can tell you that.
I'll tell you how stupid you are right.
So that's when I started telling them about driving this out of town and waving at you, probably half the time we're going out of town and how, how do you think we got all that stuck to Miami man?
It was like going on like this and you had no clue, you know?
And um, so I start.
You know, then these uh investigators from the U.s attorney's office want to come and talk To Me.
So almost every other day I'm getting shackled and cuffed and I'm taken outside the jail.
And here in downtown Fort Myers, and I'm doing the convict shuffle with all these chains and shit on into the next building, right?
And I start telling them, you know, how stupid they are, how we do this, how we do that, you know, this, no names, but, you know, you figure it out if you can fucking figure it out, okay?
I had one of the guys on the crew was Everglades National Park Ranger.
He was one of my best friends.
He was on my crew.
He introduced me to a guy in Miami who was a counter surveillance technology expert.
He worked with the government on their surveillance technology.
I was getting the same, if not better, technology that the government was getting.
I had handheld radar.
At that time, they were perfecting Starlight Scope, night vision from the Vietnam War.
I had three of those.
Really?
Yeah, all kind of cool shit, man.
Wow.
I had a little RF detector.
It was about half this size.
It was about this big, the size of a deck of cards.
Little switch on top, a little red light.
In a, in a telescopic antenna that I can unscrew off and put a wire antenna on it.
I could take that wire, put that thing in my pocket, run the wire down my pant leg and i'm walking to the club.
If this thing starts to vibrate somebody's, somebody's recording, it's picking up or sending a signal, somebody's picking up a radio frequency rf it's the radio frequency detector.
So if I feel this thing vibrating in my pocket, I just walk around the club till I find out who's carrying it.
Really yeah, and when I get home at night then I unscrew the wire, put the telescopic Antenna back on it, pull it out, and sweep my house when I get home.
That's insane.
It's the coolest shit, man.
And when we, this is all part of having ramped up our operation once the grownups and us kids took over.
Now, we're all using the kind of boat that I showed you, the T Craft, that was very popular.
Another boat that was very popular, shallow drafting boat, was made by a couple of brothers, Morgan Brothers, made boats in Naples.
Oh, yeah.
You know the Morgan?
I'm familiar with Morgan.
You know the Morgans?
Yeah.
I don't know that, but I'm familiar with them.
The Morgan boats, yeah.
Excellent boat.
So we changed all over to those.
You know, we got rid of the mullet skiffs.
You know what those are?
Yep.
With the little motor in the middle, kind of old-fashioned kind of shit.
But they were great at the time because that's all there really was.
And everybody was really fond at that time of the 235 Evan Roots, you know, because they were the most dependable and powerful engines at that time as far as torque.
Um, so um.
There were so many tea crafts at that time during the late 70s, early 80s, um and um through the mid 80s.
There's so many tea crafts around southwest Florida.
People had to start hiding them, keeping them out of sight, because I mean, it takes like 25 or 30 of these to unload us, you know, a 40-ton job, you know, to get it into shore, and then everybody takes them home and hides them and like this right, we had, and I told you about the, the logistics of the older generation and the problems they had with their mechanics and keeping boats running and like this.
Well, I only had one mechanic, Sammy.
One mechanic for all these boats.
And when you called him, if you had a problem with one of your 235s, no matter where you were, your Everglades, Goodland, Marco, Naples, wherever, he doesn't come with a truck and a box of wrenches to wrench on your fucking engine.
He brings you a new engine.
Because it's always been said that if this fucker left me sitting, I'm not going to give it a chance to let me fucking sit again.
Get it off my fucking boat.
Well, People say, you know, people always ask me about, well, what about breaking in new engines?
I mean, I can't put a brand new engine on there and haul loads like that around.
Well, duh, of course not.
We must have known at that time between all of us, every private charter captain that there was fishing in those days, you know, six pack charter captains, we'd give them a 235 Evanrude, just give it to them to use.
And then Sammy would make note and keep track of all the engines he's got into all these people.
And when they run so many hours on them, he takes them out, swaps them out, gives them a new engine, takes that engine, puts it back in the crate.
So when we call him, he brings us an already broken in.
2.35, hangs in on a boat, we're good to go.
That's how you sharpen up the fucking operation.
That's how you shape up an operation, man.
That's incredible not only that This is funny fuck one of the guys on the crew Was Was the son of one of the sheriff deputies in Everglades City There's only three.
I mean, there's a sheriff and two deputies.
I mean guys like right Barney Fife and you know So when his dad was on duty You know, it was like the back door was open.
He usually worked the night shift.
You know, it just shit was coming, shit was coming, shit was coming.
Man, there was one night, I don't know if it was him or whoever was in the car.
I'm unloading at the Everglades National Park Ranger Station.
It's right there in the middle of town.
Lights on in the parking lot and all kind of shit like that there.
This is in the early days.
This is way back when.
And I'm eliminating all the other people out of the play.
I'm eliminating everybody except the mothership.
And the and the, the two boats that I hired to bring it in, the two crab boats I hired to bring it in.
Typically they bring it in and then the little boats grab it, take it to the house.
You know the story.
Blah blah blah, like that.
Well, I cut everybody out of the picture and brought those two boats right to the docks at the at the Everglades national ranger station and loaded that in two tractor trailer trucks that were sitting there in the parking lot sheriff's car sitting there, lights on in the parking lot and the guys in the front seat like this, two in the morning, sheriff sleeping.
Trucks getting loaded and And I don't tell that very often because, you know.
You can't make this shit up, man.
No, and there was, I mean, it just gets better.
There was a guy, two Marine Patrol guys in Marathon.
And in Marathon, they put up a type of a weather balloon.
They called it Fat Boy.
And mounted below it was a radar device.
So they'd crank this thing out there on a cable, I don't know, four, five, six hundred feet, thousand feet in the air.
This was a good size, looked like a blimp, a Goodyear blimp, but it was downscaled.
Well, they could watch through radar.
Traffic lanes coming through the Yucatan Pass.
We call it the Gap.
There's the western coast of Cuba and the eastern coast of the Yucatan.
And that's where we had to come through to get to southwest Florida.
Well, they have this goddamn rayer up there that's watching.
And they turn it on every night.
And they put a VHS tape and have it running and recording so they don't have to monitor it just in case.
And they file it away in case anything else.
comes under suspect, they can go back and review, you know, whatever.
So being that there's two guys down there in Marathon, we always went in when we were lobster fishing, we'd always stop and spend the night at a hotel and a really nice resort called the Buccaneer.
So one of the guys was single.
The other guy was married, had kids, and just like that, because we had guys following them.
I had a couple of guys that live in Marathon and watch these guys.
Well, the one guy that was single really liked having dinner at the Buccaneer.
you know, because it was a cool place to hang out, a bar and a grill and that kind of thing, and it was on the water and stuff.
So I took one of my dumbass buddies down there.
I mean, this guy was, you know, had about as much education as you can get out of a number two pencil that's about this big, you know?
So I said, look, what you need to do is go in there.
And I had a bag of money.
I had 100 grand.
I said, go in there and sit down next to the guy.
Put the bag down on the floor next to you.
And you have to strike up a conversation.
And it's real simple, dude.
He's either going to grab you, try to grab you.
And in that case, and you've run your fucking ass off, grab the bag, but run your ass off.
Or he's just going to sit there and listen to you talk.
So.
Sammy takes the baggie and goes in.
The guy's sitting at the bar and we can see through the window.
We're in the car.
And we're watching him in there and he's in there 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
I'm thinking, what the fuck is he asking this guy for a date or what?
And he gets up and he walks out, gets in the car and we drive off.
Had he, I said, had he tried to grab you, you dive in the window and we're down the road.
We're in that tea craft of ours and we're halfway across Florida Bay before he gets his car started.
But it turns out he just sat there, kept the money.
What we did was asked him to turn that.
VCR off.
Don't turn the radar off.
Just turn the VCR off at a certain day, at a certain time, for so many hours as our boat's coming through the Yucatan.
Because when you're coming through the Yucatan and you change from one shipping lane to another, there's a shipping lane that goes to Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa for bigger vessels.
Turning Off the VCR in the Yucatan00:07:47
If anything strays out of those shipping lanes, they become suspect and they may get looked at.
They may not get looked at.
It depends.
So we have him turn it off for so many hours at that time so he can get out of the shipping lanes and into the crabbing lane where all the crabbers are.
Or the shrimp boats are.
It's simple as that.
But if you think about it, you know, in those days, if you offer a cop or you offer a marine patrol or any one of these guys, you know, park ranger, 10 times their annual salary just to go over there for two hours and go to sleep.
What the fuck do you think they're going to do?
Right.
They're going to go take a nap, for Christ's sake.
Right.
I don't give a fuck what you're doing.
Nah, in those days, it was just that easy.
That's amazing, man.
That's fucking amazing.
Well, dude, we just did like two and a half hours.
Sweet.
I appreciate it.
We just got started, man.
I know.
We got to do a part two of this, man.
Yeah, when I get my tooth vecked, the mangroves knocked out the other day.
Jesus.
Where can people go buy your book?
Check it out on Amazon.
They're selling Amazon Saltwater Cowboy Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire.
I've seen people reselling my book for as much as $150 on Amazon.
Really?
Yeah.
Can you believe that shit?
That's wild.
Why?
It's insane.
I don't know.
They're a limited supply?
Well, Amazon buys them and they're gone.
Okay.
And I believe what's happening is they're pushing the.
I'm also on Kindle in a nook.
Okay.
And I also have an Audible version.
Oh, good.
Did you read it or you had someone read it?
No, no, no.
I put my hat in the ring during pre production, but it was too late during pre production because I was having a contract dispute between.
Um, not so much a dispute but rather a change in my contract where ST Martin's Press, who I contracted as my publisher, had written Amazon and um Audible in or uh, into their contract so they would have gained any any resulting residual from those and I would have not seen it.
So I scratched that out of there, okay.
And the minute I did that and turned my contract back in I get a call.
My agent gets a call from Audible saying we'd like to advance you and royalty you separately.
So I got a deal with Audible.
Oh, cool.
And I got a deal for the Nook and the Kindle, you know, the e-book versions of it.
But those are my most lucrative deals because there's literally no work to be done other than push a button and a download where you've got to print a book, you've got to package it, you've got to send it off and all this kind of shit.
There's a lot of money in there.
Download's much cleaner.
Download's much cleaner and more profitable because I can make up for every 5,000 units sold of my Audible book or my Kindle or Nook books, my percentage of profit increases up to, I think, 42% of the cost of the book.
Oh, wow.
Which is, I mean, that's very lucrative.
That's amazing.
What's the book called?
Saltwater Cowboy, Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire.
And my picture on the front, very cool 80s.
I've got a picture.
I'd like to see it.
We have it, don't we?
You sent it.
Yeah, we got it.
Put it up on there.
There we go.
There she is.
Saltwater Cowboy.
There I am.
Look at you, Tim.
You know, and there was a very cool review.
Only two reviews on the back of the book.
One of them was done by Kirkus.
Kirkus is notorious for bashing authors, let alone new authors.
But they somehow managed to give me a somewhat glowing review on the back of my book, which I was pretty impressed with.
You have an incredible story.
And the author of the book, Blow, who wrote the guy, Bruce Porter, who wrote George Young's story, actually is a St. Martin's Press author as well.
So when he found out about the book, he was freaking mad and wanted to get an advanced copy of it to read it.
And he left a, he said, dude, I got to give this guy a review.
He said, let me offer a review for the back of the book.
And let me see if I can find it here real quick.
Oh, shit.
Why don't I just do this?
Is it on the back of the book?
Yeah.
Oh, perfect.
Oh, yeah.
The book.
Where am I?
There she is.
Which one am I?
You're here.
Hold it close to your face so I can see it.
There you go.
Just like that.
Saltwater Cowboy, right?
Okay, now, these are my two reviews.
Right here.
This is a Kirkus review, and this is Bruce Porter's review.
Talking to the mic so we can hear you.
This is Bruce Porter's review here, and it says, A wild and entertaining true story by one of the biggest pot haulers in American history.
Speedboat chases women in Colombian mansions to McBride's Tale of Excess is a thrill to read.
Go buy that book, everybody.
Buy it right now.
Get thrilled.
I'll link it below, too.
Link it in the description for everyone to see it.
Yeah.
You know, and I brought something else.
Just real quick, I wanted to show you that.
Yeah.
I have a website, too.
It's www.
Www.original Saltwatercowboy.com and there's a media section in there that has a lot of the media that I've done in there and stuff like that.
But this is the LIFE magazine I alluded to earlier.
When Operation Everglades 2 came to Everglades in 1984, one of the reporting crews I said there was so many reporters down there that there were more reporters and cops than there were people being arrested.
LIFE magazine was one of them.
They offered up a rather Awesome centerfold picture of the trouble in Everglades.
And the subtitle says, A Southwest Florida town tarred with drug smuggling, and most of its 600 residents say, So what?
18 pages of that's incredible, man.
They put in this magazine, which was pretty outstanding.
Pretty unprecedented.
It made national news all over the country.
It was a big deal at that time.
And I felt it was necessary to write this book and tell the story about how it actually happened without any embellishment, without any bullshit, regardless of whatever the haters want to throw at me.
That's cool, man.
I've had it all.
If you're going to understand marijuana, particularly in this day and age when it's becoming legalized or quasi-legalized through medical use and what have you, I think that it's important that people understand the true history.
and judge their first use of this medication, as we call it now, cannabis, for the first time, not by what they see happening and taking place on the Mexican border, the violence and the mayhem and the death and the destruction over cannabis and all the drugs coming across our border.
Particularly the cannabis.
I don't want people going into their first experience with cannabis with that in their mind.
What they should be thinking about is how it originally took place.
my generation and the generation before us.
I want you to go into trying cannabis for the first time thinking about that ultra cool Rasta dude standing out in the middle of 200 acres of virgin bud just, you know, enjoying and digging life, smoking on a spliff, or that little Colombian dude in all his white cotton and his white hat just out there picking and having a good time and just enjoying life like that.
Leaving Without Shame or Violence00:02:40
No guns, no this and no that.
That's the version they should hear.
The version they should hear that involves no gunplay, no violence whatsoever.
Just family oriented.
Of course, breaking the law, you know i'm not.
I'm not advocating, you know, breaking the law or smuggling in any way, shape or form.
It's just what I grew up into, you know.
It's just my unfortunate, or fortunate uh circumstance, if you will.
But people need to understand that it was not violent, it was never that violent.
And the reason being real quickly is because if I can spend three hundred thousand dollars and buy 15 million dollars where they, Who's shooting at me?
Nobody's shooting at me.
They're giving me more money.
They can't get me going back there fast enough.
So that's how it all took place.
So you can find a lot of that on www.original saltwatercowboy.com.
You can look at some of my posts that I post on Instagram at original saltwatercowboy.
And I got to follow you.
That's it.
Awesome.
That ain't it.
You got to have me back and we'll talk another three hours.
We're definitely going to do another three hours.
Hell yeah, man.
Oh, shit.
That's great.
Yeah, I'm going to follow you right now.
There's this, you know, some very interesting characters involved in this.
And keep in mind that, you know, we're not, we were never violent, dude.
I mean, we're kids, man.
And I think that has a lot to do with the reason why the United States government chose to do what they did.
Yeah.
And, you know, in retrospect, now I'm 63.
I look back on some of the craziness I did.
And like I said, I could have cut a cigar with my asshole.
But, you know, knowing that we did it in such a way that I'm not ashamed of it, you know.
I broke the law.
Yeah, I'm an outlaw.
I'm a fucking pot hauler, but I never killed anybody.
Not to say that that didn't happen.
It went on for sure.
I mean, there were assholes out there that just didn't give a shit.
I mean, bad dudes.
But I don't want that to overshadow the majority of the shit that was coming into the country and the people that were bringing it.
Families.
So let's leave it at that.
Well, thank you so much, Tim.
It's been an invigorating two and a half hours.
You got a ton of stories.
I like that, dude.
Oh, it really did.
It really did.
I'm super grateful for you coming on.
Thanks for having me.
We'll do it again in the future for sure.
Yeah, I'm just down the road, bro.
Only two hours, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's if somebody doesn't get ass ended on the bridge.