All Episodes
Previous Next
July 11, 2021 - Lex Fridman Podcast
02:09:35
Roger Reaves: Smuggling Drugs for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel | Lex Fridman Podcast #199
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The following is a conversation with Roger Reeves, one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history.
He worked for Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa, the leaders behind the Medellin Cartel.
Roger was the employer and close friend of Barry Seal, the infamous drug smuggler who was the main character in the movie American Made.
Roger transported countless tons of cocaine and marijuana covering six continents.
He escaped prison five times, was shut down in both Mexico and Colombia, and was tortured nearly to death in a Mexican prison.
Through all of this, his wife Mari, the love of his life, was there with him, and when he was in prison, she waited for him.
He recently got out of prison, where for many years he worked on his memoir called Smuggler.
This podcast is an exploration of his story.
Quick mention of our sponsors, Noom, Allform, ExpressVPN, Four Sigmatic, and Eight Sleep.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
Let me say a few words about Roger Reeves, Pablo Escobar, and the war on drugs.
This conversation with Roger is unlike any I've ever done.
In the eyes of many, including the law, Roger is a criminal, a bad man who has added to
the suffering in the world.
But he never directly engaged or participated in the violence, unlike his bosses, Pablo
Escobar and Jorge Ochoa.
His crime was the transport of drugs.
I thought about this, and about Pablo Escobar, who was at once both a brutal murderer and
a Robin Hood figure who helped the poor and was loved by thousands, if not millions.
We sometimes idolize murderers and destroy good, honest men.
We give power and money to corrupt politicians and dictators that starve and murder their own people.
Given this, I think about what makes for a good man, and what makes for a bad man, and who decides.
Sitting across from Roger, I saw a complicated man, but one who has kindness in his heart, a love for money and adventure, and a disdain for violence.
Again, his crime was the transport of drugs.
Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost U.S. $1 trillion.
Marijuana legalization alone would save and make $13.7 billion.
That could send more than 650,000 students to public universities every year.
Then there's the human stories of the 500,000 human beings sitting in prison for drug-related offenses and the 1.1 million on probation and parole.
Their life is damaged or ruined beyond repair due to the prohibition of drugs.
There's a lot more to be said about the damage done by the war on drugs.
But when reading about Roger's story and talking to him, I couldn't escape the thought that while society wants to label him a criminal and a bad human being, there are much worse men out there who we give a pass to, even give power to, even men who hold political office or run companies.
I also think about my role as an interviewer, sitting across a man like Roger.
In these interviews, in life, in many ways I continue to be myself, a person who, like Dostoevsky's the idiot, seeks the good in all people, but is hurt by it on occasion and maybe is destroyed by it in the end.
I'm not naive, but I'm also optimistic and have hope for humanity.
That's who I am, and that's what these conversations are.
I hope you join me, and I hope you understand that I come from a place of love.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Roger Reeves.
You are one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history.
What would you say motivated you?
Money? Power?
The thrill? Or was it something else?
Money. But isn't there a point where you've had more money than you can possibly know what to do with?
Or is it always more money?
You know, I had plenty of money several times and I think it's sort of like if you was in Las Vegas and you had the slot machine handled down and the gold coins was tumbling around you and you had sweepers bagging them up.
When would you let it go?
But isn't some part of that the thrill then?
Oh, there was a lot of thrill.
Sometimes way too much.
You made certainly tens of millions of dollars, probably much more.
What memorable experience did having that much money make possible for you?
So there's one thing is the money, and the other thing is what that money can buy.
Well, I bought everything that I could hide.
I bought seven farms.
I owned the...
The land where the city of Moreno Valley, California is.
I had an option on that land.
Did the planning and development of that.
The most expensive coin in the world.
Yachts, ships, airplanes galore.
Did that bring you happiness?
No. Absolutely not.
In fact, I think I'm happier now.
I know I'm happier now. So looking back, would you do it the same way all again?
No way. Really?
Even the thrill of it?
Not even the thrill of it.
It wasn't worth 33 years in prison being away from my lovely family.
So money, what about the power?
Just being on top of the world where nobody can, not the governments, the police, all the big bad agencies chasing you, and you could do whatever the heck you wanted.
As far as having to look over your shoulder everywhere you went and every phone call you made, make sure that you was naked with somebody in the ocean before you talked.
It's rather uncomfortable.
Yeah. I like to make phone calls the same way.
What was it like meeting and working with Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellin cartel?
He just seemed like a gentleman when I met him, just like you and I sitting here shook hands and I had flown one load for a fellow, and it didn't work out well.
The fellow that I gave it to got shot, and it took a while to get my money, and they didn't put as many kilos on the plane as they're supposed to, and so I wasn't going to work with them anymore, and my contact down there introduced me to Jorge Ochoa.
And we went up in Envigado.
We went up, and the gate opened, and we was escorted in.
There must have been 50 men out in the yards, a hitching rail on an old house.
And we was escorted right in.
And there was a beautiful woman in there.
I mean, gore, drop-dead beautiful.
And she made us a cup of coffee, and then was ushered in to see Jorge Ochoa.
And he had 12 telephones on his desk, and all of them was a different color.
And he shook hands, was very friendly, spoke English.
And he said that each one of those telephones represented another city in the United States.
This is Chicago, and this is New York.
If I ring, I knew who was calling.
And so we chatted a while, and he asked me what type of airplanes I had.
And what experience I had flying across the U.S. border.
And I told him he seemed pleased with it.
And he called the lady in, and she went next door, and in came Pablo Escobar, and he introduced me to Pablo Escobar.
And he asked the same questions again, and I answered him, and I said, And I asked them how much they paid, and they paid $5,000 a kilo to haul it.
And so I said, how much you put on the plane?
He said, $300,000, $500,000.
So that's $1.5 million, $2.5 million for an eight-hour trip.
Sounded pretty good to me.
And we're talking about cocaine, and we're talking about Colombia.
Columbia and Cocaine and Medellin Cartel.
And Jorge Ochoa was one of the, what would you say, founding members?
He was probably the brains behind the whole thing.
The brains and spoke good English.
Yes. And they were nice people.
Really nice people.
Were you scared? Not at all.
What's wrong with your mind that you weren't scared?
Here's some of the most dangerous men in this world, and you weren't scared.
Well, I knew I was going to do exactly what I said I was going to do.
Mari and the children were down there.
They went down, and they stayed in the hotel, five-star, and treated royally on my first load.
And they just did ask security to make sure that I wasn't a DEA agent.
So I did the first load, and they didn't say they were hostages, but they really weren't.
It was just insurance.
So there was some integrity to the way they operated?
Completely. I mean, straight up.
The money was ironed and banded and just right, and the numbers were never once anything wrong with it.
What would you attribute that honesty to?
Within their own moral system and their own set of rules, why weren't people crossing the line and shaving off the top and injecting chaos into the system to where it would be unpredictable and people would be dishonest and greedy and all those kinds of things?
That's true. Most people are, but there's certain people at the top of the food chain that they don't need that.
And if they're completely honest, then they don't have to think of, remember the lie they told.
And plus, they're just honest to start with.
They're making plenty of money.
They was making as much money as I did.
I'll tell you how that came about.
I understand that 10,000 people were killed every year in Medellin, Colombia.
And what they were doing, they didn't have any organization.
And if one fellow had 10 kilos and he wanted it shipped to New York, he would tell his friend.
And his friend says, sure, I'll ship it.
I have a pilot and I'll ship it up.
And then he would look in the newspapers.
Oh, 40 kilos was busted in New Jersey.
I'm so sorry. Yours got busted.
Bang, bang. He's dead.
So here comes Jorge Ochoa and the three Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar and Gacho, and they decided that we will make an insurance company, that we would charge you $10,000 to take it to your contact in Miami.
If it gets lost anywhere between the time I put it on the airplane or the time you give it to us and the time we give it to your man, we will replace it in Columbia for you.
So there was no way anybody could lose.
And I understand they got 100 tons piled up under that insurance program.
And I was right there the first day.
So I had all the work I could do.
I would land and I said, when do you want me to come back?
We're waiting on you, senor.
Well, let me ask a difficult question.
Some see Escobar as a brutal murderer, and some see him as maybe a Robin Hood-like figure who helped the poor.
How do you see the man?
Both of them. I think he started out, to be honest, would help the poor, and then they had a war down there.
And they blew up and killed his people.
And the country was divided almost equally three ways.
They had the military.
They were just as much into it as anybody.
And then you had the FARC guerrillas.
They had about a third of the country.
And then you had the conchers.
It was like the white farmers.
And they're the ones that I was dealing with.
And they were at war with one another.
And so if one of them started killing their people, well, I'll kill some of yours too.
So that's how it happened.
And then when I heard about Pablo Escobar blowing up that airliner and killing those women and children, I was sorry I ever shook his hand.
That's brutal murder.
So you would say Escobar's not a good man?
Not at all. He's terrible.
Now, looking back on it, when I met him, he was good.
Do just exactly what he said he would do.
Could he be a bad man and a man you can trust?
Absolutely, you could trust him, yes.
So, from your perspective, in terms of business, he was reliable, he was honest, had integrity, you could work with him, and you felt safe.
Completely. We flew up to his ranch, and he...
We brought out motorcycles to start with, and can you ride a motorcycle?
Of course I can ride a motorcycle.
So I took off across the grass, and there was a little ditch there, and the front wheel dropped in that thing, and I must have slid across that grass 20 feet before I got stopped.
He almost fell off of his bike waiting because they knew what it was going to do.
And then we got on horses, and we went out there and pretended to round up some cows, and he put a MAC-10 machine gun pistol over my shoulder.
You know how to use this? Well, I never had, but it was all right.
I think it was like, okay, you got 10 bodyguards, what do you need me for?
So that's the kind of time.
We laughed and talked and drove some cows over the stumps.
You said Jorge Ochoa was perhaps the brains of the Medellin cartel.
What was he like? And why do you say he was the brains?
Well, he was a gentleman. And I suppose he shipped, you know, tell me how many more times of cocaine than Pablo did.
Him and his brothers, you could tell by the, they had on each load, they was in duffel bags, and his big football-shaped fluffy stuff made with ether.
And They would have three horns on it or a rattlesnake or four X's on each bag.
You kind of got to knowing which was which, and they shipped a lot.
And he was just a gentleman.
I took the family. We went one weekend to his ranch or his palatial place out near Barranquilla.
And oh, he just treated the family.
His family, his younger brother made a bullfight, and we had skiing and little airplanes on floats on the water.
It was really nice, and he was really nice.
How do you make sense of the tension that a man could be a gentleman, could have integrity, but also be a murderer?
Well, murder is a stronger word than killing.
Can you explain the line, the gray area we're talking about?
I mean, I've just been talking with Jocko Willink and we talked a lot about killing in the context of military conflict, in the context of war.
So there, there's a line between murder and killing that you can draw.
What's the line that you're referring to?
It's something similar. If people are shooting at you and you shoot back and kill him, that's not murder whatsoever.
He's trying to get away or out of the situation.
But if some woman don't pay you and you send a hitman over to kill her and her children, that's murder.
That's murder. Was Jorge involved in those kinds of things?
I don't think so at all.
I mean, he was just such a gentleman.
He had a restaurant before, and he was just smart.
I understand that the first 10 kilos he sold, he was sitting on a motorcycle in the sidelines in a parking lot, and when the DEA come in, he's spared away.
So he didn't come back to America.
He was just smart. Some people just are savvy.
And he was such a gentleman.
And the whole family, the mother and the father, the two brothers, their sister, I was there when she was kidnapped.
And finally, he kidnapped our, I guess, 100 leaders of the FARC. And I said, all right, if she don't come back, none of these are going to come back.
So they made a deal.
Is there something you can say about the power structure, the hierarchy of the Medellin cartel that you interacted with?
Was it a dictatorship where Pablo ran everything?
Was there a bunch of power centers?
Was it like a company where you have CEO, CTO kind of thing?
And then there's like managers and all those kinds of things.
How did it run from a leadership perspective?
I understand that about five of them got together.
And made this, I will call it an insurance company, and now known as the Medellin Cartel.
And I didn't see any difference.
Each one of them had their own business, and their people from the jungle or wherever made the cocaine, gave it to them, and they shipped it.
And so it didn't seem to be any power play between them at all.
But my main contact was Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar was right there.
And I saw plenty of stuff for him too.
It's strange that they didn't betray each other regularly.
You know, greed makes men betray each other.
How do you explain that?
How much betrayal did you see?
I didn't see any. Absolutely none.
If they shipped his 100 kilos, he got paid for it.
If the other one shipped his, I'm sure they got paid for it.
How do you explain that? Well, there was no need to.
The money was just unbelievable.
You think about 500 kilos in the plane at $50,000 a kilo at the time.
And they paid $5,000 to ship it.
And they made $5,000 without even touching it.
They just had somebody to load it on through the airplane.
I gave it to their man in Miami.
They gave it to whoever it belonged to by the marks on the duffel bags.
So they was making just untold millions.
No reason. But greed can blind men.
It's still strange to me that there was not more betrayal.
It speaks to something else, perhaps, that's bigger than money.
Maybe not.
But it seems like just like in the casino, like you mentioned, we get accustomed to whatever level of money we have, we get accustomed very quickly.
Yes. And then there's a tension that's natural between human beings.
And when that tension combined with money, combined with power, combined with, like you mentioned, beautiful women, And a bit of violence, it seems that betrayal should become a place.
But it's not. It wasn't.
Not at all. Carlos later, I don't know if he betrayed anybody, but he started that.
He was running cocaine through the Bahamas, and he had the island.
I didn't go. I was offered to fly with a DC-3 with that, but I didn't like it.
So I had my route through the oil wells in Louisiana.
And so I wasn't going to change.
But he talked a lot, and I don't know if he betrayed, but they didn't like him.
Yeah. So as you expand, there could be tensions that lead to conflict.
Columbia was, like you said, an ultra-violent place.
How did you survive?
Who protected you?
I was a hero. They liked me.
I mean, I was just treated royally.
All I did, I would come over El Banco.
There's a radio station at the Forks of the Magdalena River.
I believe it was 720, if I remember right, on the AM. And I'd fly in at 10,000 feet, and I'd see below me, there'd be a Cessna.
And I'd wiggle my wings, and he'd wiggle his, and I'd fall in behind him, and we might go 100, 200 miles.
I'd land on some jungle strip or some...
Banana plantation. And they'd fuel me up.
I could eat steak in the night.
It was just like treated royally.
I mean, take off for the next morning whenever I wanted to.
It was just like that was protected.
And I was an honored guest.
It wasn't anything like in that movie putting a gun to your head and taking your sunglasses and betting.
So one time I complained to Jorge Ochoa that the runway was pretty short that they were using.
And I went back down there and it looked like Los Angeles International.
They had bulldozers in there, had that thing 5,000 feet long.
Just the next week it was all done.
The jungle was gone and clay put up there.
And all the while, you were not afraid.
You were treated like royalty.
Yes. There I was.
I was afraid when I landed in the United States.
Well, maybe let's go back to the beginning.
What was the first time you flew an airplane with drugs on it?
Tell me the story of the first time you smuggled drugs.
All right. I flew down to Jalapa, Veracruz with a Cessna 182.
We landed at the town.
It was a lovely town. It was an old town.
It looked like Bible times.
Women were washing clothes in the streets with stone basins and the stream running through.
I was just dumbstruck.
It was just so pretty. I went in a Catholic church, and it had the Stations of the Cross all carved, magnificent.
I'd never seen that.
I come home and told Mary about that.
That just almost brought tears to my eyes.
It was so beautiful. And three o'clock the next morning, I went out to the airport and taxied down to the taxiway and there was a guard came out.
And I wanted to know what I was doing, and I pulled out.
I was on the fire department out in Redondo Beach, California.
So I pulled out my wallet, and in it was the fire department badge.
And, oh, he shook my hand and was so good.
So I taxed it on down there, and we loaded up about 400 pounds in the plane.
And I came on back, and I was running the headwinds more than I thought.
And I landed on a little strip.
You were talking about on the way back?
On the way back, on the way north after we loaded up early in the morning.
And it's the only time I ever got vertigo.
The mountains were coming down at a 30 or 40 degree angle, and the Milky Way was overhead, and somehow I wanted that airplane to be level with the stars.
And it got me, and it's just a phenomenal pilot has vertigo.
It's the only time I ever had it was on that load.
So anyway, the wind was on the nose of that Cessna, and I wasn't going to make it to the dry lake where I had fuel.
So I landed on a little bitty strip, and there was a little house that was caved in, and there was a little boy named Lazarus, about six or seven years old, and he was herding some goats.
So we put the marijuana in that house, and the man stayed with it while I flew into some town and got fuel and came back, and we sat down with the lunch that I brought back, and little Lazarus sat there and ate with us, and we had a good time.
We loaded them back and came home.
Oh, wow. I wonder where he is now.
What was it like to fly?
Maybe describe the details of, do you have to fly low?
Is there details that are unique to this experience of flying an airplane with drugs on it, on board?
All right, well... One of the mistakes that just hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pilots make, they don't stop at the border going down and get their permit.
Once you get a permit to be in Mexico, you've got it for six months.
You can go anywhere, any fishing village, any little town, any little place, show them this and you're welcome.
If you don't have that, you go straight to jail.
So you go down there and you think, okay, they're going to have fuel for me to come back and so forth.
Oh, sorry, senor, that had a rusty leak in it.
We don't have any. Well, you better be able to go to town and get it.
So that's what I did.
And when I was coming back for several years, I would fly up at Mexicali and cross the border right at Calexico.
I would act like I was landing on the Calexico side just after dark.
And then I'd zip across the border and I'd go to the Salton Sea and go below sea level 100 and something feet, I believe 170 feet, and come on up and go out there above Palm Springs and land out 29 palms in the desert and put my stuff under Joshua Tree and fly into town and get my pickup and go on back out and get it.
And that was fun. And then it got really dangerous.
They had Operation Starlight, I believe was the name of it, and they caught a lot of pilots coming across the border.
So I changed it.
And by that time, I was flying bigger planes.
I was flying Beach 18s.
And I would refuel in Mulahay halfway down on the Baja Peninsula.
And then over in the middle, 20 miles from the nearest road, was a goat ranch where they milked goats and made cheese.
And I would go there and unload the load coming up out of anywhere in southern Mexico.
And I would land there and a guy named Juan would put the marijuana under the trees and I'd fly into Moolahe and they'd wash my plane and gas it up.
I'd eat lunch and rent a room for a few hours and take a nap and a shower and then go back in the afternoon and fill up.
And then I would go northwest out of there and fly 200 miles off the coast of the island of Guadalupe.
And from there, I would fly on a more northwestern heading about 300 miles out over the Pacific.
And then I would come in behind the Santa Barbara Islands down low, and then I'd come up and go out in the desert and land.
And I did that for the rest of the marijuana trips.
What was the hardest part about flying those routes?
The hardest part was getting good marijuana.
So the hardest part isn't the flying.
No, it's the flying. It's just like driving your car down.
But then I had people that would bring me on strips that were just unworthy of an airplane.
I'd land on a highway.
And in the rainy season, I would come back to land again, and the guy wouldn't think about it, and he'd have little hills on both sides.
The wings were out there.
Well, the grass and the weeds would grow up, and it sounded like—I mean, it sounded like tearing the airplane apart when those wings hit, mowing the grass down both shoulders of the airplane.
Oh, wow. The weeds would grow up high in the tropics.
So some of that stuff was bad.
And, oh, getting bad gasoline and telling me that land here in the light and knock the wheels off when you land— Oh, you should have landed a little further up here, señor.
They ditched down. That sort of thing.
What was it like landing on a highway?
And when did you have to land on a highway?
I landed on a highway most of my life, most of the times.
In Mexico, first time I went down, there was a place called Pichilingi.
And it had a 900-foot strip.
And I would fly down and I'd carry gasoline with me.
And Mario and I would go to the grocery store and buy all kinds of little goodies and candies and toys to bring to the children.
And that sand strip in the bend of a river was just too short to take off with a load.
So there was a young man there named Pedro, not weighed much over 100, maybe 120 pounds.
And he'd get in a plane with me.
And he'd direct me 20, 30, 40 miles away to a highway.
And the people, Joaquin and the people would pull out in a two-ton truck with a machine gun on it and a bunch of guys with arms would just, and they'd block the road, and then another one would block it up about a mile away, and I'd land right over that truck.
They'd load me up. It looked like a bucket brigade with the marijuana coming.
I'd shake hands with all of them.
And I'd take off right over the other trucks.
And sometimes maybe 20, 30, 40 cars lined up.
One time I remember a patrol car, a highway patrol car.
He didn't have his lights on.
Took off right over him.
And then when I started flying to Louisiana, the bridge over the Mississippi River, there were several contractors that went broke.
And that thing was out for years.
And about five miles from the river was flashing red lights and a detour.
And then the swamp on both sides of it and the middle of it was growing up with 20 feet trees.
And that was like an international runway from anywhere in the world.
So I landed on that and over and over those red lights, just like the end of a runway.
And then the next morning, we'd go out there and scrub the marks off the highway where I'd landed before daylight.
Wow. Let's go to somebody you've known well.
Somebody who is also a drug smuggler is Barry Seal.
Who is Barry Seal?
How did you meet him? Barry Seal is a friend of mine.
Murray and I and the children went down in Honduras, and we went up Lake Azul, I believe it was, and we were looking at a ranch to buy.
I was looking for something in Central America where I'd have a halfway place.
Oh, it was lovely. We stayed up there for some days, and our clothes got muddy, and we went in the river and all kinds of things.
So we got to San Pedro Sula, and we was going back to New Orleans.
So we went to the cleaners to get our clothes, and most all of them was in there.
And they go, oh, senor, they'll be ready tomorrow morning.
We're not ready now. Well, the plane leaves at 9 o'clock or whatever.
So I told Mari for her and the children to go into the airport because it'd be easier for one on a standby flight.
So I went to the laundromat for the clothes and they were ready and there was a pile of them and I put them on my back and got in a taxi and the old taxi would drive him with it and I'd give him a hundred dollars to go faster and he just blew his horn more rapid.
We got to the airport, and I jumped out and ran around on the tarmac, and here's a brand new 727 taxiing out.
Oh, no. So I'm waving to the pilot, and he's a young fellow.
He waves back. Then I see Murray's face in the cockpit, and the nose goes down where he puts on brakes, and he laughs, and he puts some stairwell out.
And I run for the stairwell, and he pulls it back up and goes like a hitchhiker going to pick you up and go again.
Then he put it out, and I got on, and the whole crowd clapped, and I'm coming on with that load of clothes.
So I go way down in the middle, and the plane's full.
And Miriam, my daughter, was about nine years old then.
And she was sitting in the middle, and by the window was Barry Seal.
Of course, I didn't know it. And I sat in the middle, and we took off, and the wheels come up with clunk.
And then I got up about 5,000 feet, and we had a little clunk.
And she said, what was that, Daddy?
I said, he just turned on his autopilot.
And that fellow reached over and I done looked at him.
I said, he looks like CIA or FBI, something.
He ain't supposed to be here.
Clear blue eyes, gentleman looking man.
And he said, you fly these things?
I said, I got a few hours, mister.
He said, I fly them too or something other.
And he said, my name is Barry Seal.
And he reached over Miriam and shook hands.
And we got to talking.
And I thought, there's no choice of seats on this.
It's just open seating.
But I don't believe him one bit.
And he started talking about he just got out of jail that morning, just got out of prison.
And I said, uh-huh.
And he told me that he had been a pilot with TWA and this and other.
And he told me what he was for.
So we had a nice conversation for a couple hours to New Orleans.
I didn't believe him.
So he got off in front of us, and what a crowd of people to meet him.
An old mother and a wife and little children hanging on to him crying and hugging and kissing him.
I said, he was telling the truth.
Yeah. So I reached over and gave him a little piece of paper.
I had Mario to write it out with our address.
I said, Barry, I might have some work for you.
What was he in jail for?
He got caught with 100 kilos of cocaine in a small plane.
And so he served a year.
And that was from Colombia?
I don't know where he come from.
He got caught in Honduras, probably refueling.
But he'd been in prison down there before for bringing explosives to the Cuban Contras.
And he lost his job with the airlines.
And then later on, I found out he was ex-CIA and George Bush Sr.'s protege and had a thousand parachute jumps and was there.
He was a hotshot pilot.
There's a million questions I want to ask here, but maybe can we linger on it a little bit longer?
What was your relationship with him like?
You were a drug smuggler.
He's a drug smuggler.
You're friends. How often do you guys talk?
How often do you work together?
What was the relationship like?
Well, I'll back up and just finish where I started off there.
I gave him a thing and said, Barry, I may have some work for you.
I know I got some work for you.
And I said, come out to Santa Barbara.
And so, I don't know, a week or two later, he flew out and went to our house and stayed with us a couple of days.
And I had an almost brand new Aero Commander 690B. That thing was turboprop, and it was hot.
It was the hottest thing I'd ever had.
So I said, let's go, Barry.
Let's see what you can do. So I'm sorry I said that.
We got about 10,000 feet.
And he was like one of them Blue Angel pilots.
He wrung that thing out.
And I said, that's enough. And then he did a falling leaf.
That's where you cut the engines and the plane falls from side to side.
I saw Bob Hoover do that in the air show once.
And that's the only person I ever saw do it.
And I was, my hand was white knuckle hanging onto the seat.
You shut off the engine? Yeah, he shut off the engines and landed me flying side by side like this.
How do you explain that?
Was he just a wild man or was he sufficiently skilled to work?
He was sufficiently skilled, absolutely.
He knew what he was doing.
I can get a plane from one spot to another, and I guess I'm known as a good pilot, but that guy was an aerobatic.
So anyway, he stayed with us a couple of days, and then I told him, I said, this plane needs tanking.
I said, I got some work down in Columbia, needs to come back to Louisiana, and I need 2,500-mile range.
He said, I got somebody in Mena, Arkansas to do that and keep their mouth shut.
So I gave him $10,000, and he flew away.
And in a few days, he called me and says, come to my house in Baton Rouge.
So I went out to his house in Baton Rouge, and I stayed with him for a few days, and that plane was tanked.
I mean, beautiful from Sim to Stern.
I could went from Bolivia to Canada with him.
So, he was, then I hired him to fly, and he was funny.
I paid him a million dollars a trip.
I paid him $2,000 a kilo, so about a million dollar trip.
And I didn't get paid until the people received it.
They had to ship it to Chicago and New York, and then the money come back.
So, it was a couple, two or three weeks pipeline.
Well, I always had to pay him before he'd go again.
I mean, and he belly ached.
I mean, he had moan and grown.
So one time I gave him a million dollars and I put it in a box real nice.
So how big is a box that contains a million dollars?
So we're talking about $100 bills?
$100 bills. It's not very big.
You can put it in a large briefcase.
It weighs exactly 10 kilos.
Each bill weighs a gram, so you can weigh your money and almost get it exactly right.
20-something pounds is a million dollars.
22 pounds. 22 pounds.
$100 bills. But in $1 bills, it's one ton, 2,200 pounds.
We didn't even accept him.
Were you the one that introduced Barry Seal to Pablo Escobar?
No. I didn't introduce him at all.
And our deal was that you don't meet my people.
I mean, we just kind of crossed. You worked it for me to fly the airplanes.
So he wanted these Panther conversions.
It cost $400,000 each.
With a storm scope and radar.
So I bought anything you want.
What's that mean, sorry to interrupt, Panther conversions?
Panther conversion was these people called Panther.
They took everything out from the firewall and instruments and all and converted them and put Q-tip propellers on them, full-bladed, and very quiet.
And the CIA developed those in Southeast Asia for running behind the lines.
And that's where Barry had flown those things, so he knew about them.
So that's what he wanted and that's what we got him.
How does that connect to Pablo?
And so he worked for you, and you got those upgrades.
I think he flew about 30 loads for me, and then I got arrested for everything in the world.
I got 35 years sentence.
But let me back up a little bit.
Barry was our friend.
Mari and I are both friends.
We should pause real quick and say, Mari is your wife, and hopefully we'll convince her to join us in a little bit.
She's the love of your life, and she weaves in and out of many of these stories that you tell.
Yes. She was there.
She was behind the scenes, but I kept her out of it completely.
And then also you mentioned Miriam as your daughter.
Yes. Rhett, our son, was a baby.
And I remember we went out to the festival.
It was my favorite restaurant in Carl Gables.
Oh, God, it was good.
And Barry knew about it.
Anyhow, we went out to dinner.
So we came back and there was no rooms.
So, very well, spend the night with us.
So he goes to our hotel room with us, and we've got two big beds in the Omni Hotel.
And he lays over there and gets down to his stripy undershorts and his T-shirt, and he puts the baby up on his belly and gives him the bottle and says, Mmm, ain't that good, red, oh my, my.
And he just feeds the baby.
We laugh and talk. That's how close we were, that we could all stay in a hotel room together.
And would you say he's a good man?
A wonderful man.
A gentleman. Southern gentleman.
Just looked after his mother, his family, everybody around him.
Everybody loved Barry. He just had a little smile on his face always.
So you got arrested, and then what happened to Barry?
Well, Barry knew the people that...
Unloaded, of course.
He sent the cars down and all that.
So he met the unloader, a guy named Lito, Luis Carlos Bustamante of Venezuelan.
And so he just kept on flying.
But he, I believe, had three of my airplanes at $400,000 apiece.
And they owed me some money.
Well, he collected a lot of that and gave Mario the money and put it in his safe.
Took her to his house and all.
After I got arrested, sent a lawyer in.
He got me the best lawyer in the country, Albert Krieger.
He was head of the defense team for all of America.
Wonderful man. Can you tell the story of the months that led up to Barry's assassination?
What did you know?
What did you sense? What did you think?
Okay, when I got out of prison, I hadn't been out long.
I was eating breakfast and there was Ronald Reagan's face right in the television.
We have absolute proof that the communist Sandinista government is in the cocaine running business.
And there was that fat lady, the C-126, on the runway with the bellied end.
And I thought, oh God, he had done it.
So I had heard that Barry might have been working with him.
So it wasn't long before...
Working with... With the DEA or whoever.
He was no longer on our side, you know.
So can you clarify how you got that from the Reagan making a statement about we've heard...
Okay, there was his plane.
There was Barry's plane.
And okay, on the way north, we could stop in Nicaragua and land on a military base or on a base that they used as crop dusters and all and refuel.
Yeah. And so that shortened our trip.
We go further into the jungle and come up.
And that was what Pablo Escobar and Ocho and them, and they had to, they was associates with the people in Nicaragua.
So Barry was, if that plane was there, that means Barry was feeding the DEA information.
He was working with them at that time.
But let me back up a little bit.
When I was flying and I told Barry we would refuel and train the airplane, the loads in Belize, where I had a spot up there.
And then that's when they told me we can refuel in Nicaragua.
And then you fly all the way, and Barry couldn't believe it.
He says, all right, but I wanted to land.
I had a place in Louisiana for $10,000 that I could unload, and the sheriff and all of them was paid off.
And he said, no, no, no.
I can't get caught in Meena, Arkansas.
I said, what do you mean you can't get caught in Meena, Arkansas?
You get caught anywhere. He said, I can't.
But it's going to cost you $50,000 every time my wheels touch the ground.
Can you explain why he can't get caught?
He said he was hooked up with him at the very top.
And he even said, I'm going to have dinner with the governor tonight.
At that time, Mr.
Bill Clinton. Undoubtedly.
And he said, like, did Bill Clinton, did you give him any money?
And I said, no, I never gave the man any money.
But it was like the money that I had that went to Grand Cayman Islands.
And I told my lawyer, I said, I never touched that money.
He said, you don't have to fondle it to be guilty.
I mean, there's a lot of conspiracy theories around the relationship between Barry Seal and the Clintons.
Absolutely. What evidence do we have?
What would you say from your best understanding of what was the relationship between Bill Clinton and Barry Seal?
Barry said, and he knew that he couldn't get caught in Maine, Arkansas.
And when that movie was going to come out and be called Mina, somebody stopped it.
I mean, they stopped it dead in the tracks for two or three years, and the producer even quit.
You mean the American Maid with Tom Cruise movie?
It wasn't American. It was going to be called Mina?
It's the name that was written and produced in Mina.
And waiting on Hillary to be elected, they would not let that movie out.
And that movie was changed drastically.
But to push back on that, that doesn't mean there's truth there.
That means they were worried about the power of the conspiracy theory, which stuck.
Exactly. I don't know.
Some conspiracy theories, just because they're popular doesn't mean they're true.
But it also doesn't mean they're not true.
And there's ones that are not very popular that could be true.
But that one really stuck.
I mean, what's your sense?
Well, I paid $1.5 million for burial land at Meena, Arkansas.
So I was pretty well assured that he couldn't get caught.
And I said, well, I can't get caught in Columbia.
We can't get caught in Nicaragua.
I guess we got a license.
We went for it. So when you say, I can't get caught, just to clarify, there's a sense where this is a safe place to land.
Yes, like completely safe.
So you don't think he was referring to some kind of, you know...
Like, my grandfather, who fought in World War II, would talk about bullets can't hit him.
So it's almost like believing...
He was taking that $50,000 and giving it to somebody.
To somebody. And Barry was honest, so he wasn't just taking it from me because he was making a million dollars and he didn't care for the $50,000.
Oh, man. Taking the story forward, the months leading up to his assassination, what do you understand?
Why he was assassinated?
Who were the players involved?
Maybe could you have stopped it?
Well, I'll tell you, after I saw Reagan's face on the television saying we have the absolute proof, the phone rang, and it was Barry.
I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years.
He said, I'm coming out tonight, Roger.
And, oh boy. So, he came out.
He said, I'll meet you in this French restaurant.
I don't even know it in Santa Barbara.
And I walked in. There was about 20 or 30 people in there.
And they was all 30, 40 years old.
Women wouldn't... Plastic leather skirts and me in their blue jeans.
And I looked around and Barry was at the back.
He was leaned up and he'd gained weight.
And I walked up and I said, Barry, are you wired?
He said, no. I said, well, I'm not going to talk to these DEA agents.
He said, every one of them. With jeans and skirts.
I like it. I said, well, Barry, I'm going to set you in.
You just talk to me, buddy, and tell me what's on your mind.
And he sat there and he just went to talking.
And he told me about he was left holding the bag.
What do you mean by that?
Like that nobody's supported him, nobody helped him out?
He was, and I don't know this.
I mean, this is just what happened, putting it all together, that he had some CIA buddies that was pretending we're going to supply all over North with arms.
And with that, you can land cocaine back here by the ton.
So, he's taking his little planes and putting some AK-47s and maybe ammunition or whatever, and takes it down to the Contras against the Communist Party of Nicaragua, where we've been landing.
And Oliver North was involved in this.
So, when all that...
And so, his CIA buddies were certainly involved, and we know they were.
And Barry had been in the CIA earlier when he first got out of school.
So... When, as I say, the shit hit the fan, they all fled and left Barry holding the bag.
The CIA and the DEA. Yeah.
Not the DEA, the CIA. The DEA wasn't in on it.
The CIA was selling that cocaine and bringing it in.
Just to clarify, what's Iran-Contra scandal?
What was the alleged involvement of the CIA in using drug trade to fund things?
What do you know?
What do you think is true?
What should we know? Well, I know, what I know is true, that Barry was taking a small amount of arms back to Central America and giving them to whoever Oliver North group were.
Oliver North was a colonel that got implemented and almost brought the government down.
And so they said, all right, we're getting the guns from Iran.
And we're taking cocaine to pay for them.
And since Congress won't give us money to fight this war, we're gonna circumvent it.
So that was a whole thing.
So it was CIA's effort to circumvent the funding mechanisms of government by selling drugs.
Yes, but it was a handful of renegade CIA agents that would bury his friends.
That was making a load, load of money.
Tons of it come up. If you would like to read the book, The Big White Lie, The CIA and the Cracked Cocaine Epidemic, the CIA put, according to this, the book, and Michael Levine, I didn't remember his name last time I talked, wrote that book, and he was a head CIA agent.
He was a head DEA agent that exposed this.
and the CIA tried to kill him.
And he says they put crack cocaine, they developed their, their chemists developed crack.
And they put it in every city in the United States on one weekend.
So they were bringing it up by the tons, and that's for sure.
And Barry was bringing it.
Can I ask you a small tangent question?
Do you think the public should trust the CIA and the DEA? Do you think they're mostly good people that are carrying out a good mission?
Because this kind of makes it sound like there's renegade agents that are just doing whatever the hell they want and with sometimes no regard for human life.
Well, that's certainly true, but that's not everybody in there.
That's just sometimes you get a few policemen in the department that do these things.
I believe that our government is good.
I think we've got some fools running it.
I don't know how we get them there.
I don't think I know.
Okay, so what was Barry's involvement here?
So Barry leaned back in that chair and he told me that, you know, he got caught with one and a half tons and he belleted in the runway in Nicaragua and...
Had cameras flashing inside and out, and he flew it back to Homestead with an agent there, and he brought the agent over.
Jake Jacobson, really nice fellow.
I think he was a crop duster.
If we'd have got along, we'd have been on the right side.
And so we sat there and drank Chevy's Regal until I got pie-eyed and And Barry told me about it.
He said that he went to see Edwin Meese.
He got out on bail.
And he flew his Learjet up to Washington and went in to see the Attorney General, Edwin Meese.
And they run him out of the office.
The next day he went back and said, I have absolute proof.
That the CIA is bringing tons of cocaine, or they're running tons of cocaine into the United States.
And Edward Meese put him up with his agent Jacobson, I believe it was.
And they went down and got one and a half tons.
And on the way back, they bellied it in.
And Pablo Escobar and some of the other ones on general there in Nicaragua, you can see them.
Toten it from one plane to the other.
It's in the book called Kings of Cocaine.
It's got a mention of me too, and also the other one has a mention of me in it.
It said I'm in more files for the DEA than Noriega.
So who wanted to get rid of Barry?
Who wanted to get rid of Barry more, the cartels or the CIA? The cartels.
But so Barry leaned back and he told me the story.
And the tears came down between his fingers and he put his hands over his eyes.
And he said, I just couldn't do it, Roger.
I just couldn't do three life sentences.
So I've told him everything.
I went to Congress and I've testified before Congress.
And he testified before Congress for all these things that he'd done.
And he said, I told him all about you.
But you're under my umbrella.
You got to testify with me before grand jury in Miami.
And so the guy said, you can come down, the DEA agent said, you can come down tomorrow with Mari, first class, or I'll take you down in chains.
And if you don't testify with Barry, the only place you'll ever see your wife and family again is in a federal prison visiting room.
Was that a difficult conversation?
Oh, my guts was just like ice water.
I can't testify against my friends.
I just can't do it.
How am I going to do it?
I just, I can't work with people, and he was honest with me.
How am I going to testify against them?
I can't spend the rest of my life in a federal prison.
What on earth, what a mess, Barry, you've got me into.
So, uh... Is that a kind of betrayal there?
Yes, but it still, I wish he'd left me out of it.
I understand him getting in such a mess that he told because if the CIA and whoever else was behind him betrayed him, then he's going to tell everything.
So I says, all right, I'll be to Miami.
So Maury and I flew down.
First class. And I went to a lawyer, one of the biggest lawyers in Miami, and I said, man, I am in a mess.
This fellow's told everything, and I've got to say something, but I'm not a snitch, man.
I mean, what can I do?
And he said, well, being a snitch is like being pregnant.
You either are or you're not.
And he says, I don't represent snitches, but if you want to fight this case, I'll do it for $600,000.
Boy, my face turned red.
Well, I'm not a snitch. He said, well, that's what you're talking about.
He said, let me tell you something. If you go in there and say one thing and sign that paper and you don't tell them everything you know, then they will convict you of everything you've ever done and you tell them.
He said, you can't do it.
So... I said, Barry, I'm having trouble with a lawyer.
I'll go to Mar. Let's go.
He said, all right, use my lawyer.
And he gave me his card, the lawyer's card.
So Mar and I went to the festival restaurant that night, and Barry and Debbie came in.
She was dressed pretty, and Barry was.
And so we was already about finished, so we had dessert together.
And I said, Barry, they're going to kill you, friend.
He said, no, they ain't going to kill me.
So-and-so, such-and-such is gone, and this and the other.
I said, Barry, they're going to kill you, man.
You can't deny it.
And I didn't tell him I wasn't going to testify, so I hugged his neck.
And we fled to Brazil.
I took Mario and the children and went to Brazil.
So you decided there you're not going to testify?
I knew. I didn't know what I could do.
I talked to a lawyer. I mean, I just didn't know what I could do, but the best in Miami said what he told me.
So I had to go.
And you went to Brazil. We went to Brazil.
Did you have a conversation with anybody at the cartel?
I mean, that's such an interesting moment that tests the man's character, to not snitch.
And did you have a conversation with anybody?
No. Pablo, about it?
No, not at all. So it's just understood.
I just couldn't do it.
But how many men like you are there?
Not many. I had all my friends testified against me.
I had 11 friends and every one of them put their finger up, Roger did it.
And I was facing life, continuing criminal enterprise.
And still you couldn't do it? I just couldn't do it.
Did you ever get respect from the cartels for that, from the people in the cartel?
Oh, there was all the time I got back and stuff.
They owe me money and I can't get it.
Well, that's about money.
I just mean about human beings.
Oh, I think so. I mean, I've been back down there, and I've been welcomed.
I have my contact, and when I was in Brazil, I was trying to get this money.
He owed me $3.5 million.
So I called up there, and he was going to pay me.
Oh, I got $600,000 today, and I'll get you some more tomorrow.
And then the next week I called.
Hey, hey, guy, great news, great news.
Barry Seale's been killed.
So, oh no, and I went back to the hotel.
We was up in the northern part of Brazil.
And where was it, Marty?
Yeah. And so I went back and I told Mari and Miriam, and they cried and I cried.
I really cried. How is that great news from the cartel perspective?
Well, now there's no case against me and him and them.
Do you know who killed him? Yes, I'll tell you about that story
On the first load I did I landed in a at a banana plantation
And it was raining and it was a muddy strip clay And they put the 300 kilos of cocaine in and the ugliest
man you could imagine named Ronaldo got in there with a Mac 10 and
He would make sure I took it to Louisiana So this is many years before yeah
Yeah, a couple of years before.
So anyway, we took off and the mud got up in the wheel well so thick until the wheels wouldn't come up.
Well, I'm going 200 miles an hour instead of 300 miles an hour with wheels coming down.
Well, I can't go back there.
If I do, I'm going to be in the same situation until the sun dries it out in a few days.
But in Belize, I had a runway that had been used for $10,000, used to refuel.
So I told the guy, listen, we've got to land in Belize to refuel.
No, no, no, he put the MAC-10 and I'll shoot you.
Go ahead, fool, you're going to die too.
He wasn't just ugly, he was also angry.
He was a bad, bad killer.
So he's the one to actually kill Barry.
The one that went up on the first load with me.
And Ronaldo, and he's doing life.
So he's just a killer.
Yeah. He's doing life in Louisiana.
I wonder who, is it known who made that decision?
The younger Ochoa brother, I understand, Favio, was the one who paid for the hit.
I don't know that, but that's what I've heard, and it probably sounds about right.
He's down in Jessup, Georgia, doing a long, long time.
I think he's about to get out. He's been in 30 years or whatever.
The movie American Made.
What do you think that movie got right?
What did it get wrong? Almost everything wrong.
It was disgustingly wrong.
Okay, which parts?
Can you maybe elaborate?
It was about Barry Seal and it just didn't even, it was nothing.
Whoever wrote it had no idea who Barry Seal was.
They sat in a rocking chair and just tried to think of what was some baby bashing Drug dealer doing.
Yeah. And it's just like, God, you just don't have any idea of the spirit of the man.
So they wanted to try to tell a fun story without actually studying the story.
They didn't know him. They just had no idea.
And Barry was such a nice person, such a really nice gentleman person.
They talked to you or no?
No. The people that made the movie.
And I see all these people telling about Barry and never met him.
They tell him all about him.
I think that's just ridiculous.
Yeah. And for one thing, for his character coming out of warehouses and all that, that was just like ugly.
And then down in Columbia, putting a gun to his head, going to take his sunglasses, and then he put $25 million worth of cocaine on his plane.
And then they're going to bet $100 that he don't have enough room to take off.
That's just insane.
I mean, just the whole thing.
And then he's talking to the DEA agents when he's coming up.
You don't know what frequency they own.
How he's got five planes and they all split when the DEA comes out.
These are just somebody's fantasy.
But those are details of the man, details of the story.
Is there some big profound things they missed about just this whole period?
About something that's really important to you that was missed?
Yes, they just try to sensationalize on little things that people remember, and it's just not true.
It was just like a business deal, and good people, and good airplanes, and good flying.
It was like a good watch that was made.
It just clicked and it just went on.
And they missed all that.
They tried to make it sound like it's something very ugly.
Do you think it was a story that could have been told way better and still be a hell of a good story?
Well, there's a series called Chernobyl done by HBO. And because I have sort of family connected to that period, you know, they did an incredible job of being historically accurate and only not being historically accurate when it helped the story, only in those rare cases.
When they on purpose left the story to make it easier for people to understand, but it was still somehow accurate.
And even though all the actors were British actors speaking English with a British accent, it was still somehow accurate.
They captured the spirit.
So it was historically accurate and the spirit was captured.
That was one of the most incredible series I've ever seen.
It convinced me that The movie was made by non-Russians.
It convinced me that if you really care about a story, you don't have to have been brought up in it.
You don't even need to speak the language.
If you're truly a scholar of it, if you talk to a lot of people, if you learn, if you just pour your heart and soul into it, you can create something really special.
And so your sense is you could do that with the story with this period of time.
Oh, yes. It was a story that needs to be told.
It needs to be told in the correct way, not like we're trying to bash a certain angle.
Yeah. Well, if Netflix or HBO are watching this, you need to tell the story of Roger Rees, in my opinion.
There you go. Is this young picture of you?
Yeah. There you go. That's from National Geographic.
Jorge Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, it's you, Roger and Barry.
Yeah. Smuggler, a memoir.
Yeah, I really do hope that they make a movie of this one.
There's a movie called Blow that tells the story of George Young, Boston George.
Did you know George Young?
That's one way to ask it.
The other is, what do you think of the movie Blow?
Yeah. I didn't know George Young, but it was a wonderful movie.
Absolutely. It captured it.
It did. Yes, it did.
That's the way it should be. So he was a little bit before your time?
Exactly the same time.
Exactly the same time. He was using stewardesses to fly the marijuana out of Manhattan Beach, and I was on the fire department in Redondo Beach, 10 miles away, flying it up, sending it back.
Somebody was sending it back. He might have been sending it back.
But he didn't have near the excitement that I did.
I was shot down twice.
I escaped from five different prisons.
I was tortured almost to death in a Mexican prison.
So he didn't have all that fun that I had.
Fun in quotes. Yeah.
So yours is a heck of a fun adventure.
Just to linger on a little bit.
So Johnny Depp plays George and Ray Liotta plays his father.
And there's this son-father kind of scene at the end.
I don't know. It's heartbreaking.
Like that scene paints a picture of a life that could have been had if none of this wild drug smuggling happened.
I don't usually, I mean, I don't almost, I really never get like teary-eyed in a movie, but that got me.
It's almost like confronting at the end of your life what your life could have been with your father.
The way he calls him Georgie.
Like you fucked up, Georgie.
Yes. I did too.
I really, really did.
Mario waited for me all those years and the children raised them without me.
Visiting me in prisons all over the world.
It's unbelievable. Nothing's worth that kind of money.
Yeah.
Can you tell the story of when you were tortured nearly to death in a Mexican prison?
I sure can, and I'm smiling, but it was nothing to smile about, I can tell you.
I was in a pool, and a gentleman came over and shook hands with me and put handcuffs on me.
And I thought, what in the world?
That was one of the nice hotels.
And they put me in a jail cell, and I sat there, and all the drunks and thieves and stuff kept coming in, and they had a bucket, and they were overrun.
And I remember there was 18 people in a room, about 12-foot square.
Oh, it was hot, and I thought, somebody's got to come get me.
This ain't real.
I hadn't done anything.
It was a pilot coming to see me up in Hermosillo, and he stopped, and he made a mistake and went to the International Runway instead of where he was supposed to go.
And he had my phony name in his pocket, so they got me.
So they said I was a drug smogler.
So after about three days, they put me back into the back, and it was a torture place.
And they put me in a little cell.
I guess it wasn't six feet.
It must have been about five feet square and about 12 feet high.
And it was June, the end of June, and it was hot.
I mean hot.
And they left me in there for, I guess, a few days.
You didn't know they... Every once in a while, they'd come and drag me out.
First off, they'd put my head underwater, and it had seltzer in it of some kind.
I took one whiff of that, and three or four of them couldn't hold me down.
Then I learned that just before you have to breathe, tear loose like that, and they'll let you up.
And that was the first treatment.
And then they started beating me.
And they beat me with blackjack and rubber hose until I was black and blue and yellow from the bottom of my feet to my head.
What did they want from you?
They wanted me to sign a confession that I was a drug smuggler.
And they put the papers under your nose.
This is all over if you'll sign.
Well, I knew if you signed, you got six years.
I wasn't going to sign. I wasn't going to sign.
But they didn't want you to snitch on anybody.
No, they just wanted me to sign that paper.
And you still didn't. About to.
A beating ain't that bad.
So anyhow, it's coming to the good part.
So then they come and they take me out.
I'm buck naked. And they bend me over and they have things to pull you, like chains, click, click, click, click, click.
And they bent me over.
And they put butter on my bum.
And they commenced to put hot chili pepper up there.
And that stuff was bad.
I mean, it was red hot.
And that was awful.
And still? That was just awful.
Yeah, but still you didn't...
I didn't think about it. I guess if I'd have known it was going to kill me, I wouldn't have done it.
But I wasn't about...
You get hurt bad enough, you'll pass out.
So I didn't pass out, so I was all right.
So then the last thing they did was they brought a dead man in there, and he was frozen.
He was wrapped in newspaper, little strips about a half inch wide, just like a mummy, and he was frozen.
And they hung him on the wall with a meat hook.
You next, son of a bitch, you next!
And so he's sitting there like this, and as he starts to thaw out, which is pretty quick, it looks like he's crying, and it looks like he's peeing, and the papers start unraveling on him, and the formaldehyde puddles on the floor.
Whew, what a smell, that rotten...
The insides and the formaldehyde.
And there was a little space.
It wasn't even a half inch high under the door.
And I lay on that filthy floor on my cheek and put my lips right up under that door and was sucking that fresh air.
And I went to sleep after some time.
And I know where Walt Disney gets his ideas.
I saw white, pink pigs with wings on them, all kind of stuff lying around.
So when I woke up, I didn't know which was real and which was the nightmare.
It took me a minute to figure out...
Where I was and what was going on.
How did you stay mentally strong through that time?
I don't know that I did.
Yeah, I was mentally strong, so I was, just like I am now.
Stubborn. I mean, you could be that man that could have killed you.
Yes, I could have. So what gave you hope?
Did you have hope? Yeah.
Or you were just a stubborn son of a bitch?
I think some of both of it.
And I think they aren't going to keep you here forever.
You know, you're going to get out into the prison or they're going to let you go or something.
If you sign that paper, you ain't going nowhere.
And I want to go home.
I got shot down a few weeks before that.
I got shot from the sky.
80 bullet goes through the plane, killed a fellow on the ground, shot the leg nearly off the man.
Where was this? In that little place of Pichilingi.
And they were shooting you from the ground.
Yeah, yeah. All right, a little 900-foot strip there at Pichilina, a poor village with starving donkeys.
That's where I'd give them $17,000 for a load, and I'd go over on the highway and load.
Well, on day 13, I did a load every day for 13 days.
They had a bunch of marijuana pretty good piled up, and I was going load a day.
And on day 13, I had that little warning sign going off in my stomach, uh-oh, uh-oh, don't do it.
I asked this walking. Oh, we had the federales paid off nowhere we were.
So I spent the night in a hammock and walked down to the airplane just as it did in daylight.
And 10 or 12 men walked with me and Pedro got in.
I brushed my teeth into a little stream.
It was about a foot deep, a little river coming through there.
I got in the airplane and I fired her up.
Bam, blah, blah. And bam!
I thought a tire blew out.
I looked over to see if it was...
It still ain't dawned on me, and Pedro was yelling, police see ya!
Police see ya, Roger! Police see ya!
Well, it dawned on me, and I shoved the throttle to the firewall.
And I only had— So that was a bullet?
Yeah, somebody—off the sides, they'd shot.
They'd shot. Just a warning, like, get out, stop.
We're going to rob you.
Whatever it is. That's what they do.
They had to take it in the plane and me and put me in prison, the whole thing.
But even though I had papers.
So I just shoved it in a fireball, and there wasn't enough room to take off on that strip.
And half of it was behind me, or some of it was behind me.
And so just at the end, I'm just like, I think that thing stalls at about 50 miles an hour, just turning 50, and I just pulled it right up.
And put the flaps on.
And as I pulled off the ground, they opened up on both sides of me with machine guns.
And they riddled that airplane.
I mean, the windshield came out.
I got hit three times.
You, like your body?
Yeah. Where did you get hit?
I didn't know I was hit. I mean, it was just the gasoline just pouring in.
The world turned yellow. I must have went into shock.
So it just stopped in slow motion.
And one bullet hit the strut right by my head, and parts of that bullet just went all over me.
I just looked like I'd been peppered with lead.
And the gasoline was just pouring in.
I mean, just pouring in where they'd shot the wing up above, and the windshield's gone.
I mean, it was just like a hailstorm.
Mm-hmm. Did airplanes stall or no?
I was in a stall anyway, and I didn't realize it, and I guess you wouldn't unless you trained for it.
But when you're in a stall, the elevator is kind of flappy.
And I didn't realize at the time, I thought they had shot the elevator cable in, too.
So I thought, oh, God. So I just reached over and switched it off, switched it, pulled the mixture, pulled everything.
And in the river, there was rocks about as big as this table, and they were like the turtle back, all the way up until there was a waterfall.
It was quite a pretty place.
And I crashed straight on to it.
I thought, if I hit those rocks.
And when I did, the first time I hit, the wings came off.
And then it bounced. And the next time, the nose came up and came under the plane.
And I'm sitting there. I must have been knocked unconscious.
Because Pedro's shaking me.
Come on, Roger. Come on, Roger.
So I stepped out into the water.
And here comes these four Federales still shooting at us.
And a bullet or two hit the airplane.
And I kept a 9mm Browning High Power taped to the top of the radio.
In case I ever needed it.
One of those times.
Didn't want it in the airplane. So it was just handy, just laying there.
So I took and popped a few caps out of them and they ran into the rocks.
So we took off running, and then I looked, and Pedro's foot nearly shot off.
It shot him on one side of the ankle, and it just blown out the other side.
And it wasn't even hardly bleeding, the shock of it.
So I took my T-shirt off and ripped it and tied it best I could.
But you had still bullets in you, so you could still run.
I shot the top of my toenail off.
I shot it across my head and my kneecap.
So I was just nicked.
It was very painful later on, but right that time, it was just hot.
And there's a bullet still in my foot from it, a piece of a bullet, a good-sized slug.
So we went on up the mountain through the cactus.
Just running. Just going, I want to go down.
No, no. Federalists are going the easy way.
Let's go. This young fellow.
And we came to an old donkey.
She must have been 30 years old, long and way back, long hair on her.
Charlotte, Charlotte. And he petted the donkey, and we jumped on.
Like an actual donkey?
A donkey. There were donkeys all over the place.
He knew that one from the village.
And so we rode seven miles, two of us on a donkey with no bridle, no saddle, nothing.
And... We came to a little man plowing a little horse and a little ox.
Both of them spotted.
The yoke was across their back this way, and he was plowing with a little plow amongst stumps.
It was like one of these people clearing a little piece of land.
He had a little house there.
We went into his house, and his wife and his daughter, they put cloth over my wounds on Pedro's.
It was terrible.
They poured diesel oil on it to keep the flies off.
So I'm covered in diesel.
So the man left, and he was gone all day.
And then about dark, he showed up, about 15 or 20 horses, and mules showed up in the yard, walking fast.
And the doctor got out.
He said, I'm Dr. Benjamin Soso with Red Cross.
And he worked on my foot, and he worked on Pedro.
He gave us a shot of morphine and tetanus shots.
And he said, you've got to get to hospital.
He said, Pedro will die if he don't get to hospital.
He said, they're looking for an American pilot.
It's been shot down. They think he's dead.
There was a lot of blood in that airplane.
And so they rode.
I don't know how far we rode, but we rode miles.
And we'd come to a road, and there was a big truck.
And it was loaded with corn in the ear.
And they dug holes in that corn and put us in it.
And covered us up.
And the road was rough, and every time we'd hit a dirt road, that corn would cover me up, and they'd scratch my face out again.
And when I came to the highway, we went into a house, and they got me some clothes.
Mine was messed up.
And a white basin, and they must have brought 20 jugs of water different times.
I kept washing and washing my foot till all the blood and the crud got off of me and put on those clothes.
And somebody went to, they said, you can't go north of Rhodes Block.
They're looking for the pilot.
So you got to go south.
So they found a taxi in Mazatlan.
And it was a rather new taxi.
And the fellow would take me to Guadalajara, which was, I don't know, seven, eight hours south.
So we got in that taxi and they propped me up with sheets and blankets and pillows in the back seat and gave me these great big white pain pills.
And I was quite content.
Then I was shot down in Columbia also.
Can you tell that story?
I sure can. All right, I went down for a load of marijuana.
And we got to the place, and we got there too early.
And the guerrillas screamed, you got to get out of here, you got to get out of here.
And so we went back to the place where we staged from and refueled.
I had a beautiful DC-3, carried three tons.
And so while I was waiting, I... I ate something for lunch and I went around behind the house.
We refueled the plane up. I had to wait till late in the afternoon.
They wanted me to come just at dark so the military planes couldn't see me on their strip.
So I'm leaning in the hammock asleep and I hear this terrible roar.
And I look right up through the trees and the ass end of two military jets going straight up.
They do a dive over, and they came back down the strip in front of that airplane, and they just tear it up with.50 caliber machine guns.
They just showing out.
So I run for the airplane.
I just give that guy $80,000, and he ran for the truck, and all the rest of them ran for the truck.
I should have ran with my money, but I didn't.
I ran for the airplane. And the co-pilot got in.
The name was Al. He got in with me, and two fellows got in the back.
We had drums of fuel in there to refuel when we got down to the Gorillas.
So we took off, and I couldn't get the gear up because I'd taken off in such a hurry these pins in the struts of a DC-3 and with big flags on them, and you have to take them up or the plane won't come up.
So these jets swarmed on me, and they tried to get me to go.
They kept telling me which way to go, and the pilot would be just as close as just right over there.
I could see them. I just held up the old hippie piece.
I didn't think they would shoot.
I really didn't.
Nobody had shot before.
So I kept flying out, and I kept getting slower and slower, and they kept slowing down, down, down, and the black smoke rolling.
And then they started shooting up under me, boom, boom, boom, boom, with them 20-millimeter cannons.
And then the tracer was just going up.
They looked like they're curving up in front of me.
And I, whoa, and I pushed the nose over so they couldn't get under me.
And later on, I heard they thought I tried to ram them.
So one of them went for fuel, and I kept on going, and the one just tore the left wing tip up with the.50 caliber, and then he come back again and shot the tail up.
He's warning me. And I tell the fellow in there, I says, you know, if you bring me enough water, I don't believe I can fly this thing.
My mouth got quite dry.
So I went on, and I landed on a big pasture.
And it was huge pasture.
And it was rougher than it looked.
And the wings just flapped.
And I come to a stop and jumped out and pulled those tabs out and threw them on the ground so I could get my gear up.
And I understand that during the 1980 World Series baseball game that it says, American DC-3 has just been shot down by American jets, by Colombian jets.
You know, it's the first plane shot down on Reagan's new war on drugs.
But he's up. He's up and away, ladies and gentlemen.
We'll keep you posted. So I took off again, and I went into a thunderstorm, and they came close to the mountains.
So I spiraled up, and every time I'd come out, that jet was there, boom, boom, boom.
And I dove back into that storm, boom, boom, boom in there.
And at 20,000 feet, I started icing up.
So I went out one last time, and he was right there waiting.
He had me on radar. So I went back in, and I kicked it over and put it into a spin and went straight down to 2,000 feet and Come out under it, and I was flying along the Guaviera River.
And it was 20 feet above the water.
It looked like a pasture.
It was just grass. And I made several runs to tear the grass down, and it felt hard.
That old DC-3 weighs 30,000 pounds.
And I put it down on the fifth run.
I said, all right, Al, we're going to land now.
So you flew like close several times?
No, I put the wheels down. Oh, you put the wheels down without landing.
It went about half miles. So I'm making me run away, you know?
Okay, so you're being tracked by a jet.
He's going. Before that, I'm just retelling this story, how insane it is.
He's trying to shoot you down, and there's a thunderstorm that you're escaping into, and then you do a spin down to, what, 2,000 feet, whatever you said.
Somehow escaping all of this, and then you try to land on a pasture on a giant heavy plane that carries three tons by touching down five or six times to make a landing strip for yourself.
Yeah, the grass is three or four feet high.
So it looked really good after a few times.
So then just before it stopped, I said, I'll take your feet off the brakes.
He said, I don't have my feet on the brakes.
Well, I knew I had broken through the crust, and I put full power on, but it didn't.
That old big plane just come on down, and it just did a hit.
As it came to a stop, it did a headstand, 90 degrees to the ground.
Oh, wow. And the engines held it up, and the nose and all just crushed in right on us.
We fell between the two seats to keep from getting killed.
Wow. And when it come to a stop, all that fuel was pouring out on those hot engines, and there was an escape hatch at the top.
I just stepped out, took my suitcase with me.
Was there fire?
No fire. Left the plane there and the two guys that was in the back one of them broke his thumb and it was with the barrels.
And they had to put a hose, tie gas hose together to shimmy down to get out.
Yeah. That's an incredible story.
Well, let me just tell you, they had a little bit more to it.
I learned to fly with the idea of being a Missionary Aviation Fellowship pilot, fly the missionaries in and out of the jungle.
Well, I went 11 days through that jungle.
The rest of them went on down the road and went to prison.
I said, I'll crawl on my bellies six months in here, a year, eating snakes before I'm going down the road.
So I went in there, and I was 11 days in the jungle, and I finally came to a place, and it had airplanes.
I kept asking the Indians, I want to steal an airplane and get out of there.
And when I came to the place, I asked, what is this place?
Lovely place. It looked like Honolulu in World War II. There was a runway there.
She said, you don't know. This is Loma Linda, Headquarters for Missionary Aviation Fellowship for the Amazon.
And they flew me out. Wow.
You escaped from prison five times?
So what stands out to you as the most difficult or miraculous escape in the bunch?
The most miraculous was when I was in the courtroom in Spain.
I think I was on the third floor of real high.
And I ran across the courtroom, handcuffed, kicked the window out.
And I looked down and it was above the palm trees.
I thought there might be a power line or something I could grab on as I went down.
There was nothing. And there was a car parked, a station wagon on the side.
You just jumped out? I jumped out from 31 feet on top of that car.
And it exploded in the street.
The windshield went over three or four cars.
It looked like snow going up.
And I looked like Donald Duck with the thing.
And handcuffs, and I got out.
And you just kept running. Yeah, I kept running.
They ran me down and hit me in the back.
I still got a dead spot in my back where the policeman hit me with a shotgun.
And they brought me back.
Murray was there. They were saying, your husband is crazy.
That was spectacular. But I escaped from Lubeck, maximum security prison.
And I cut out of there and got out of there.
That was a miraculous escape.
And that was where? In Lubeck, Germany.
What was that escape like?
I was there and it was going to extradite me back to the United States where I still had all these charges and 25 years special parole.
And I was cleaning the...
Lawyer's visiting room.
And on it was bars that looked like piano notes or this way to make it pretty.
But there was a little bit So I got a rope from a guy where they made boats in there.
And I had 20 minutes.
So I went in there and I wrapped it around and I put a broom handle in it that was cut off and wrapped it around until they pulled the bars together on that side.
And then I pulled them together on the other side.
But that only put me inside the prison yard where the soccer equipment was kept.
But they were putting new windows on one side of the prison and they had it scaffold up to the fourth floor.
So there was a little recess there and there was guard towers everywhere.
A hundred feet or so.
I mean, they would shoot and kill you.
So I got behind that and climbed up, holding to the bricks on one end and the scaffolding on the other, and went to the roof.
I lost my shirt and most of my clothes going through the window.
I got all the skin off of me.
I thought I was going to die. And I was trying to go sideways like this, and finally I got a grip, and the bars let me through and took all the skin off of me.
So I got up on that roof, and I have asthma, and I just lay there trying to catch my breath.
Didn't bring my inhaler. With blood everywhere.
Oh, I was bloody, yes.
And so I got down to the end, and on the end, the reason I did it, they was putting a new wall again around the prison to make it larger.
And they had taken all the wire off above the sally port where they could join the two walls together, and I saw that when I came up.
And there was a guard, a half of a, like a dome sticking out of that brick building where
there's a guard there with a gun, and he'd kill you.
I mean, he was made, he was surely trained to kill you.
And we had some bad people in that place.
So I lay up one floor above it, and I saw a guard and his wife come with a double umbrella,
and it was just pouring down the rain.
Here I am without a shirt on, bloody.
And she had a little boy with her under that double umbrella, and I knew him when he come.
And she started back from the sally port.
I hit the top of that guard tower, bam, with both feet, and I jumped, I guess, it's three
I jumped, there was a pile of sand, like a cone where they were digging it there, and I hit that, and my feet bared up to the knees, but I didn't fall.
And I ran straight towards her so he couldn't shoot me, and then I went around some bushes and went downhill.
And then I heard blam, bam, bam, bam, bam behind me and I looked and that fool woman was in a big old car and she was knocking down the parking meters behind me.
She was trying to run over me and I ran behind the car and she tore the fender off of her car.
Trying and yelling, yap, yap, yapping, a terrible evil-looking face at me, screaming at me, and the sirens going off in the prison.
And there was a fence there, a wall, and I jumped up on it to jump over, and it had glass embedded, and I cut my hands and my arms all up, getting over that, and I hit the ground on the other side, and it was like...
It was that mucked muck where some farmer had dug it.
I dug it in there, and Maury had slipped me $200 in the prison, and I had that in my shoe, and I lost my shoes in that muck.
But anyway, I got out of there and got to Holland.
Really heck of a story how I did that.
What was prison like, whether it's Germany or whether it's Australia?
What were some of the darker moments in prison?
The United States prisons are awful, awful, evil places now.
Just really, there's nothing nice about them.
There's the guards.
In L.A.? And everyone I went to.
It seemed like the further east.
I went to Oklahoma and it was nicer.
But all of them on the west coast, they was hatred there.
And they got really stupid people hired, just incredibly.
A hatred by the guards.
And the inmates.
Like, I speak Spanish, and I walked into the Spanish TV room, and it was, Senor, no, you can't come in here.
And I walked across to the black, hey, get out of here, white boy.
It was just like, what?
Man, I like all you people, you know?
And so I walked down to the white people and said, show us your paperwork.
You can't come in here until you show your paperwork.
We don't let snitches and homosexuals and all this sort of stuff in here.
So it's just like, man, I don't want to be in here.
I mean, it sounds absurd, but you're saying like the basic humanity is gone.
Completely. Completely.
And the guards, it was just like, come here, Reeves.
And I woke up to him, get the fuck out of my face.
He sticks his chin out, like for me to break his jaw.
Like, what in the world, man?
I love people.
Yeah, you got this joy to you.
You have a joyful nature.
And it didn't seem like that broke you.
Not a bit. How did you persevere?
Did you know I didn't even think I persevered, but I try to enjoy my life wherever I am every day.
I do. I ran every day, and like I told you, why do you run so, Roger?
I said, to help me suffer these fools.
And I played a game of chess every day almost of my life in there.
And I read two books a week.
And I talked with people, storytellers.
Guys would come in and tell us another story, Roger.
Give us a poem. Tell us one you never told us before.
And so it was just nice. A lot of them have original boys.
They picked their country music and it was all right.
Red, Morgan Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption, says the following, These walls are funny.
First you hate them, then you get used to them.
Enough time passes, you get, so you depend on them.
That's institutionalized.
Is there truth to that?
100%. I didn't even see the walls, except whenever I was planning on escaping.
In Shawshank Redemption, he spent so many years in prison that he almost didn't know what to do with himself once he left, once he was a free man.
You get so used to the system, the rituals, having to follow orders, Even being treated poorly, all those kinds of things that you become dependent on.
Well, down in Australia, I spent the first a little over a year in the shoe.
It was like, did you see the movie, The Silence of the Lambs?
Thank you, Marty. And he's there.
I had five or six guards looking at me with a one-way mirror.
And that's whenever I thought I might never get out.
I got a life sentence. I had all this time waiting here in Germany.
And so they had a computer in there, but it didn't have a program on it.
So I just started writing these little stories of stuff I did in my life.
And I wrote one line, and I wrote over a million words with them looking at me.
So it was after a year they let me out.
It wasn't long before they put me in a place called self-care.
Particularly, I was in what they call the lifer's pod.
There was 268 men in self-care there.
It was unbelievably good that we were left alone.
Basically, they was there.
The guards were certainly there, but they had their shack, and we had apartments, four apartments to the building.
And six men to the unit with your own door and a key to it, and a kitchen, dining room.
Freezer, refrigerator, and they allowed you $360 a week to buy groceries.
And I cooked for about 16 years and learned to cook good.
And other people have their specialties.
So that was quite—it wasn't so like being in prison.
It was somewhat living with me, and it was difficult, man.
I had some good fights and carry on, but you don't get along with everybody.
But then whenever I came back to the United States, I was laughing and talking, and when I got off the plane and— L.A. had three marshals with me from Australia.
I was slammed upside the wall, I mean hard, put ankle bikes on and handcuffed so tight till he cut my vein off.
Face forward, face forward, lens apart!
Good gracious. And walked me 50 steps and turned me over to the marshals and they took part of that off.
That was a border patrol that was there over my marijuana charge from 1977.
Yeah. I did 11 years for parole violation.
Now they want me for more violation.
And they put me in, down in Los Angeles, they put me in, the marshals put me in there, and they put me in isolation.
I thought, what in the world they got me for isolation for?
I've done anything.
How long did you spend in isolation?
More than six months.
So after three or four days, the little Judas window slide open, and a nice-looking man
in a suit come in.
Hello, Reeves.
I just want to see what you look like.
I saw your National Geographic documentary, and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation.
He slammed the thing, and I couldn't get out of there.
And by law, the U.S. Parole Commission is supposed to give you a hearing within 90 days.
So Murray paid a lawyer $7,500, and he never picked up the phone.
Somebody got to him.
Who's that somebody, you think?
Christopher Cannon was his name, and I don't know who got to him, but he didn't do anything to get me out of there.
I got one 15-minute phone call a month, and I couldn't get out.
So then after six months, they put me on Con Air, double shackled and black box on my hands.
And I went to Oklahoma, and they let me out on the floor.
I couldn't imagine that I could call after a couple of days.
And they said, there was a man here from Washington give you a parole here, and you only got here at 3.30.
So he left. He said he'd be back next year.
I've been in now over six months.
So then there was a lovely little lady.
She was the case manager or something.
She said, you can ask for parole on the record.
And I said, please do.
She said, I'll send them an email and the next day I got my parole.
Ninety days later, they sent me to Terminal Island and put me in the place there with the invalid, I guess, since I was old as I am, 78 years old.
So they put me in the people in there dying in wheelchairs and legs off and arms off and cancer.
So I was in there and I pushed the fellas around.
And... I come out of the chow hall there, and I went to go to the right to get me a haircut, and two Mexican guys there, a lieutenant, another one, womp between us, and he went like the boop, boop, boop, and I said, I could outrun you.
Man, they slammed me, put me on the ground, handcuffed me, and put me in the shoe for a week.
I got out, and man, they put me back in the place.
They treated me rough.
I got in a little more trouble, and they put me back in the shoe, and I wouldn't come out.
The virus was out killing people, so they killed eight people in that unit I was in.
Oh, wow. So, I mean, I wouldn't even come out to take a shower.
I had a little straw that I put in the sink, and I'd take a sock that I had and scrub myself with it with some soap and glass of water over my head and then clean the floor up and put it in the toilet.
So that was your time during the coronavirus pandemic.
I got out last April, right in the middle of it, and they were dying bad in there.
So I was treated worse for that last year in America than I was for the whole 20 years in Australia, the 18 years in Australia.
And then you were a free man at the end of that year.
They put me out and sent me home and the parole officers couldn't even come.
They weren't working. They were just doing everything by video.
Better not have a drink.
The only thing was I couldn't even have a drink of wine.
So, after a year, I had to take psychiatric treatment every week.
I had to go talk to the psychiatrist, psychologist.
And me and her got along great.
She was a good Christian woman.
We just chatted and talked.
And I think they said, so I had to pee in the bottle every week.
I said, I've been in 33 years.
How many piss deaths do you think I've had?
Never been dirty. Only thing if y'all want a clean one, you come get me.
Before I talk to you about love, let me ask you a difficult question.
You write in your book, I don't consider myself much of a criminal.
I don't lie, cheat, or steal, and I always take up for the underdog.
Violence makes me sick.
Yet, I know I'm an outlaw, and those that break the law must be punished.
I think many people listening to this, or some people listening to this, will see you as a criminal, as a bad man who increased the amount of suffering in this world.
What do you have to say to them?
I would like to tell them that they have been indoctrinated by the spin Of news and politicians, and they don't know the truth of the situation.
You lay the truth out there in an envelope and let me open it.
Besides something else that is false, and it's staggering.
The truth is that I was a tobacco farmer, and tobacco kills 500,000 people a year in America, and 6 million have debilitating diseases because of it.
Drugs, all drugs combined, kill between 10,000 and 15,000 people a year by overdose, and 60% of those are pharmaceutical.
Now then, when I was a tobacco farmer, come sit on the front pew, Mr.
Reeves. Come on up here.
You're a gentleman. You just join the Masonic Lodge, and you join our church, and you just come on and sit down with the good people.
You grow two marijuana plants.
Get out of here, you scumbag!
And the marijuana doesn't hurt anybody.
It's just, that's the truth of it.
And so, in your career, you walked amidst violence, but you never participated in the violence.
I didn't even see it.
It just didn't happen around me.
In prison, it did. I sewed people up.
They called me Doc. I had dental floss, and one time I had to get a blade and try to help keep them from my patient from getting again.
But I was just like if I shot at those people, I shot at them to keep them from killing me.
I certainly didn't mean to kill them.
So that's just, some people are evil and they will kill you and hurt you and lie to you.
I just don't do any of that.
It's just, it makes you sick.
I've seen it. When I was in the shoe, three guys tried to kill a guy and they stabbed him so many times, but their stab went blanking and the blood getting out of the room.
I said, you're going to kill him. You're going to kill him and save his life.
Drug him up there where the guards could see him.
There's stuff like that. I'm just not of that nature of those people.
They're just evil. There's people born evil, I believe.
It is heartbreaking to hear that the basic humanity has gone in prison in the United States.
That's heartbreaking because that basic humanity is actually the light at the end of the tunnel.
It's the thing that saves us, as opposed to when it's absent, it's the thing that destroys us.
The prisons are filled, absolutely filled with people that have some mental problems.
Now, you see Tent City all the way up and down here.
I guarantee you, every one of those people have mental problems, to some degree.
However little it is, but they're a little bit off.
Now, then you get a DEA agent that wants to make a name for himself.
He goes down there and gets one of them to sell a little two grams of methamphetamine to the other one, and he gets the conviction.
And a young prosecutor, he gets a conviction.
He wants to make a judge.
And we got to judging...
Where was it? I'm going to give a million...
What was his name? Gilbert.
I'm going to give men a million years before I get off the judge.
You get fools like that in charge.
You're going to fill prisons up with pitiful humanity.
And those are the ones.
And then the other is people over drugs.
And drugs should be a health issue.
You can't...
You cannot...
Police it enough. It's just they know the only thing that overdoses is opioids, the heroin.
And if they can give it to them, it costs about a dollar a day to give the worst addict is fixed.
But they'll give it methadone, which is from a pharmaceutical company, which is just as bad.
Why in the world? We tried it all over the world, in Portugal and England, and when they give the girls cleanup, no more stolen cars, why?
Who wants to keep this forest going?
They're just perpetuating it like, oh, every little police place is getting all these suits and armor and machine guns.
It's just like, oh, it's such a spin.
It's sad. Do you think all drugs should be legalized?
I don't know about that, but they certainly should be controlled.
If a person is an addict, he should be able to go down and get his fix with somebody there to help him with a clean needle and a glass of orange juice.
It's so much cheaper than prison.
It's so much cheaper than him stealing cars or a prostitute having to go to work.
That's sad. You've lived one heck of a life Looking back, there's a lot of young people that listen to this, high school, college students.
What advice would you give them?
How to live, how to have a successful career, how to have a good life, how to be a good man or woman?
To be a good man or woman?
If I had it to do over with, I'll just tell you what I'd have done, I would have paid attention and studied my lesson and did the best I could.
In school? In school, yes.
And went as far as I could have.
I would have liked to have been a doctor.
I just didn't have the stickability or anybody to tell me, hey, go there and do that.
And if you can do that, at a very young age, start in a trade.
Learn to do something.
It doesn't matter what it is.
If you learn to do something good, there is a great demand for you.
And I would say that in prison, The prison system should come in and you get a thief.
Young fans are a thief. A robber.
And you say, all right, we need carpenters.
We need plumbers. We need electricians.
We need sheep. Sentence them to that trade.
And when you get an A plus in that, where you can go out and make you $30 or $50 an hour, you go home.
Now, you can mess around 10 years if you want to, or you can do this in two.
I think that's just for the prism.
But anyway, I would say that they find somebody and be true to them, that we have...
Just be honest and true in your life.
You mean like relationships?
Relationships, yes. I mean, so many people, particularly our children, are from relationships where...
They're not wanting their divorce.
Their father's left. They don't know who their daddy is.
They diss in foster homes.
500,000 children are in foster homes in America today.
And we have our government inadvertently is in encouraging those people.
My daughter is a doctor, and she delivered a couple years ago a baby from a 10-year-old child.
That child, and she said, in the visiting room is four generations, all of them on welfare.
Now we got one more, and it reminds me of Elvis Presley's song, In the Ghetto.
So for an individual...
Learn a trade, become a craftsman of sorts, and find somebody to love and who loves you.
That's right. Have a family and stick with it.
Surely, you're going to get angry, you're going to get disappointed, you're going to get all kinds of stuff, but come back and make up before you go to sleep.
Well, I did half of those things.
I got the first one, I'm working on the second one, so I appreciate the advice.
Well, Mari, thank you so much for joining us.
Can you tell me the story of how you two met?
Well, my parents every summer would go to the lake in Canada, and the place was called Turkey Point, which is on Lake Erie, and just have a nice summer holiday there, water skiing, swimming, sunbathing.
This was back in the 60s, and I was sitting on the pier with a few girlfriends and telling them my story, and then all of a sudden I looked up and And I saw this figure in the distance coming onto the pier.
Now, we're all dressed in bathing suits and swimwear.
We're swimming and this, that, and the other.
And here he comes, dark trousers.
In fact, they were black, white shirt.
And a tie and a straw kind of a Panama hat.
And, you know, so he stood out.
And so I invited him to come and sit down.
And so he continued to talk and we just talked and talked and talked and then later moved To the beach.
And I think the next time I saw him, he was talking to another girl, and I thought, yeah, you know.
Yeah. Men. I know.
I was, okay. Okay, next.
Yeah. Well, about six months later, I receive a letter.
And it's a letter from Roger.
And then we start this lovely correspondence and we just start writing.
You know, in those days, you just wrote everything.
And then the next summer, he was coming up again.
He was on his way to Alaska.
And he says, I would like to come by and see you.
And I said, well, I'll be in the same place that I met you last year.
And so when he came up this time, for some reason, Roger reached for my hand and I reached for his, and man, that was it.
It was like love at first touch.
That was love. It was just like a silence, you know, and a, oh my gosh, and...
We didn't even look at each other.
It was just, oh my goodness, what happened here?
And I was the type of person, I never wanted to get married, way, way, way down the road, never have any children, and I wanted to see the world first and then do all that, you know?
But that was it. That was love, and you've been together ever since.
Yeah. Well...
The thing is about the love that the two of you have for each other is they had to persevere through quite a heck of a journey.
So how did Roger's drug smuggling change the nature of your love and your relationship?
Well, Lex, that remained steadfast.
It endured.
And since Roger's been home, I think we've rekindled the love that we had when we first met.
But I think my faith...
You know, my faith, my steadfast faith, and also the fact that Roger and I communicated.
We wrote letters.
You know, he never complained.
I know there were the children there.
He never had mistreated me.
I love this guy.
And we had a lot of experiences.
It was just... He's good-looking, charismatic.
He's pretty, you know... Yeah, and he was adventurous, you know, and...
Would you say that again?
But yes, it was just, I know I missed him physically, but we were just so strong in spirit, you know, and we could talk to one another.
Yeah. What was it like, Roger, when you're a free man?
Yeah. Seeing Mari for the first time in person again.
I cried for three days.
Everything, I had to look at a picture of her.
I came home and there she prepared a meal for me.
And it was the old oak table that I'd Redone, and the chairs, the same one, and the green placemats, and the same china that we had, and the same silverware.
And all of it just brought back the same paintings on the wall.
It was just like unbelievable.
After 35 years, She had all my clothes cleaned and my shoes shining.
And I put the shoes on and I walked out of them, the strings on and the soles came off.
But the shirts and all fit perfect.
So it was just wonderful.
And just to see her and then just to think about, see her picture of her 50th birthday or her 60th birthday or her 70th birthday, I wasn't there.
And the picture of her with the children, it was heartbreaking.
And about the third day, I thought, man up, fella.
I mean, you've got to.
So I got over and quit the tears.
Everything was just pulsating with life.
It was just unbelievable to get out of that place.
It really was. Do you regret the drug smuggling that took you away from the woman you love?
Oh, yes. 100%.
I wouldn't have done it again.
You don't think you're going to get caught.
It's just, no.
I did it for money, and I had everything in the world I wanted before I did that.
So the adventure...
I mean, it was one heck of an adventure for the two of you, for the both of you.
Yes. Were you able to enjoy it, or was it always danger?
Was it always something that threatened your relationship, your love, your family?
Or were you able to enjoy the adventure of it?
You know, we all die.
Life is short. And to live that kind of adventure...
Well, whenever I did the first loot, I got $10,000.
And that was just about two years' pay on the fire department, take home.
And I brought that home.
I put my hand over my mouth.
I said, Roger, I can't believe this.
Oh my, what in the world?
And Roger said, let's go have dinner.
And so we went to the little restaurant that we would go to, you know.
And he said, and don't you dare look on the right-hand side of the menu.
He said, just order anything you want.
As we were in the restaurant, we were giddy about it.
Yeah, I was giddy about it.
Were you afraid that—I mean, did you think about the fact that it's illegal and Roger could end up in prison?
Oh, yes. Did you guys talk about it?
Well, I just—I kind of thought I was bulletproof.
I mean, if they didn't catch you, I thought if they didn't catch you, you was all right, and it was hard to catch you in the air.
Yeah. So you never thought it was hard to catch you in the air?
Mm-hmm. I didn't know that if your friend told on you five years later, you'd still go to prison.
That was a problem.
I didn't know that.
Did you guys ever talk about walking away?
I asked Roger to walk away, and he says, I can't, Mario, just now, you know.
And then, of course, the amount of people that he began to support, the family and the gifts and...
The deals. The deals, yes, the deals.
Big ones. Yes, and then you always wanted to, what do you do with the money?
You know, so you want to, I guess you...
Clean it up or you want to invest in an enterprise or in a business.
Well, it just doesn't work.
They know the source of it and they take it and run.
Every one of them.
Yeah. Yeah.
But he was very generous, extremely generous and benevolent.
And when I started, I would ask about it.
I went to a lawyer and a good number of people in California at that time wanted to legalize marijuana.
Yeah. Back in 1973.
And I went to a lawyer and I said, Mr.
Lawyer, I put $100 on the table.
What would they do if they caught me bringing marijuana across the border?
He said, do you have a criminal record?
I said, no. I've never had a speeding ticket.
Nothing. Not even a traffic ticket.
He said, you work for the fire department?
I said, yes, sir.
He said, you'll get probation.
The worst you'll do is you'll get One year, and you spend four months raking leaves on a military base.
So my mother, my father died some years before, and my brother and baby sister came out, and I took them down to Disneyland, and she said, what are you doing, boy?
I said, I'm hauling pot, Mom.
She said, how much are you making? I said, I'm making $40,000 any day I want to go.
And she said, what do they do if they catch you?
And I told her what the lawyer said.
Four months at the most, raking leaves.
I said, what do you think? She said, do you need a co-pilot, son?
Yeah, money is money.
So your relationship persevered through some big challenges.
Is there advice you can give about what makes for a successful relationship?
Well, you know, I think the initial igniting meeting someone, you know, that's the love.
That's it. And that little fire just keeps burning and burning and burning.
You can't put it out, no matter what.
It's the love fire.
But it gets difficult.
It does. It's funny, the love fire.
So you're saying the love fire is all it takes to persevere through the difficulty.
Well, no. Well, that's a huge part of it.
And also, I contribute my individual situation in order to endure the prison years is my faith.
Faith in God? Yes.
And friends who were unconditionally still loved me no matter what.
Yes. So you had love around you in general.
I did. And my children. They, you know, and that was a real purpose to guide them and to love them and to help them become citizens.
What about you, Roger?
What advice would you give?
I just don't know how to do it, but I do know that you have to work on a relationship.
Laura and I have had problems.
Did you guys get in fights?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yes.
Pretty regular. But they don't let them last long.
Yeah, yeah. But certainly, we're so different.
We're the same, and yet we're so different.
Yeah. Like little stuff?
Little stuff, yes.
And it might be big, but I usually win her over, you know.
But anyhow, I just feel like Maria was always there.
It was like she was my anchor.
I was coming home.
I was always coming home to her and the children.
And you can see throughout my life, I'm working on getting there.
Are you afraid for his life, by the way?
Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.
There were times, yeah.
But, you know, I had faith in him.
He was an excellent pilot.
For example, I always said, Roger, if the ship's going down, I'm jumping in the lifeboat with you because I know we're going to get to shore.
You will save us. And so I had that faith in him.
I mean, he's a man, but yet he's the one you want to get into the lifeboat with.
Yeah, definitely. But then there is Pablo Escobar, one of the most dangerous humans in history, plus the U.S. government.
Very difficult to get away.
In terms of your faith, how has your faith helped you to be the woman you are in this relationship, in seeing love the way you see it?
Well, I think my faith gives me hope.
I have lots of hope.
It helps me to dwell on the good side.
You know, when I ever meet someone and there's some negative thoughts, I try to see why they are like that, or what's the source of all that, and I try to pull out the good.
I really do. Not that I'm a goody-goody, but that's what your faith does.
You see them as God sees us.
How has he changed over the years?
Roger, he's still the same.
Actually, I like him better now.
He's a little calmer.
Yeah, that's crazy. Oh, yes.
And happy to be at home where he'll say, Mari, I am just so happy to be with you here in this condominium.
I'm content. Because I used to call him my homing pigeon.
I just have to let him fly.
He has to fly, but he always came home.
Do you think about the end of this ride, our mortality?
Do you think about your death?
I do. Particularly, I'm going to have a heart valve replacement in about seven days where I could not make it.
You know, it's a very serious operation.
And I think about that very much.
And I ask for peace.
I just lost my brother about 10 days ago, so unexpectedly.
And that really put, you know, makes you think of your mortality.
Are you afraid? Somewhat and yet not.
Yeah. I want to live, Lex.
I want to live, you know?
This life is fun.
Yes. Do you think about your death, Roger?
I have visions. I have visions, and they often have them very, very clear, like what I have seen in the future.
Scientists might call it wormholes, or in the Old Testament they call it prophets, but I see sometimes in the future around the corner.
It's clear as we're sitting right here.
What's that look like?
I was on a porch and I believe I was in like Central America place.
I was an old man with khaki pants and a white shirt.
And it was a chair with wide arms and it was straight.
And there's like the beams coming out above my head and I'm on a porch.
Well, it couldn't be yet. And I have out-of-the-body experiences also.
And I came out of my body.
I just floated out of my body and went into a veil, like into a mist.
And I believe that's probably what happened.
You talk about like it's in your past.
This is your future. This is in my future.
This is something he has seen in the past.
I've seen it in a vision. I know, but it's funny.
The tense you use, it happened, and yet it's something that will happen.
Yes. Both are true.
It's just unbelievable. I don't know how many people have it, but I have it.
I've walked out of my body just where I could come up to you and look and set up on the radio.
I used to work on the railroad, and I had them there.
How do you explain that? I don't know.
What the heck is going on in this universe that's possible?
Oh, I don't know.
But it's certainly a phenomenon that should happen.
And there's a guy, Bill Monroe, that wrote the book on it, Out of the Body.
He tells about it. And who was the guy that writes The Alchemist?
Pablo Coelho? He has them also, just like that.
And he tells about how it happens on him.
Mine happened differently. But you certainly can come out of your body.
What do you think the meaning of this life is?
Maybe from your faith, but also from just the amazing adventure that you lived through.
How do you make sense of why the heck we're here?
I don't know. It's just kind of like who you are.
Even when I was a child, I was like, I'm different from other people.
You know? And just as a boy, I was.
Could you put into words how you were different, or was it just a Yeah, like my brother, I mean, he kept his hands clean and his shoes shined, and you're always barefooted catching a wild hog or wrestling a horse trying to get it down.
I saw pictures of you climbing a tree recently.
Yes, when I first got out of prison.
Always something like that.
Yeah. So I don't know.
And I noticed that something about me is sometimes in prison there'd be a knife fight.
And people, you see them rough guys that turn white from it.
I just kind of almost like smile.
I mean, if they come at me, I turn white and get away.
But it doesn't bother me.
Prison didn't bother me.
So you don't know what the heck the meaning is.
You just know you're a bit different than the others.
Yeah, it might be a little bit kooky.
Well, maybe the whole point is you want to realize you want to let that madness flourish, that uniqueness flourish.
That's the whole point of life.
We're all different in very interesting little ways.
Yes. And the more different you are, you want to let that You want to let that become.
You want to let it be its full possibility.
It's like a garden, you know, all the different flowers.
Yeah, like a garden. You did mention you weren't sure if there's a free will or not.
Do you think it's all predetermined?
Or do you think we make our choices?
No, we just make our decisions.
I just said if it is. But I know that we make our decisions.
Yes, I agree. And I know that we are spirits that are living in this flesh.
That's beyond a shadow of a doubt for me.
If you walk out of your body and have out-of-body experience, you will know it.
So the body is just the temporary container for something much bigger.
The spirit lives on eternally with no beginning and no end.
And that's hard to fathom.
Yeah, this is just a little shell.
This is a shell to contain that spirit.
This is the way we work on Earth.
But yeah, I know.
I'm an eternal being.
So are you. Do you think there's a why to it?
Do you think there's a meaning to this life?
Well, I think the why is beyond my capability of understanding.
It's someone greater than me.
I don't understand it, but it's awesome.
I just know that it's awesome.
And one day we will know the answers.
Once we get to that crossover to the other side, I think we will understand clearly.
It says, you know, now we see through a glass darkly, but then when we are face-to-face with God, we will understand.
And until we know, let's just enjoy this beautiful life while we've got it.
That was my gift.
I love everybody and everything.
I do. And I'm sorry if I put a stumbling block in anybody's way.
I wouldn't want to. But these are these things that I just think about, oh, what a hypocritical world we live in, though.
Almost anybody, I'd say, listen, okay, he's a drug dealer.
And I would say most of them have committed adultery.
That's a cardinal sin.
And yet they throw rocks at me for moving marijuana or cocaine across the road.
It's just if you saw the two different things, you'd say, what a terrible difference it is.
But we've become conditioned with this mad society that we have.
You mentioned that your daughter, Miriam, wrote you a poem.
Do you mind reading it? I'd be glad to.
I was doing 11 years up in Lompoc Penitentiary, maximum security prison, for a parole violation for possession of marijuana in 1977.
They should have given me six months, but they gave me 11 years because they wanted me for what they call silent beef.
Anyhow, while I was in that dungeon, I received a letter from my daughter, Miriam.
It's called Daddy's Poem.
A year ago, I became a poet when I wrote your birthday prose, and here I am today ready to give it another go.
First, I would like to wish you a very happy birthday to be, and to thank you so very much, for without you, I would not be me.
Secondly, I want to say that your support has been immense.
It has been true, honest, loving, and free of all pretense.
Thirdly, it goes without saying, your love has surpassed all my wrongs, and you always made me smile with one of your old country songs.
I can remember on Cuervo, Daddy, with you holding me in your arms as you sang Jim Reeves songs and talked about the farm.
I can see you walking through the door from one of your travels far and wide, and the thought of you coming home, Daddy, kept a twinkle in our eyes.
I can smell you as I did when I used to climb into your bed, and you would talk to me again about one of the adventures that you led.
I can see me and Mario asleep in one of your airplanes extraordinaire, and remembering wondering to myself why there wasn't an available chair.
I remember having to meet you, and worrying that you wouldn't be there, but you would pop from behind some counter and give us all a happy scare.
You gave us presents in Key Biscayne, in hotels pleasure galore, and three dozen roses as we came through the airport door.
I can see your face in Amsterdam with a luggage carousel, and you look like a boy with a secret that you were just dying to tell.
You taught me mathematics in the sands of far away places and taught me to sail and we left without any traces.
We climbed glaciers in Argentina and saw the blue of the beautiful caves and witnessed the majestic beauty of such a jaggling maze.
I learned how to change gears on the dirt roads of Brazil.
We ate hot dogs in Paraguay, a memory we smile over still.
We talked about lions, elephants, and bears on a hacienda in Uruguay, but decided it was better if to Europe we did fly.
Oh, the old world and all its luxury, what a good time it was.
From South America to the Krasnopolsky, I think we fell in love.
The European jaunt, well, it is considered a book in itself.
But it's a story about beauty and knowledge, suspense, and worldly wealth.
We went from Holland to Sweden, and we went from France to Spain, and I promise you I have no regrets.
I would definitely do it all again.
I would see the world with you anytime, sir.
There's no doubt in my mind, because being by your side, Daddy, always ensures a wild good time.
So our paths took a turn, and we're back in the U.S. of A., but life here isn't so bad, and I'm plumb content to stay.
I'm happy to be near you, although I'm not as close as I was before.
But because of your love and encouragement, I've been able to open new doors.
I'm grateful to be in school, and I'm genuinely happy where I am.
And I even like when you call and tell me to study for the next exam.
What a life you've given me, Daddy.
It's a tremendous and a magical gift.
We already have so many stories to tell, there are far too many to list.
But I want to thank you again this day for the very big happy birthday to you and to tell you just a few more things that I knew in my heart to be true.
That I love you, Daddy, with all of your wrongs and your rights.
That you're ahead of our family and you've kept us all bound tight.
That you have an honest love in your heart for God and all mankind, and you truly do believe in yourself when you say it will all be fine.
I know you will be there to catch me if ever I waver or slip, and I know I'd want you as captain on any sinking ship.
I also know a new chapter is written.
It's almost time to move on.
It's time to sail another sea and to witness a brand new dawn.
It'll be good to see you at the helm again as you point out our destination.
The laugh and dance on the upper deck is while the boat glides through It'll be good to see you on the go, as I know you like to be, and to know you can open any door without any key.
But while we revel in our days together, we will know better than to hurry, because as you told me many times, life is an incredible journey.
Wow, that's beautiful.
Yeah. Roger it.
I'm really honored that you would take the time to visit me in Texas and to sit down and talk with me.
Thank you so much, Roger. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you. It was a pleasure.
It's been a real pleasure. Yes.
Beautiful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Roger Reeves, and thank you to Noom, Allform, ExpressVPN, Four Sigmatic, and Eight Sleep.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Pablo Escobar.
All empires are created of blood and fire.
▲
Export Selection