by Jason Ryan
Foy glanced in the rearview mirror. The salesman appeared tense.
“How fast you going?” Foy’s father asked.
“I’m testing it out,” he replied.
The Mercedes crested a hill and, descending, approached a ninety-degree turn. Sand had washed into the road from recent rains, and Foy applied the brakes quickly as the car rushed over the hazardous soil, sending the Mercedes into a full spin.
“I saw it, but I was going a little bit faster than I should have been,” recalls Foy, in a rare confession of poor judgment. “God almighty, it hit that sand and went SCRRRRRREEEEEECCHHH.”
When the car slid to a stop in the middle of the road, Foy’s heart was thumping. Looking over his shoulder, he stared at the car salesman. “The poor son of a bitch in the back,” says Foy, laughing. “He was a red-headed dude, and he had kind of a reddish complexion to him. Well, buddy, he was so white I thought I was looking at a ghost. I’m not kidding, I could see through him.”
More ridiculous than Foy’s driving was the frozen, spreadeagle pose the car salesman had struck during the spin. “He had gripped both the handles on top of the doors on both sides. When we stopped, and I looked back, that’s how he was … it was like he couldn’t release,” says Foy. “He just saw his whole career go down the tubes in one turn.”
Such recklessness did not go unnoticed. In the late 1970s the business partners who became rich with Foy slowly began disassociating with the brash kingpin. For Bob “The Boss” Byers, it was Foy’s unexplained disappearance in the middle of an off-load on Hilton Head that more or less severed their ties. Unloading the boat, Byers’s crew begrudgingly stacked Foy’s share of the drugs against a fence and covered the bales as daylight approached. Byers soon followed his own advice on the best way to get even with bad business associates: stop working with them.
For others, it wasn’t so easy to walk away, or affect change. As Bob “Willie the Hog” Bauer says, “It’s hard to tell some twenty-eightyear-old guy with $3 million in the bank what the fuck to do.”
In many ways the character traits that made Foy a villain are what enabled his breathtaking success in the drug underworld. He was impetuous and took too many risks. He was flashy with his money. He had little regard for others’ well-being. Foy was going to make a dollar, one smuggler said, no matter who got fucked.
In 1976, Foy was blamed, he says unfairly, for rushing an offload in the Florida Keys that led to a lobster fisherman spotting the smugglers and contacting the police. As the smugglers scrambled, with Foy swimming between keys to escape, a few men were arrested and a sixty-five-foot sport fisherman with fifteen thousand pounds of unloaded marijuana was sent on autopilot in the direction of Cuba, never to be seen by the smugglers again. One imagines a Cuban beachcomber had the find of his life soon after that debacle.
Initially grievances against Foy could be satisfied with drugs, girls, money, and heart-pounding excitement, all of which were plentiful when Flash was around. After so many frustrations, though, the charm began to wear thin.
Upset that Julian “Doc” Pernell and Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs smuggled a load into McClellanville by partnering with another South Carolinian, Foy traveled to Washington, D.C., and demanded a $150,000 payment from the men, claiming he controlled half the South Carolina coast. They claimed to have told him to “buzz off,” and didn’t see him again. Not that Foy really cared.
“Foy was burning his bridges behind him,” Toombs later testified. “There’s a lot of people in the drug business that like to burn their bridges behind them. They accrue more money, and they have got the capability of making new friends quicker than they can burn out bridges, so it is profitable.”
Among Foy’s new friends was Tom Rhoad, a young lawyer from Columbia who, at first glance, wouldn’t appear to be the best candidate to replace the savvy smugglers from whom Foy had split. The men met after Foy’s lawyer friend, Pogo Hartman, had referred Foy to his colleague Rhoad for help resolving a traffic ticket. Foy entered Rhoad’s office and approached the diminutive lawyer with wonder. Behind the desk sat a man dressed in a pink shirt, green and blue tie, and chartreuse pants. Foy thought he was looking at a rainbow.
Perhaps the multichromatic assault on Foy’s senses impaired his judgment, because he soon opened his briefcase to retrieve the citation and inadvertently exposed its other contents to Rhoad—$60,000 or so in cash. Waving the ticket in front of a seemingly catatonic Rhoad, Foy realized his gaffe and snapped shut the briefcase. Rhoad’s eyes did not waver. Moments passed before he finally promised to take care of the ticket. Days later, Hartman gave Foy a call and told him Rhoad wanted Foy to know he was always available for legal work. In the weeks that followed, the two formed a fast friendship at Hartman’s house, partying close to the governor’s mansion.
The pair was an odd couple. Rhoad had spent his early twenties learning law, and Foy had spent that time breaking it. Foy took a hands-on approach to smuggling, while Rhoad began participating as a financier, rarely stepping foot on a boat or getting his hands dirty. They both attracted attention, but in different ways. Foy favored making a name for himself through smuggling exploits, custom Porsches, and full-length mink coats. Rhoad’s style attempted to be more refined, with his preppy wardrobe and prized, powder blue classic 280 SL Mercedes convertible—the same car owned by Lee Harvey and Les Riley. His voice was nasally, and many regarded him as a prick, but others forgave his flamboyant fashion sense and particular habits because of his insatiable appetite for drugs, crude jokes, and loose women. As he became more involved with the East Coast’s marijuana smuggling underworld, he earned a variety of nicknames highlighting the aspects of his personality sure to make his mother recoil.
Foy had his own nickname for his friend—“TT Rebozo,” a play on the name of Florida banker Bebe Rebozo, President Richard Nixon’s close friend and Key Biscayne neighbor. Others knew Rhoad as “Tommy Love” or “Kinky Tom,” as friends had once discovered Rhoad in an apartment wearing a leather mask and little else. His girlfriend lay bound and gagged in a quite vulnerable position on a nearby bed.
He also had been spied prancing around a room with a woman leading him by a leash tied to his penis. Rhoad’s buddies joked that he was so consumed by sex that one of his girlfriends constantly walked around with wires running down her legs, attached to a sex toy that vibrated and produced a stimulating electrical current. When Rhoad had an apartment in New York, he’d invite prostitutes and girls, Foy says, some allegedly as young as fifteen, to have orgies and freebase cocaine, cooking the drugs on his stove for days on end.
When it came to money, Rhoad could be stingy. Riley knew Rhoad as his “2 Percent Man.” Each time Riley sold Rhoad some pot or hashish, Rhoad would complain about being shorted 2 percent or so in weight, and would pay slightly less than the agreed upon amount. After noticing a pattern of these complaints, and doubting their legitimacy, Riley stopped arguing with Rhoad and simply charged him more per pound to offset the expected loss.
Rhoad’s most popular nickname, though, was “Rolex,” and its origins are a bit ambiguous. Some surmise the nickname stems from his fondness for the expensive timepieces and the prominence they assumed on his narrow wrist. “He had this massive Presidential and, he’s small, so the watch looked twice as big on him,” says John Jamison, a former neighbor of Rhoad and an occasional smuggler. “It was the first thing you’d see.”
Others say the catchy moniker was coined after he began giving away the watches as calling cards. “One night partying, I asked why they called him Rolex. And he whipped out a new Rolex and gave it to me,” says Sanders, in a letter. “I said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna like kickin it with you fuckers!’ ”
For all his eccentricities, Rhoad’s upbringing was traditional. His parents owned a tobacco and hog farm outside the small town of Branchville, South Carolina, and, when not farming, his father delivered mail. His family attended a Baptist church, and, according to one former girlfriend, alcohol was not allowed to
be consumed in the house, per Mother’s rules. That didn’t stop Rhoad and his brothers and father, however, from sneaking a drink in other buildings on the property.
Rhoad was the oldest of four children and a quarterback on his high school football team, playing in a state championship game. At the University of South Carolina he served as a manager of the football team and belonged to a fraternity. His football experiences came as a surprise to his smuggling buddies. They, of course, saw him as a sex-crazed dandy fond of inappropriate comments and bewildering expressions. One favorite he’d often mutter in that distinctive nasal voice: “It ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.”
Bauer, a man known as both “Willie the Whale” and “Willie the Hog” because of his large size and appetite for cocaine, respectively, was particularly baffled by his small friend’s football glory days. Bauer and Foy were once at Rhoad’s house on Hilton Head when they came across a photo of Rhoad in uniform, striking an iconic football pose, with an arm cocked back, ready to throw, and head up, surveying the field. They chuckled as they kidded Rhoad about the photo, but then nearly died from laughter as Rhoad played along, re-creating the pose for them and extending and retracting his fingers to match his words. “Tom Rhoad—number eleven on the jersey, number one in your heart,” said Rhoad, hamming it up.
Rhoad and Foy lived in beachside houses a few blocks apart on Hilton Head, less than two miles up the beach from Riley. Wally Butler, in a flourish befitting the marketing mind of a Realtor, gave their community on North Forest Beach a name: DDOA, or Drug Dealers of America. By this time Riley’s fishing buddy was well aware Riley was not a yacht broker, and he began working with the men to find suitable sites to unload drugs, including a dock behind his own house.
On Hilton Head, Foy and Rhoad lazed around their houses, hanging out almost daily, smoking pot, watching sports, and going out at night. Apart from a few frantic nights of preparations for an incoming load, their lives were full of leisure. They were awash in cash, often keeping tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars around in bags and briefcases. It became a chore to keep up with so much money. It was only so often they mustered the effort to pay someone to pack wads of cash into their boots and pants and head to the bank in Nassau, or make the trip themselves.
Jamison recalls walking by Foy’s house one day and seeing a hand-tooled leather attaché case sitting conspicuously in the back of his Jeep pickup—an attractive target for a beachgoer with sticky fingers. Doing the kingpin a favor, he grabbed the case and returned it to Foy, who answered the door looking disheveled and nonchalantly thanked him. Jamison, who was suffering from financial difficulties with his charter fishing business and the IRS, was amazed to learn the case was stuffed with money.
Rhoad was no better. The only time Bauer can recall getting angry with his friend was when he flew to Hilton Head on a chartered plane to deliver a million dollars. When the plane landed and Bauer disembarked, Rhoad was nowhere to be seen. The pilot soon became impatient, wanting to make the return leg of the flight. Bauer didn’t know what to do. There was no sign of Tommy Love.
Bauer stewed. Rhoad eventually pulled up in his Mercedes, halflit, his face decorated with earrings and a pair of shades. He greeted his friend, whom he affectionately called “Young Will.” Bauer dispensed with the pleasantries, asking him what the hell took so long. “Did your mom die?” Bauer said, with some annoyance. “Did something happen to your brother?”
No, Rhoad explained, he had been trying to pick up a waitress.
Bauer was floored. As Rhoad vouched for her beauty and offered apologies—“Now, now, Young Will, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”—Bauer fumed, trying to comprehend how anyone could leave a million dollars, and a friend, sitting on a runway for hours while he flirted with a Hilton Head waitress.
Bauer also recalls taking a trip to Vegas to run an errand for Rhoad, only to find out Rhoad had skimped on the reservation and booked him at an exceedingly dumpy hotel. Bauer picked up the phone to complain. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he asked the millionaire.
Another time, Bauer rang Rhoad from Vegas, only to have Rhoad end the conversation early, informing Bauer, who was doing him another favor, that “I gotta go, this bitch is gonna blow me in cowboy boots.”
And yet another time, when Bauer had finally been booked in a reputable hotel, he spoke again to Rhoad, who giddily let him in on a secret, directing him to the third machine in a bank of pay phones. “You won’t believe this. It’s the bonanza,” Rhoad told Bauer. “Lee [Harvey] found it. You can talk for twenty minutes. It gives it back!”
That drug kingpins celebrated a pay phone that returned quarters, and protected knowledge of its existence like a national secret, is perhaps slightly understandable when one considers how often they relied on the anonymity provided by pay telephones. Almost every drug smuggler in the 1970s kept a large container of quarters in his car or home, and it was always wise to take a drive and find a pay phone instead of talking business on the home phone, lest the government be tracing calls on that line.
Even in this mundane detail of the drug business did Rhoad stand apart from his peers. He allegedly bought thousands of dollars of quarters at a time, and kept $40 at a time in a European-style “fag bag,” says Bauer.
Trips to Vegas, of course, included visits to high-end prostitutes, including one who appeared in Playboy magazine. Bauer was smitten with her, and so was Rhoad, who made it a point to detail the depth of his infatuation. “Will, she’s so fine, I would take her home at Thanksgiving,” Rhoad gushed, “and at Thanksgiving table tell Maw Maw and Daddy that I love her and that she’s a prostitute.”
Bauer found all this endearing. “I loved him like a brother,” he says. “He was fucking nuts.”
In July 1979, President Carter holed up at Camp David for ten days and invited a smattering of American leaders and citizens to meet with him and share their opinions on the state of American life. Carter was preparing to address the nation about America’s energy woes, but, after listening to the sampling of constituents and some of his advisors, he decided to deliver a broader message. For the last decade, the country had slogged through Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, and fuel shortages. These crises had taken a toll, Carter concluded, and the United States was suffering from a “crisis of confidence.”
“It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will,” Carter said in a televised address from the Oval Office. “We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation … In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”
The remarks became known as Carter’s “malaise speech.” Though his criticisms had broad application, they seem particularly insightful when applied to the case of the gentlemen smugglers. Indeed, their hedonism and avarice exemplified what Carter considered the very worst habits of modern Americans. They favored easy money. Family harmony was tenuous in the face of frequent substance abuse and cheating. Their community was loose knit, composed of a transient privileged class that moved between resort islands and beachfront towns. They worshipped money and were poster boys for conspicuous consumption, parading around in Gullwing Mercedes and Rolex watches.
The gentlemen smugglers were the epitome of an overindulgent lifestyle, and they were spreading it to whoever wanted to purchase an ounce. At least that’s one perspective. They saw it differently; they exemplified true American spirit, courage, and capitalism by trafficking a natural substance on the verge of legalization, or at least widespread decriminalization. If they didn’t pay their taxes, so what? Nobody got hurt.
Had any of the gentlemen smugglers appraised Carter’s speech— an unlikely scenario, given their general disinterest in politics—they may have agreed wholeheartedly
with his comments regarding America’s diminishing value of hard work. As young men, each of the smugglers had toiled at jobs they found unfulfilling. Foy worked as a mason, Riley a lifeguard. Harvey was a mechanic, and Byers assembled furniture and delivered soda. Their earnings were entirely inadequate for their oversize expectations of life, a week’s worth of wages easily dwarfed by earnings from a few small pot sales among friends. The smugglers saw little promise in the vocations that awaited them, following in the footsteps of their parents to become bankers, business executives, barbers, mailmen, or carpenters. There was simply no match for the excitement and income a night of smuggling could provide. As Byers told his hired hands while unloading twenty-one thousand pounds of particularly potent and pricey pot, “Remember, every bale is a BMW.”
Such quick riches cemented any disaffection smugglers might have had with traditional work. Toombs said he saved every paycheck he collected during the sixteen months he spent in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner. Boredom defined much of his service, with the exception being the occasional firefight. His heart raced during those chaotic moments in which he dodged bullets and pulled a trigger, killing strangers he barely saw.
He made additional cash by volunteering for extra guard duty. Still, it didn’t amount to much. When he was honorably discharged at twenty-one, he left with the conviction that collecting a regular paycheck doesn’t get you too far. “Working hard doesn’t necessarily mean you have money,” says Toombs. “And saving well doesn’t mean you have money.”
Drug smuggling, of course, did make him money, which enabled him to pursue his own passions on his own terms, without having to clock in. “Money is only freedom,” says Toombs. “It’s nothing else.”