by Jason Ryan
In 1966, when Lee was about seventeen, his father passed away after suffering a series of heart attacks. Lee then left for the University of South Carolina, where he studied business, joined a fraternity, and dated more pretty girls. One of them, Cameron Currie, remembers going to a football game and party with Lee. He dated her roommate for a while, too. All the girls at the University of South Carolina had a crush on Lee, she says, and he stood out as preppy, known as the first boy on campus to wear a pink shirt.
As Lee was finishing college, his older brother, Butch, was killed in Vietnam along with fourteen other Marines, including a highly decorated colonel, William Leftwich. On November 18, 1970, Butch boarded a helicopter in heavy fog to rescue seven soldiers surrounded by an enemy division in mountainous terrain. After the rescue team extracted the men by dangling a rope ladder from the helicopter, the chopper banked and crashed into a mountain, killing the entire crew and all the rescued soldiers. A Marine chaplain and honor guard knocked on the Harvey door days later to break the news. Lee, now the oldest male in the family, had to identify his brother’s body. The charred corpse was almost unrecognizable, a far cry from the handsome, athletic, and fearless man who went off to war. Years later, Lee confided to his brother Tom that, “I’d wish to God I’d never seen him.”
“Things like that really set you back,” says Michael. “When there’s something going on in the country that you absolutely despise and hate like that freaking war in Vietnam and somebody that you love and admire comes home in a box. It just, it does something to you.”
After graduating from the University of South Carolina with a marketing degree, Lee Harvey enrolled a year later at the university to obtain a master’s degree in business administration. His graduate schooling would be interrupted, however, by his arrest in 1974 for certain extracurricular activities: Harvey had acquired hundreds of pounds of marijuana for a northern Virginia drug ring. He was convicted of conspiracy and interstate travel to facilitate an illegal act, and sentenced to three years in prison.
Fortunately for Harvey, federal prisoners in the 1970s often served a third of their time, earning early release dates through good behavior and parole. After leaving prison, he called up a college buddy and asked for his help. Harvey told the old pal he was trying to get in touch with a fraternity brother from the University of South Carolina, Les Riley. Did he know where he could find him?
Yes, the classmate answered, offering to drive Harvey to Hilton Head to see Riley. He even loaned his friend money for a hotel room. They arranged to meet Riley on a dock near the Harbour Town lighthouse, just as Riley returned from fishing. Standing on the dock, the classmate watched Harvey climb into the boat with Riley and exchange greetings. The reunited friends motored off into the sunset while the classmate yelled after them, reminding Harvey he needed to pay him for the hotel bill. The message went unheeded, and the former classmate didn’t see Harvey for another six months.
“He was gone,” he says. “He stiffed me.”
Lee Harvey’s friends say that he was determined to move beyond the family gas station, unwilling to live life as a grease monkey. When he was arrested and developed a criminal record, though, his hopes of being a legitimate businessman were dashed. He viewed his conviction as a stain he could not remove, no matter how many times he changed his shirt. To pursue a conventional career, too, would deny his God-given criminal talents.
In college Harvey had sold some pot and hash oil, but he wasn’t thought to be nearly as devoted to peddling drugs as someone like Barry Foy. Most classmates remember that Harvey was always grinning, a habit that earned him the nickname “Smiley.” Riley remembers Harvey for the way he could snag a date with any woman he wanted.
“He was a good guy,” says Riley. “Fun to be around because all the girls liked him, so you could pick up his leftovers.”
Harvey’s purpose for meeting Riley was not to reminisce about their glory days, but to re-create them. He told Riley he wanted to learn the smuggling business and become his partner. He tried to make the offer enticing, explaining he knew people who wanted to buy any marijuana they could bring in.
“I’ve got people, and you’ll teach me the business,” Harvey told Riley. “You don’t have to do anything, except show me what to do.”
As he would realize years later, Harvey’s appearance marked a crossroads for Riley. Seven years earlier, he’d dropped out of college to crew boats and cut lawns in the Florida heat, scrounging together any cash he could to rent shacks during island vacations. Now he owned slices of a resort island, including a beachside home. He had a wife and young family, and a fat bank account, too. Any crimes he had committed were long forgotten; the marijuana he smuggled already smoked. The worst thing he could imagine happening is some problem with the IRS. It was nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
But Riley was a little bit bored in his paradise, and itching to travel again. He agreed to take his insistent friend on as a partner, and explained to Suzanne that if she wanted to keep on living as they were, she’d need to permit him some freedoms. He might need to leave home from time to time, Riley said, and he might miss the occasional holiday. It was critical for him to take care of business when it needed to be done.
That Harvey could lure Riley out of retirement was no surprise. Like almost everyone else in the world, Riley was susceptible to Smiley’s charms. Harvey could exert a pull on people whether they were strangers or loved ones, friends or foes. When his brother Tom was pulled over for drunk driving in Jacksonville, Florida, after a day at the beach, Harvey stopped the car he was driving to talk to the cop, persuading him to let his brother go and continue driving a half-mile more to his hotel. After his first stint in prison, he prepared for a visit by his parole officer by taking Tom’s two- and five-year-old daughters across the street from the family service station for ice cream. When the parole officer stopped by the garage and flashed his badge, he advised Tom he was here to see Lee.
“He’ll be right back,” Tom said.
Glancing out a window moments later, the parole officer observed Lee crossing the street, flanked by two cute little girls. Each had a hand held tight by Lee as they watched for traffic. The other hands clutched ice-cream cones.
“Oh my God,” muttered the parole officer. “I can see where this is going.”
When dealing with friends and smuggling associates, who were essentially one and the same, Lee Harvey could be similarly transparent yet somehow able to get away with it. Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs began to work extensively with Harvey after discovering the Virginia natives had mutual friends and business partners in South Carolina. He could cajole you like a used-car salesman, says Toombs, but was exceedingly sophisticated.
“He was a charmer. He could lie to you and you’d like it,” said Toombs. “He had the gift. I mean, a serious gift.”
It was with Toombs and his partner Julian “Doc” Pernell that Harvey and Riley tried their first deal together. While Riley had extensive experience using boats to smuggle marijuana, Harvey convinced him to use a plane to get some Colombian pot. Against his better judgment, Riley agreed, accepting responsibility for refueling the plane in the Bahamas and bribing Customs officials to look the other way. Although they planned to be picking up only thirty-six hundred pounds of pot, it was good marijuana and would fetch high prices. Plus, a plane could make the trip much faster than a boat, and the pilot they hired was known to make more than one trip to Colombia in a day.
On March 6, 1978, Harvey, Pernell, Toombs, and others waited on the ground in Sylvania, Georgia, for the loaded airplane to arrive from the Bahamas. Minutes after the plane landed at about ten-thirty at night, they began moving the marijuana into waiting trucks, which sped away. A minute after the trucks left, the smugglers found themselves in handcuffs.
For months, it turned out, they had been meeting with an informer and undercover federal agents posing as smugglers. The agents had tricked the smugglers into thinking the airport was a private Georgia ai
rstrip, when in fact it was the municipal airport for the town of Sylvania. Police sprang from the woods and stopped the speeding trucks, seizing the marijuana. As an appeals court decision later boasted of the sting, “No ambush was ever more successfully laid or executed.”
The smugglers flew down lawyers from Alexandria, Virginia, to arrange for their bail. Meanwhile, Riley sweated it out in the Bahamas, unsure if his name had been mentioned to authorities. To his relief, it hadn’t. After posting bond, Harvey eventually called his panicked friend and said he wanted to try another deal. This time, though, they’d use boats.
Despite it being a violation of his parole, the Georgia arrest didn’t faze Harvey. A couple thousand pounds of pot was not large enough to warrant major punishment under drug laws at the time. If he had been caught in Florida, where drug running was rampant, he might not even have been prosecuted. In fact the likelihood of receiving nothing more than a five-year prison sentence, of which a convict might serve only a third, was a major reason so many were willing to smuggle marijuana. For Harvey’s most recent arrest, he predicted a light punishment he could endure with ease.
“They’re gonna give me two years,” he told a friend. “I can do that standing on my head.”
Marijuana use was of course exceedingly common among the youth of the 1960s and 1970s, with pot often smoked in public. Despite laws against its use, marijuana was not overwhelmingly condemned by the public, and many Americans favored regulation over prohibition. In 1978 eleven states did not consider possession of small amounts of marijuana a criminal offense, and President Jimmy Carter urged for reduced punishments of marijuana users. Paradoxically, that was the last thing smugglers wanted to hear. Heaven help the smugglers if marijuana was legalized—then they wouldn’t make any money.
Punishment was also minimal for drug runners like Bob Byers, Foy, Harvey, and Riley because they refused to carry guns or traffic cocaine. Although they all enjoyed snorting a line or two (or more), the men opted not to smuggle cocaine, despite its potential for enormous profits. Disturbed by the emergence of automatic weapontoting cocaine cowboys in Florida, they thought cocaine smuggling brought “bad juju” and was an invitation for violence.
When the Colombians tossed a few keys of cocaine on board a boat loaded with marijuana, an angry confrontation often ensued, with smugglers demanding they take it off. When someone carried a gun to a deal, they were shamed, as the presence of a firearm put a chill on the deal. How could you trust someone who might shoot you, they asked? Why would anyone ever shoot someone, anyway, when there was so much more money to be made? If there’s a problem, they reasoned, we’ll just make it right next time.
Given their aversion to violence, refusal to participate in the cocaine trade, and partially completed college educations, the marijuana smugglers of South Carolina and their partners earned the label “gentlemen smugglers.” The authorities charged with catching, prosecuting, and punishing the smugglers considered them fairly civil, at least compared to other drug-related criminals. Defense lawyers felt the same way. These were men they felt comfortable taking home to dinner, they said, and some might even be allowed to date their daughters, though there’s no doubt they’d break the poor girls’ hearts.
It wasn’t a label totally embraced by the men. Self-deprecating smuggler Skip Sanders writes: “as for that tag … ‘gentleman smuggler’ … total front. Total bs. ‘chicken shit smuggler’ would have been more appropriate.”
Among the men unshaken by consequence and previous drug smuggling convictions was Christy Campbell, a young boat captain born into a prominent family who lived on a plantation outside Beaufort, South Carolina, north of Hilton Head Island. After high school Campbell finagled subsequent jobs as a captain in South Florida for two wealthy New York clothing industry executives, despite having no experience piloting yachts. During a trip to the Bahamas with one of his employers, he bumped into Riley, an old acquaintance, who said he might be able to use a boat captain. Campbell quit his job and sailed boats for Riley and Harvey, making a number of runs from Colombia to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where’d they unload at a house owned by Riley’s friend, Bruce MacDougall. Campbell’s friend Kenny Gunn, a Miami lounge lizard who bore a resemblance to actor Burt Reynolds, often served as a crewman. Between the two and another crewman, they’d make $200,000 a trip.
The more trips Campbell did, the more he became known for his brazenness, which could no doubt be an asset when carting eight thousand pounds on each run, trying to zoom up the Gulf Stream in record time without getting intercepted by the Coast Guard. Yet his over-the-top personality irritated some colleagues. Toombs recalls Campbell arriving at Cape Cod and “bragging about how South Carolinians smuggle better than anybody else and how he was always on time.” When Riley and Campbell began to have differences, Riley was happy to let his new partner, Harvey, interact with the brash captain Riley had nicknamed “Captain Crunch.” Riley believed Campbell could be reckless and provocative. On the other hand, Campbell would sail wherever he was asked, with no hesitation.
“Christy was Lee’s boy,” said a fellow smuggler. “All he had to do was point and Christy would go.”
In November 1978, Campbell, Gunn, and Ashley Brunson were sailing past the Bahamas one evening, loaded with pot, when it turned dark. A Coast Guard cutter was nearby, and Campbell decided to leave the boat’s running lights off. The Coast Guard spied the sailboat Love Affair anyway and soon busted the crew, hauling them back to Miami. It was another hiccup for Riley and Harvey, but one they could tolerate. The sailboat crew was released without being charged. More important, plenty of their other ventures had been successful. They were making millions.
Chapter Four
To hear Skip Sanders tell it, the best seats in the house were by the window. There, regulars at downtown Charleston’s 82 Queen could see the cars that rolled by and the women that stepped in. The restaurant was a popular hangout for area marijuana smugglers, and the initiated were well aware that Barry Foy owned a share in the fashionable eatery. Such ownership was inspiring to small-time smugglers, an indication that drug running could be a steppingstone to legal and lucrative business. Unlike Foy, most smugglers did not have the heart to lead a full lifetime of crime.
Sanders’s position among South Carolina’s smugglers was unique. His grandmother owned a 325-acre plantation named West Bank on nearby Edisto Island, and its defining features, at least from a smuggler’s point of view, were not its marsh views, ample farmland, or the nearby antebellum plantation house, but rather the remains of a deepwater dock and its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean.
Sanders had noticed smugglers using his grandmother’s isolated property since 1973. One morning he’d raked up twenty pounds of pot left behind from the previous night. If they could afford to leave behind twenty pounds of top-notch pot, then they could certainly afford to pay a price for safe passage through his family farm. The Sanders family already leased acreage to tomato farmers. In November 1979, Sanders began offering one-night leases of the bluff to men who sold another type of crop.
“The first one, I went from deadass, flatass broke, to being handed a briefcase a week later containing eighty large,” Sanders recalled. “Hello. It was on. I quit college and became a professional ‘spot’ salesman.”
In Charleston, Sanders enjoyed a certain harmless notoriety, though he kept some clear-headed perspective on the depth of his involvement. He maintained a reverence for the men he believed to be the real entrepreneurs. Foy, or Flash, particularly impressed Sanders, not only for his boldness and success, but for his wit. Sanders thought it was brilliant that Foy referred to money as “dust,” because it accumulates all around him.
In letters from prison filled with curious punctuation, Sanders reflected on 82 Queen’s significance:
“see there?” this is why we sling weed. for a secure life down the road. this guy has a business. the Queen gave us hope some risks could [be] overcome. the QUEEN was argument whenever the girlfriends wou
ld all ask, “why not quit?” can’t, liquor lips. need more dust to buy one of these …
the Queen was youth and health and easy dust. leggy gals. and not dumb asses either. one day, i had a 911 parked outside and the prettiest sonofabitch in the place sittin’ there all starry eyed at me. i thought, “how the fuck did this happen?” … we all had chunks-o-dust. sacks-o-blast [cocaine]. bottles-o-dom. when i think how many bottles i sucked back in the Queen? if i said a hundred, i’d probably be off. as in not enough….
sometimes, the godfather, FLASH, would breeze up in his. but his was different. it was a turbo, special import from Germany. flash gave me my lesson on Porsches one night just after I bought my first one, a 924 turbo. pure junk. he was at my house one night and we went to town … he said, let’s take my turbo, you drive. well, getting on the interstate, flash had me redline that machine. incredible. seems like it was 70-80 mph in first gear, 100-110 in second, and about 135 in third….
later that night, i gave the girlfriend the 924 and bought a real one [a 911] a week later. there is nothing like ’em. it ruined me for life.
Foy owned no less than four Porsches in his twenties and early thirties, and his frequent automobile purchases made for some interesting interactions with car salesmen lucky enough to have him as a customer. Arriving in shorts and flip-flops to showrooms full of luxury cars, Foy would return the next day with a paper bag full of cash, dumping it unceremoniously on salesmen’s desks as they scrambled to close the office door and drop the window blinds. Sometimes, though, he made them work for their money.
At a dealership in his hometown of Columbia, Foy once brought his father along to test-drive a Mercedes sedan. Father and son piled into the front seats as the salesman slid into the center of the back bench. Foy motored out of town, charging along a rural road. His foot grew heavy on the accelerator, and the speedometer needle climbed smoothly past one hundred miles per hour.