by Jason Ryan
Without boats, patrolling for drug smugglers was done on land, with agents driving on island roads in the dead of night. Given the number of islands and waterways south of Charleston, a thorough patrol by automobile was nearly impossible.
“Most of the time you’d be by yourself,” recalls Chuck Pittard, a former special agent for the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, who was detailed to U.S. Customs Patrol in the early 1980s. “You used the stars and the moon and everything. But you’d have to go down there with your lights out because they could see you.”
Using tips from informants, Customs supervisors would select specific areas of the coast to concentrate the patrols, sending a handful of Customs officers to Hilton Head Island, for example, with support from state police officers and the local sheriff’s department.
“If you saw something, you would call, call for help,” says Pittard. “[Of] course you’d have the old primitive radios. Nobody was on the same frequency. Charleston County had one frequency. Customs would have a frequency. SLED would have a frequency.”
The most intensive smuggling patrols occurred each holiday season, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, to coincide with the harvesting of marijuana in Colombia. State police officers from South Carolina’s capital city would bolster the patrols, staying in motor homes or motels for a few days at a time while working night shifts. Pittard remembers keeping busy and working night after night until three or four o’clock in the morning.
“There wasn’t a whole bunch of Christmas shopping you were doing,” he says. “You weren’t going to a bunch of parties.”
Despite the long hours, the nighttime work could be enjoyable. It was certainly different from traditional police work.
“I use the word fun time,” he says.
If you were intent on catching crooks, though, it could be disappointing. The majority of patrols did not yield arrests. Without help from an informant, the searches were stabs in the dark. The agents used a phrase to describe their often-fruitless pursuits: “goat fucking”; or, in polite company, “goat roping.”
“We would be out there working and you ain’t gonna catch nothing, ya know,” Pittard explains. “You’re just a wasting your time, but you out there doing it.”
“What kind of goat fucking we going on tonight?”
Half a century earlier, fellow South Carolina law enforcement officers expressed similar exasperation in trying to intercept smugglers bringing booze into the marshes during Prohibition. South Carolina had relatively few of these smugglers in the 1920s, though, with the bulk of the nation’s rumrunners sailing to the Northeast and New York City. There they’d park along Rum Row, joining other spirits-laden ships bobbing in the ocean, just beyond the territorial waters of the United States. Speedy motorboats would rush out to meet the motley flotilla, get loaded, and shuttle the alcohol back to shore. When the Coast Guard initiated pursuit, the motorboats went to great lengths to thwart arrest, using decoy boats, smokescreens, and other ploys, all in the name of fun and money.
The Prohibition rumrunners in South Carolina were not so bold, preferring to avoid confrontation with authorities. They’d hide among barrier islands and unload liquor at remote boat landings. In a memoir, Sheriff J. E. McTeer recalled the trouble he had patrolling Hilton Head Island and the surrounding area:
Beaufort County with its hundreds of islands, three large sounds and miles of rivers and creeks was a perfect port of entry for smuggled whiskey. An army could patrol constantly and still fail to see a carefully guarded barge as it slipped through an obscure creek to run aground at the foot of a little used road. There trucks could unload tons of liquor and transport it throughout the country under the cover of darkness.
As if they were taking cues from these rumrunners, marijuana smugglers in South Carolina avoided urban centers, preferring to unload in rural areas like McClellanville, a fishing village thirty miles north of Charleston. Billboards along coastal highway U.S. 17 boasted McClellanville was the shrimp capital of South Carolina, and the title was a badge of honor for the town. Though the crustacean may not be the most magnificent of sea creatures, shrimp occupy a special place in the hearts of South Carolinians, and, when fried, a special place in their stomachs. In McClellanville, shrimping was an important livelihood. Many villagers spent months away from home, dragging shrimp nets off Florida in colder months before moving north to South Carolina for the summer and fall shrimping seasons. On the way home some shrimp boats made a detour, heading south all the way to Colombia to bring home a product that fetched a much higher price per pound than shrimp. Even better, it didn’t need to be kept on ice.
U.S. Customs agents were not unaware of the marijuana coming into McClellanville, and Customs officers occasionally patrolled the waters outside the village at night, hoping to make a bust. Wary of being compromised by eavesdroppers, and in a nod to the billboards, Customs agents referred to the village as the “Capital City” when discussing their patrols on the radio. Thanks to Foy, it wouldn’t be long before they considered McClellanville the state’s marijuana smuggling capital as well.
The hamlet and its tranquil surroundings suited Foy’s needs just perfectly. Despite the village docks being just a short cruise from the Intracoastal Waterway, the prime spots to smuggle were a few miles north of McClellanville, on the banks of plantations that lined the waterway. The land belonged to wealthy, unsuspecting out-of-town families who seldom visited their coastal estates. Any chains around the properties’ gates were easily removed, allowing a small convoy of trucks to rush in and head toward water’s edge. Most of these trucks were provided by new business partners Foy had made in 1974—the pair of talented distributors from northern Virginia: Pernell and Toombs.
Pernell and Toombs had met years earlier in The Place Where Louie Dwells, a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Toombs was a cook; Pernell did the taxes, as his father-in-law owned the place. At that time Pernell, a native of North Carolina, worked as an accountant, negotiating loans for small businesses. He also ran a gambling house, taking bets on ball games and organizing poker and craps games. He was busted in 1972, but escaped conviction because police executed search warrants illegally. Toombs marveled at Pernell’s ability to break the law, and claimed that if Pernell was offered $100,000 to tell the truth and $10,000 to lie, he’d lie because it was more enjoyable.
Toombs was born in Vienna, Virginia, and, after high school, was drafted into the Army for sixteen months, serving much of it in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner in the 1st Cavalry Division. Coming home at age twenty-one, he gambled and hustled at Virginia pool halls for three years. The experience was instructive: He learned not to fear losing everything he had.
Though he didn’t care to smoke pot himself, his friends in the pool hall did. Toombs began selling it, and soon started driving out to Arizona three times a month for Mexican pot, motoring for two and a half days each way. He didn’t fear getting caught, but the drive was a grind, no matter the cargo and the money it would make him.
“You get an adrenaline rush, but you get through that,” recalls Toombs. “Everything basically comes down to work when it’s repetitive. It’s a job.”
Five years after Pernell and Toombs struck up their friendship, Toombs’s connections in Arizona had dried up. Both men were eager to discover new sources of pot, so Pernell asked a friend in Key West, Florida, for help. The friend arranged an introduction to Foy in the Coconut Grove Hotel in Miami, where Foy offered Pernell the chance to invest in a boat he’d be sending to Colombia. Pernell declined.
Three months later, however, Foy called Pernell and advised him the boat was returning. Would he like to buy some of its cargo now? This time, Pernell said yes, and Foy instructed him to drive down from his home outside the nation’s capital to McClellanville, the shrimp capital.
Without the help of local watermen, smuggling into McClellanville was a nearly impossible endeavor. It was difficult to navigate the shallow, serpentine creeks that separate the Intracoa
stal Waterway from the Atlantic Ocean, especially at night. To avoid disaster, Foy usually required the large sailboats and trawlers he loaded in Colombia to wait offshore when they reached McClellanville. Once the skippers radioed in, local men would pilot small boats out to meet them and transfer the pot. Despite Foy’s best intentions, things rarely went smoothly.
One time shuttle boats got caught by a falling tide, leaving the crafts stranded in dry creek beds and forcing panicky smugglers to stash marijuana bales on a marsh island until they could be removed the next night. Another time, Foy didn’t have enough trucks to cart off the marijuana, so they stuck thousands of pounds of pot in the woods for a few days and covered the bales with a tarp. It looked like a marijuana mountain. Another time the boat arrived from Colombia four days earlier than expected, forcing Foy to scramble his off-loaders and unload the drugs. No matter how much practice and preparation, every deal was a potential disaster.
“All that was so unorganized and haphazard and crazy the way it happened,” says McClellanville shrimper and smuggler Billy Graham. “The communications and all were always fucked up and backwards.”
Foy, however, was a master of improvisation, able to pull off each caper in McClellanville without attracting the attention of the authorities. It may not have always been pretty, but Foy resolved whatever problems came his way, pulling ten thousand pounds of pot off boats at a time and quickly getting it on the road. Within a few weeks any frustrations felt by his hired hands washed away when he handed out paper bags stuffed with cash.
Chapter Three
Despite being born more than a hundred miles inland, it wasn’t until he was at least a day’s sail away from shore that Les Riley felt at peace, finding rhythm in rolling waves and ocean winds. He was a restless man and discovered early in his adulthood that a sailboat was the perfect place for him to call home. A sailboat meant freedom, and escape was always available through a few tugs. Just yank up the anchor and the sailboat was loose. Just yank up the halyard and the mainsail rose and filled with wind. Then the sailboat would move wherever Riley pointed it.
Thanks to the success of his early ventures with Barry Foy and others, Riley and his girlfriend, Suzanne, were able to buy a sailboat to call their own. They purchased a thirty-five-foot wooden Cheoy Lee sloop about 1975, named her Whisper, and lived aboard as they cruised the Bahamas, snorkeling, swimming, and fishing. Theirs was a simple existence in which they stretched the money Riley made from smuggling pot, going without comforts like air-conditioning or refrigeration. All their clothes, Riley says, could fit in a single suitcase. He kept their sailboat orderly, with each belonging assigned its proper place.
Suzanne became pregnant aboard Whisper, and in 1975 she gave birth to daughter Leah in Nassau. About this time Riley started making more money by organizing his own smuggling ventures, quietly earning a small fortune. He met businessmen in the Bahamas who steered him toward investments, such as gold and securities. The day’s interest rates were high, giving Riley a good return on his money. His wealth would have surprised most of his friends from college and Key West, who had dismissed Riley as too laid-back to ever work seriously at anything.
Wealthy or not, living aboard a sailboat with a small child had its hassles. A year or so after Leah was born, Suzanne pleaded with Les to move back to the United States. Riley acceded to her demand, but only on the condition they find a home “no further north than Charleston, no further west than A1A or Highway 17.” The young family settled on sneaker-shaped Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and purchased a home in the fashionable Sea Pines Plantation subdivision. On one side of the gated community stretched the beach and ocean, where Riley bought a house. On the other side, along the back of the island, were tranquil marshes that lined Calibogue Sound. On this side, too, sat Harbour Town Marina, where shops and restaurants surrounded boat docks. A small lighthouse served as the marina’s landmark.
Developer Charles Fraser had started Sea Pines Plantation in 1957 on timberland owned by his family. The graduate of Yale Law School sought to build luxury homes there without disrupting the natural grace and beauty of the island. Just years earlier, Hilton Head Island residents went without paved roads, telephones, and a bridge to the mainland. The development of Sea Pines changed all this. Fraser developed approximately five thousand acres in Sea Pines, but sought to leave at least 25 percent of the land undisturbed.
By the mid 1970s, many more people than just the Rileys discovered Hilton Head. The island’s sleepy pace of life gave way to an energized atmosphere trucked in by developers and tourists. Tennis courts and golf courses started to appear, with Sea Pines hosting prestigious professional tournaments for both sports. Businessmen carved other resort subdivisions on the island. There was a belief, though, especially among those associated with Sea Pines, that residential development could be accomplished while maintaining the serene setting. People had big ideas about how Hilton Head could be made different than other spoiled paradises. Among them was Wally Butler, a former executive with the Sea Pines Plantation Company who moved to the island in 1958 and bought a house on Calibogue Sound. After leaving the company, he sold real estate in the area and engaged in a legal fight with his former employer regarding the development of nature preserves in Sea Pines that he argued were supposed to be protected.
A recovering alcoholic who chain-smoked to help stay sober, Butler’s odd sense of humor earned him the nickname “Weird Wally.” But more than weird, he was an affable man and an excellent fisherman. Upon being introduced to Riley, he became the smuggler’s fast friend, even though Riley was about fourteen years younger than Butler. Butler encouraged his new friend, whom he understood to be a Florida yacht broker, to invest in real estate on the island. Residential lots in Sea Pines could be purchased for a few thousand dollars, and Riley scooped up land, including a piece of waterfront property just down the street from Butler. Riley saw great resale value in the land and figured he’d made enough money from smuggling to live comfortably for the rest of his life, so long as he invested wisely. There was nowhere else he wanted to be.
“Hilton Head had the Montessori schools. They had the bike paths—it was beautiful,” says Riley. “No streetlights or stoplights or anything like that. Great place to raise a family. So I basically retired and Wally and I fished.”
Two years after delivering daughter Leah, Suzanne gave birth to a son, Justin. Riley would take the kids down to play on the beach, just a short walk from their home. Almost every day, Riley could be found catching a tan on the sand, reading newspapers, or doing crossword puzzles. As the day wore on, he held court at the nearby tiki bar.
Coming back from a fishing trip one day with Butler, Riley cruised toward the Harbour Town lighthouse, ready to call it a day. On the dock were two men, one of them flashing a big grin. Riley greeted the smiling man, a college friend who’d just served time in prison. He invited him to jump down into the boat. The men cruised back out into the sound and started to catch up. As Riley would later write to a judge, “This was the biggest mistake of my life.”
The Harvey family of Alexandria, Virginia, operated a service station on Fort Hunt Road and had just about as many kids as gas pumps. Seven boys were born to that family, and by the time each was a teenager, he helped run the family business, rotating tires, pumping gas, or performing some light mechanical work. Dad paid them a buck an hour, which the boys regarded as big money at the time.
The oldest was Butch, born in 1947. A year later came brother Lee. A year after that came Tom. After taking a break, the next Harvey boy, Michael, came four years later and was followed by the birth of the other siblings. The boys attended parochial school until the eighth grade, and it was Lee who gave the nuns the most grief. Even when he wasn’t causing mischief, recalls Tom, Lee would often get blamed.
“Lee always had a smile that said, ‘I’m guilty,’” he says. “He had kind of a crooked grin.”
The smile served him well in high school, where Lee was voted the
best looking in his class. He never had a problem getting dates with the cutest girls and was a good student and athlete. He could be regarded as quiet, but was extremely outgoing, his brothers say, and loved to read and engage in conversation.
“Intelligent, good looking, unbelievable charisma,” says Tom. “People were just drawn to him.”
Conscious of his appeal, Lee took great care in his appearance, staying neatly groomed and wearing preppy clothing. He required his mother to iron his boxer shorts, and if he got oil on his uniform at the service station, he promptly took it off and changed into another. It was at the service station where he practiced his charm, doing his best to earn nickel tips from customers. At home he was the same way with his brothers, hoodwinking them into deals with lopsided returns and convincing them they were making out like bandits.
“Lee started a lawnmower service where he made all the money and I did most of the work,” says Tom. “We’d get paid $2.50 to do a yard, and I’d get 50 cents … [but] you would walk away thinking, ‘Man, he’s a great guy.’ ”
“Yeah, he was real good at that,” says Michael.
“If you wash and wax my car for me, I’ll give you a ride over to Timmy’s house,” he recalls Lee saying.
“Great,” replied Michael. “It’s a whole block away!”
If he sometimes leveraged his age and smarts, other times he was genuinely nice. Michael remembers his older brother teaching him how to throw a baseball and coming to his baseball games to support him. Oftentimes he’d stop by on a Saturday night before meeting friends, just to tell Michael he was proud of him.
“He didn’t stick around long, but he would always come by and encourage me and help me,” says Michael. “He was a great brother, just a super brother.”