by Jason Ryan
Roche remembers even more debauchery, with a woman lying on the hood of the speedboat’s engine, accepting more than one sexual partner at once. Another time, Abell and Roche say, Byers’s passengers mooned marine law enforcement officers patrolling the Intracoastal Waterway and then hightailed it to Bimini in the Bahamas. Byers ran the boat hard, and the cigarette boat was in fact a replacement for his former boat, which broke in half after being used by Byers at high speed in rough seas. Byers was passionate about researching the quality of his equipment and putting it to the test, says Roche. Similarly, he put severe stresses on his body. One friend, Bob “Willie the Hog” Bauer, said that when others were doing half a quaalude, Byers would take two.
Bauer, the sulfur-sock dusting native of Indiana, first met Byers in a Miami apartment complex, finding the Minnesotan staggering on walkways after he had consumed a number of downers. Bauer worried Byers might stumble off a third floor balcony, so he walked with him until the depressants’ effects lessened. Quaaludes were popular in Miami in the early 1970s, and Bauer, a connoisseur of illicit substances, nominates the Rorer 714 Quaalude as the world’s best drug and quaaludes in general as a fine aphrodisiac. A number of airlines had stewardess training programs in Miami at that time, so the apartment complexes were flooded with attractive, adventurous young women, much to the budding drug dealers’ delight. The quaaludes were so effective at disarming these women that the men nicknamed the drugs “instant pussy.”
“You could have been with the Virgin Mary,” Bauer says of the quaalude, “and her drawers were coming off before the night was over.”
For any of the men, a life peppered with drugs, sex, and sunshine was enough, at least for the short term. Beyond pleasures of the flesh and getting drunk and stoned, regular diversions included motorcycle rides, golfing, boating, and waterskiing. For Byers, it wasn’t enough. So one day, Roche says, Byers persuaded a friend to fly him in a private plane from Florida to Colombia. The plane landed on a beach, refueled, and took off again, flying low to avoid radar. Left behind was Byers, with a single backpack. He hiked into town and then traveled into the mountains, intent on finding someone to supply him premium marijuana. It wasn’t long before he established a golden reputation among the farmers, paving the way for future visits by his lieutenants and friends, including Abell, Roche, and Foy. In other words, he left Colombia with what he came for: a connection.
That even this much is known about his kingpin beginnings is surprising given Byers’s propensity for secrecy. Among his favorite sayings was, “loose lips sink ships,” and he would not discuss the smuggling business openly. Accordingly, he chose friends and employees carefully. Before Bauer began driving vans full of drugs for Byers, the kingpin required him to rub down his cigarette boat so Bauer could demonstrate his work ethic. With other employees, Byers entrusted them with suitcases full of cash, returning months or a year later to retrieve it. Of course he expected every dollar to be untouched.
Byers’s hiring practices reflected the discipline with which he approached the drug trade, and he often emphasized he “hired the needy, not the greedy.” Roche calls Byers a thinker, and says although the two friends were renegades, they didn’t consider themselves outlaws, but rather businessmen. At times, despite his own occasional binges, his tolerance for frivolity and overindulgence could be limited and his temper short. He was the “sweetest, kindest person in the world,” said friend Liz Kennedy, “but you did not want to be on his bad side.”
Byers dated Kennedy’s roommate for some time, so she saw the kingpin often and sometimes joined him on his sailboat. To her, Byers seemed to be wary of abusing drugs and alcohol. She remembers him smoking pot often, but only snorting a single line of cocaine before putting it away. Kennedy was not capable of such restraint, she says, and she recalls once asking him for another hit. Byers’s response was sharp.
“You’ve had enough to last a lifetime,” he snarled. “Have a beer.”
Working with the young and freewheeling Foy, Byers was careful to keep him in line. When Foy was short some cash for a deal they were doing, Byers insisted he take possession of Foy’s Porsche as collateral. Foy fumed over the lack of trust, but Byers cut him no slack.
“Barry,” Byers said, “business is business.”
Whether Byers knew it or not, he and Foy were contributing to a rich history of illicit activity on the Carolina coast. For the past three hundred years, the area’s expansive marshes and isolated inlets had been used by pirates, Civil War blockade-runners, and rumrunners. In the seventeenth century, English buccaneers followed the example of French and Spanish pirates and frequented the area’s waterways. There, sheltered in inland rivers and creeks, they could refit and repair their ships in safety before returning to the Atlantic or Caribbean to terrorize merchant vessels. English colonial leaders welcomed the buccaneers’ attacks on Spanish ships and the booty they brought back to sell and trade. In return, pirates appreciated Carolina’s agreeable customers and unobtrusive authorities.
In response to complaints from ship owners and the governor of Jamaica, Carolina’s leaders passed stricter antipiracy laws in 1685, diminishing the influence of pirates at the turn of the century. But by 1715, with the colony’s military resources pushed to the frontier to combat Indian tribes, pirates repopulated the coasts of North Carolina and South Carolina, which had become separate colonies three years earlier. The most outrageous attacks were led by the infamous Edward Teach (or Thatch), otherwise known as Blackbeard. The appearance of Blackbeard struck fear in the hearts of merchant sailors, and for good reason: Prior to boarding a ship, Blackbeard was said to have hung weapons across much his body and set fire to cannon fuses tied in his beard and tucked under the brim of his hat.
In 1718, Blackbeard blockaded Charleston Harbor with Queen Anne’s Revenge and three other ships, seizing a number of merchant vessels and holding their passengers ransom for a chest of medicines. South Carolina Governor Robert Johnson, without a warship at his disposal, acceded to Blackbeard’s demands. Three months later, Johnson was less accommodating, sending an expedition from Charleston to capture another notorious pirate holed up in the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, “Gentleman Pirate” Stede Bonnet. A former Barbadian militia officer, Bonnet had left behind his family and a small fortune to become a pirate and associate of Blackbeard. After his capture he was brought to Charleston to be tried, though he soon escaped, perhaps by bribing a guard or by disguising himself as a woman. The Gentleman Pirate’s escape would be echoed more than 250 years later, when a notorious marijuana smuggler would also manage to slip away from a Charleston jail.
Bonnet was soon recaptured on Sullivan’s Island, across Charleston Harbor, and publicly hanged. By this time an expeditionary force from Virginia had killed Blackbeard in North Carolina. The deaths of Blackbeard and Bonnet more or less marked the end of piracy on the Carolina coast, but not the area’s utility as a site for illicit commerce. Rumrunners had a short heyday two decades later, when Georgia prohibited the importation of rum and brandies between 1735 and 1742. Opportunistic South Carolina smugglers sailed south to secluded Georgia beaches and unloaded spirits.
More than a century later came the blockade-runners. In April 1861, a week after Confederate forces fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor and started the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, intent on starving the Confederate Army of supplies, ordered a naval blockade of the South. Seven months later the Union Navy captured Port Royal, South Carolina, sixty miles south of Charleston, and used it and nearby Hilton Head Island as a base for the Atlantic blockade, which massed many of its ships around the ports of Charleston and Wilmington, North Carolina. The blockaders faced long odds in stopping the Confederate runners. In 1862, for example, a mere eight steamers and four sailing ships were assigned to patrol a thirteen-mile arc around Charleston Harbor, as well as an inlet to the south, and the port of Georgetown, South Carolina, sixty miles to the north.
Still there
was danger in trying to slip by the stretched Union Navy. Fortunately for the Confederacy, many men were willing to try. Blockade-runners, steam-powered supply ships adept at evading Union warships, regularly crept along the Southern coastline, waiting for darkness and the chance to make mad dashes for the mouths of Confederate harbors. Within the harbors the crews of blockaderunners could breathe easy, knowing Union ships would not pursue them for fear of being shelled by Confederate forts.
The typical blockade-runner was approximately two hundred feet long, had an iron or steel hull, and was powered by steam engines that turned side-mounted paddles. Most steamed across the Atlantic from Nassau, Bahamas, or St. George, Bermuda, to deliver sorely needed cargo in the dead of night. They left the southern ports in darkness, too, bound back for the Bahamas or Bermuda with cargoes of cotton bales piled high below and above deck. The cotton bales were so closely packed “a mouse could hardly find room to hide itself among them,” wrote Charles Hobart-Hampden, the British captain of the blockade-runner Don.
While the Confederacy deployed some enlisted crews on blockade-runners, most crewmen were entrepreneurs hired by British supply firms. Accordingly, many of these men were more interested in making money than helping the war effort. Meat, for example, was sometimes left to spoil on wharves in the islands so a crew could pack a ship with lighter luxury items like medicine, liquor, and silk. Should a blockaderunner’s captain become fearful of being caught at sea, he’d order lead tossed overboard, lightening the ship but depriving soldiers of material to make bullets. During the war, ships departing Bermuda for the South had manifests showing cargoes that included cigars, soap, pepper, coffee, whisky, bonnet frames, sherry wine, hams, cheeses, and wire frames for hoop skirts. It was not until March 1864, nearly three years after the Civil War began, that the Confederacy began to regulate blockade-runners, forbidding the importation of luxury goods and curbing war profiteering by requiring half a ship’s cargo be devoted to freight at fixed prices.
The substantial riches collected by blockade-running crews helped convert Nassau and St. George into dens of vice. As Samuel Benjamin wrote of Nassau in an 1878 travel guide:
During the Confederate years the little town actually swarmed with Southern refugees, the captains and crews of blockaderunners, cotton brokers, rumsellers, Jews and Gentiles of high and low degree, coining money and squandering it as if they owned the secret of transmutation of metals … The shops were packed to the ceilings; the streets were crowded with bales, boxes and barrels—cotton coming in, Confederate uniforms and pills of lead and quinine to pepper patriots and patients, going out. Semmes and his bold boys twisted their mustaches at every corner, danced involuntary reels and hornpipes from groggery to groggery. They were also often seen on the waxed floors of Government House, where they were always sure of a cordial reception, along with other guests from the Banshsee, and Alabama—bully chappies who brandished their revolvers in the faces of Union men, whose lives were too uncertain to insure thereabouts in those rollicking days.
Nearly one thousand miles north, the scene was much the same, according to James M. Morgan:
In Bermuda these men seemed to suffer from a chronic thirst which could only be assuaged by champagne, and one of their amusements was to sit in the windows with bags of shillings and throw handfuls of the coins to a crowd of loafing Negroes in the street, to see them scramble. It is a singular fact that five years after the war not one of these men had a dollar to bless himself with.
Some things never change. More than a century after the Civil War, South Carolina’s marijuana smugglers spent the bulk of their money on women, or on drugs to get women, says smuggler Oliver Mayfield. While Nassau was the site of some carousing, it was more commonly visited for the purpose of making bank deposits. Marijuana smugglers preferred to keep their sailboats, and occasionally raise hell, on other islands, including the fashionable St. Barts. Even during visits to less glamorous, and downright dangerous Caribbean ports, the smugglers made the most of their time. Mayfield recalls sailing into Colon, Panama, to pick up needed cash and visit a brothel with a crewman. After he finished with his own woman, Mayfield waited in a bar downstairs for his friend to join him.
And waited.
And waited.
He’s falling in love up there, Mayfield thought to himself, nervously eyeing the increasing number of Panamanians streaming into the bar. Colon had a reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere, and the $5,000 wad of cash in Mayfield’s pocket seemed to be more and more conspicuous as the bar filled with intimidating men.
Finally Mayfield struck an idea and summoned some courage.
“That was the best pussy I ever had,” he yelled across the bar, the American slang apparently understandable to the Panamanians. “And with my last $20, I’m going to buy everyone a round.”
Carefully peeling away a single bill from within his pocket, Mayfield bought the drinks and made new friends—brothers bonded by an appreciation of female anatomy. He and the crewman soon left, unmolested, and made it back to the boat.
Like their blockade-running predecessors, South Carolina’s marijuana smugglers eschewed violence as passionately as they pursued sex. Not only personally distasteful, violence was often impractical.
“It must be borne in mind, that the excitement of fighting, which some men (inexplicable, I confess, to me) really love, did not exist,” wrote Hobart-Hampden. “One was always either running away, or being deliberately pitched into by the broadsides of the American cruisers, the slightest resistance to which would have constituted piracy; whereas, capture without resistance merely entailed confiscation of cargo and vessel.”
Much more thrilling was slinging illegal cargo at midnight, sneaking in lead bullets or marijuana bales right under Uncle Sam’s nose. As Englishman Tom Taylor, a cargo supervisor aboard the blockaderunner Banshee, described evading Union ships to deliver needed Confederate Army supplies in Wilmington during the Civil War:
Hunting, pig sticking, steeple-chasing, big-game shooting, polo—I have done a little of each—all have their thrilling moments, but none can approach “running a blockade” … perhaps my readers can sympathize with my enthusiasm when they consider the dangers to be encountered, after three days of constant anxiety and little sleep, in threading our way through a swarm of blockaders, and the accuracy required to hit in the nick of time the mouth of a river only half a mile wide, without lights and with a coastline so low and featureless, that as a rule the first intimation we had of its nearness was the dim white line of the surf.
More than 120 years later, after running the same rivers, Mayfield put it much more succinctly than the Englishman: “Pussy wasn’t even fun after that.”
The conditions that had made Carolina so attractive to swashbucklers—isolated backwaters, poverty, and sparse settlement—were still intact three centuries later. In the 1970s, South Carolina’s waterways were lightly traveled. The state was still poor and relied heavily on its textile industry. It was also still sparsely developed. Compared to Florida, the South Carolina coast was virtually untouched, save for Charleston and the hotel-lined Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach.
Most important for smugglers, law enforcement in the state was weak, at least along the coast. In 1973, upon the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), only one U.S. Customs officer from South Carolina, Harold Stein, was transferred to the DEA. His territory stretched more than three hundred miles, from the border of North Carolina and South Carolina to Brunswick, Georgia.
“Needless to say,” Stein says, “it took a lot of cooperation from state and local law enforcement agencies to develop cases.”
From the outside looking in, it can be difficult to understand the division of responsibilities when it came to drug smuggling interdiction in the 1970s. Before the DEA was formed, U.S. Customs had jurisdiction over drug smuggling cases. After the DEA was formed, U.S. Customs lost that responsibility, and Customs reorganized, forming an additional
branch, the U.S. Customs Patrol. The uniformed officers of the U.S. Customs Patrol served to apprehend suspects they physically caught in the act of smuggling, but could not investigate cases based on clues, leads or informants. When they made an arrest or received a tip on any illegality, they turned the case over to special agents in the U.S. Customs office of investigations. The exception was information on drug smuggling cases, which was handed over to the DEA. The bureaucracy could easily complicate anti-smuggling efforts with overlapping jurisdictions inspiring rifts between law enforcement agencies.
“There was always the undercurrent of turf war, conflict, whatever, everybody wanting the stats,” says Lionel Lofton, an assistant U.S. attorney in Charleston from 1971 to 1983. “I spent half of my time refereeing turf wars between Customs and DEA.”
Beyond jurisdictional distractions, patrol officers suffered from a lack of equipment. The Customs Patrol office in Charleston didn’t acquire its first boat until 1975, says Mike Bell, a former patrol officer. It was a boat seized from a suspected drug smuggler. Customs Patrol offices in Savannah, Georgia, and Wilmington, he says, didn’t have boats until a year later. In fact Bell can’t remember many local law enforcement agencies having boats at that time, just game wardens and the U.S. Coast Guard. Like many Customs officers at that time, Bell had joined the agency as an air marshal in the early 1970s. In 1974, with the introduction of X-ray baggage screening, the need for air marshals declined drastically, resulting in their reassignments to other posts, including coastal patrols.