by Jason Ryan
If the gentlemen smugglers owned too many things, it was easy to understand why. When you’re an exceptionally good smuggler, you’re rewarded with excessive amounts of cumbersome cash. You’re net worth can double, triple, quadruple, or more in one night. Money can quickly become a nuisance, though one that many people are glad to help you resolve.
You can do two things with money: save it or spend it. Saving was harder for the smugglers, requiring trips to overseas banks and hours of bill counting, or, alternatively, finding secluded spaces, such as a spare bedroom closet, to store it. The closet, though, could fill up quickly, and it wasn’t the safest place to store hundreds of thousands of dollars. Foy was robbed once at his Hilton Head beach house, $10,000 or so snatched from a concealed closet safe he had left open. It was spare change to the kingpin, but it could have bought him a car.
Those who opted for sticking profits in foreign bank accounts or safe deposit boxes were running similar risks, counting on their frequently drug-addled brains to recall where they stashed their cash. It was easier for them to buy things, remembering where they parked their Mercedes or where they docked a sailboat. Spending was a requirement, too, for keeping up appearances in a violencefree underworld where power needed to be projected more often than proved. Sanders says he’d try to keep up with Jimmy Connors, comparing the tennis star’s winning purses at tournaments to the money Sanders made leasing his grandmother’s riverfront property a night at a time. Another smuggler, upon locking his keys in his convertible, used a pocketknife to cut open the car’s cloth top and retrieve them instead of walking back into his apartment building and riding an elevator up to retrieve a set of spare keys. He’d rather replace the top than waste time.
The smugglers bought fur coats, cashmere clothing, and thick gold chains, otherwise known as Mr. T starter kits, after the heavily gilded member of the A-Team. They ordered the most expensive bottles of wine and champagne when dining out, but not necessarily the best. Sometimes they dined in, ordering one of everything off room service menus. One smuggler was said to have taken a date aboard the Concorde jet to Paris for dinner, then jetted back home that same night, just because they could. As a rule, Riley only flew first class, reasoning that you meet more interesting people that way.
Harvey earned the nickname “Lee Lear,” given his penchant for traveling aboard a private Learjet. Harvey patronized the charter services of Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based pilot Harvey Hop, and the aviator’s newly formed business Hop-A-Jet, allegedly persuading Hop to perform barrel rolls in his aircraft. One wonders if Hop ultimately appreciated the irony of flying Harvey and his band of fellow millionaire marijuana smugglers in the same aircraft he used to transport celebrities that included Nancy Reagan. The future First Lady and Harvey, who very well may have sat in the same Learjet seat, had opposite agendas in life. While Reagan would seek to decrease Americans’ drug use with her “Just Say No” campaign, Harvey brought in drugs by the boatload, organizing a handful of deals at a time. It was Harvey who stepped into a Las Vegas hotel room one day, lamenting the latest news to Bauer.
“Hey Willie, I’ve got a problem. I just read in the paper today high school kids are smoking less marijuana,” deadpanned Harvey. “We got to get those numbers up, it’s bad for the market share.”
Beyond Carter’s claims that rampant materialism was poisoning America’s soul, the perils of runaway consumption included attachment to objects. For freewheeling smugglers, forever looking over their shoulders and trying to stay three steps ahead of authorities, attachment could be problematic. If you bought a home, you’ve created a paper trail and public record, as well as a place where the neighbors will recognize you. If you bought a boat or plane, you’re responsible for its maintenance, storage, and registration, which also creates a paper trail. With almost all things, including women, it was better to use it once and leave it behind. Not that anyone listened, but a smuggler named Diamond Jim once said, “If it fucks, flies, or floats, rent it.”
Rent women they did, though they preferred high-end prostitutes as opposed to streetwalkers. The gentlemen smugglers referred to women as whores so often, one cannot be certain when that meant there was formal exchange of money for sex and when they enjoyed the company of loose women looking for a more causal receipt of excitement and drugs. When the smugglers did turn to prostitutes, they did it because they were sex crazed, not sex starved. None of the men had much trouble getting a date or a regular girlfriend, though they might have trouble keeping them from heartbreak due to infidelities. Some smugglers flew in call girls by seaplane and invited them aboard chartered yachts, where, for example, they nicknamed the stateroom the “Briar Patch.” The girls pranced around the boat in bikinis, enjoying unlimited amounts of drugs while coquettishly cooing to the men, “Ooh, don’t throw us in the Briar Patch.”
They were thrown in the Briar Patch, and they got pricked.
Rhoad met a woman who would become one of his steady girl-friends in Key West in 1979, walking with Foy into a Duvall Street shoe store and picking out a few pairs of designer cowboy boots. While browsing, he flirted with the saleswoman and co-owner, Maura Mooney, and handed her a huge bag of cocaine. Mooney accepted the gift, ducked into the storeroom, snorted a line, and then returned the powder to Rhoad. He pulled out a wad of cash to purchase the boots and made plans with Mooney to go out that same evening, and then the next day, too.
“It didn’t take long for him to open up at all. As a matter of fact, before he left town, which I think was three days, he had pretty much divulged himself to me. I knew exactly what he did,” recalls Mooney. “Maybe he needed to be that way with somebody, I’m not sure.”
She moved in with Rhoad at his home on Hilton Head Island, where she occupied her time by taking care of their dog, cleaning the house, and abusing cocaine. She soon got bored, unaccustomed to being without work. She frequently saw Foy, who was inseparable from Rhoad, and marveled at his cheating and the fact that his headstrong girlfriend never walked away.
“He also did a lot of screwing around. But they all did,” says Mooney. “Shameless, absolutely shameless.”
In summers, when the weather became hot, Rhoad and Mooney moved to his home on Nantucket, Massachusetts. When the weather cooled, they headed to St. Barts and rented a house next to the Rileys. Other smugglers had similar seasonal travel schedules. Wherever the smugglers went, says Mooney, they enjoyed smoking the finest pot and drinking the best liquors. There was usually a party somewhere, and she used cocaine daily.
Mooney remembers listening to singer Jimmy Buffett in a small St. Barts club with Suzanne Riley. During his performance, they both ducked into the restroom to snort some lines.
“Sue asked me if Tom had any coke,” says Mooney, who thought the answer was fairly obvious. “I said ‘Yeaaaah!’ ”
Buffett was popular on the island, and counted a number of the gentlemen smugglers as buddies. His close friend, Larry “Groovy” Gray, sailed with Riley and a handful of the South Carolinians, joining them on pot runs to Jamaica and Colombia. Buffett hauled a few bales himself, according to an article in the October 4, 1979, Rolling Stone magazine, and the singer lived in the smugglers’ midst, the artist and criminals inspiring each other.
“St. Barts is a tiny, splendid island. Its populace is packed with sunbaked American and European hippies with lots of money and no visible means of support,” wrote journalist Chet Flippo. “They sit around at places like the topless and sometimes bottomless beach over by the Hotel Jean Bart, drinking pineapple juice and greenies [Heinekens]. At night they slip their boats out into the opalescent waters to take care of business.”
For as many smugglers that were on the island, there seemed to be even more beautiful, blond American hippie women. The women were not shy, and during Flippo’s brief visit to see Buffett, the journalist had his pants unzipped in a bar and a pigtailed blonde advised Buffett to drink pineapple juice so as to sweeten the taste of his semen. One of Buffett’s favorite haunts
on St. Barts was Le Select Bar, where the regulars greeted him with a casual, “Hey, Jim, howzit?”
The bar, Flippo wrote, was “a real crossroads for smugglers and other exotic charlatans. It’s a tawdry, open-air, whitewashed-stone joint with outhouses that would make a sewer rat gag, but the clientele makes the place, I suppose. Naked hippie children crawl across the floor, hard-eyed hippies whisper conspiratorially in English, French and Spanish at the bar, dogs wander in and out.”
At night, discos raged in the hills, with tourists slinking out of clothes as they danced. Those who wanted a quieter night stayed aboard anchored sailboats, watching the moonrise. If sitting on a sailboat, signs of intoxication assaulted almost every sense, wrote Flippo. One smelled marijuana wafting across the harbor, saw glowing joints, and heard clinking glasses. It was undoubtedly paradise, and Buffett’s tunes served as the official soundtrack.
“The local drug smugglers—Lord, they swear by the man and would no more make a run in their boats without Buffett cassettes on board than set sail without a few cases of greenies [Heineken beers].”
Both Foy and Riley owned homes on St. Barts, and the other gentlemen smugglers made regular appearances. Smuggler Freddy Fillingham, who rented a house above St. Jean Bay, writes of cruising in his motorboat and seeing Byers leaving St. Barts in 1979, bound for the other side of the world:
As I was coming in the harbour this really pretty boat was coming out. Somehow he recognized me as I turned to run alongside and admire the boat. He said come aboard, didn’t even slow down, so I pulled alongside, hopped aboard and towed my Whaler behind. He showed me all around. She was a light green … brand new Bowman 57 ketch. Really nice. I asked where he was going and he said “The Panama Canal” “and then across the Pacific.” He had some party chicks on there and said “Come with us” and I might have if I had a passport.
Byers had decided to stop smuggling in the late 1970s, and instead traveled to England to supervise the construction of his yachts Energy and Anonymous of Rorc, both of which were fifty-seven-foot bluewater sailboats built by Bowman Yachts. Before he left to sail through the Pacific, including a stop in Fiji, he encouraged smugglers like Foy to include his friends in deals, hiring them as off-loaders and drivers. For as much time as the smugglers were spending away from South Carolina, they still returned to the Palmetto State often to conduct business, which was booming.
Among the successful ventures conducted by Foy and Rhoad, were the following:
• Eighty-five hundred pounds of marijuana onto Hilton Head in the spring of 1978,
• Twelve thousand pounds into McClellanville in the fall of 1978,
• Twelve thousand pounds onto Datha Island in June 1979,
• Eight thousand pounds onto Edisto Island in November 1979.
Riley and Harvey were just as prolific, bringing in, at the very least:
• Twenty-eight thousand pounds of marijuana near Conway in January 1979,
• Eight thousand pounds on Hilton Head in February 1979,
• Nine thousand pounds on Hilton Head in the spring of 1979.
Even with the lax drug patrols in South Carolina, that so many ventures could be accomplished successfully is a testament to the sophistication the gentlemen smugglers developed. By this time, the veteran weed runners had established routine procedures for each off-load. They would obtain Coast Guard “hit lists” of boats suspected of illicit activity, making sure to dispose of those vessels, or at least have them painted and renamed. At sea they flew a foreign flag to discourage the U.S. Coast Guard from boarding their boat. When entering American territorial waters, they would exchange the foreign flag for the Stars and Stripes in hopes of avoiding a Customs inspection, pretending to have never left the country.
Days before a sailboat arrived, kingpins would discern the location of local Coast Guard cutters and visit the U.S. Custom House in Charleston to see which undercover patrol vehicles were gone from the parking lot. Smugglers’ radiomen tuned in to the frequency of every local law enforcement and public safety agency, including firemen and game wardens; set up equipment; and monitored the airwaves.
The night of an off-load, the kingpins, off-loaders, drivers, radiomen, and sentries would all gather. On Hilton Head, which had become one of the most popular off-load spots, they often brought marijuana in behind the Sea Pines home of Butler on an out-of-town neighbor’s dock. As darkness fell, the men would gather in his living room with views overlooking Calibogue Sound. They relaxed and were friendly with each other, though they shied away from formal introductions and exchanging names. If the men worked enough loads, however, they started to put some names and faces together.
As the night passed and the boat was raised on the radio, they started to work. One man disappeared into the nearby forest with a walkie-talkie in hand, serving as a lookout. Another monitored radio frequencies inside Butler’s house. Others tended to the vehicles parked in the backyard and garage, taping ready-made custom patches of cardboard and duct tape over the brake and taillights, allowing them to maneuver the cars in complete darkness. Parking the cars by the dock, they’d open the doors and load each vehicle with as much pot as it could hold, emptying the sailboat as they marched through the night, bales on their shoulders, like ants bringing food home to their mounds.
Most often, the men drove full-size vans or pickup trucks with camper tops, able to carry a few thousand pounds at a time in the rear cargo compartments, which were separated from the driver’s bench by a partition. The men were particular about maintenance of the vehicles and often required them to be equipped with fourwheel drive. The smugglers had mechanics beef up the suspensions to accommodate heavy loads and installed extra fuel tanks. When the vans and trucks were not in use, they would keep them locked in garages or storage facilities, fearful of the vehicles being ticketed, involved in minor traffic accidents, or spotted with drug suspects inside. The vans and trucks were not daily drivers and came out only when it was time to work, ready to roll from South Carolina to any major East Coast city with tons of pot packed inside.
Despite all the precautions, things sometimes went awry. Bauer remembers driving away from Butler’s house in a van they had packed with thirty-four hundred pounds, using a sledgehammer to pound in the last bale. Driving away, Bauer panicked when the fuel gauge read empty and the dashboard lights refused to work. He returned to the house, encountering a furious Byers, who demanded to know what the problem was. Crawling under the van, Byers tapped on the gas tank, determining it was full. Apparently, says Bauer, the weight of the drugs either crushed the van’s electrical components or crimped its wiring, accounting for the malfunctioning gauges. He pulled away from Butler’s house again, destined for an Atlanta stash house, but without a working speedometer.
There was always room for improvement. In the weeks between off-loads, Riley, Butler, and others would devise innovative methods to transport the pot from sailboat cabin to the dock. If the sailboat was small, and the tide high, there was no problem, as the boat could be brought alongside a dock and bales taken off with ease. But larger sailboats proved more difficult. Some were made to wait offshore, where they were met by speedboats and the pot transferred at sea. Sometimes the sailboat would anchor a few hundred feet from a dock, and small motorboats or dinghies would ferry the pot the remaining distance. Once, Butler and Riley constructed little barges made of Styrofoam to float the pot to shore.
There was always the chance of being seen by a neighbor, and the gentlemen smugglers went to great lengths to prevent this from happening, too. Butler uprooted trees and plopped them in holes he dug along his property line as a temporary cover, thinking the neighbors wouldn’t notice a dying, leaning tree suddenly springing forth from a section of previously open lawn. He stretched netting between other trees to create a visual barrier, again unconcerned that this might prove more conspicuous. Another time, Riley fed a neighbor’s dog a hamburger patty stuffed with quaaludes to prevent him from barking at any activity that
night. Good night, poochy.
Such preparations took time, but there were other tasks for the smugglers to tend to, as well. When not physically handling the drugs, the aspiring or established kingpins, including Byers, Foy, Harvey, and Riley, concentrated on collecting their money, purchasing new sailboats, and concealing their cash and assets. Fake identification became an important consideration for the men, and they’d have associates scan obituaries, finding men of similar ages who had passed away. If only the good die young, they come back to life through men quite bad. The smugglers applied for assorted forms of identification to be reissued in the names of these dead men, but supplied pictures of themselves.
When buying cars, the men preferred using cash. When it came to banking, they sailed or flew to the Bahamas and opened offshore accounts to deposit their money, a few hundred thousand dollars per trip. Banking secrecy laws were also favorable in the Grand Cayman Islands and the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy in the English Channel. In all these places, the smugglers could wire money back to the United States for the purchase of real estate and sailboats. They’d do so through shelf corporations, which were previously established companies with little more than a name to them, having no operations or corporate officers. These companies’ incorporation paperwork would sit on a shelf until the company was purchased. Once the smugglers bought one of these offshore corporations, and listed their overseas lawyer’s location as its place of address, they could use it to launder money and purchase assets, concealing their ownership. Property up and down the East Coast, including a number of residential lots on Hilton Head, were owned by overseas companies in the control of the gentlemen smugglers, such as Bahamas Leeward Ltd., Agora Properties Ltd., and Baachus Properties Ltd.
On Hilton Head, Butler was making a fortune leasing out his home for drug off-loads, but he was eager to find an even better spot for unloading larger amounts of drugs. Fortuitously, the real estate agent managed an abandoned oyster factory outside Hilton Head on nearby Sawmill Creek, just a few turns off the Broad, Chechessee, and Colleton Rivers. A small house was there, as well as a concrete structure where oysters were once shucked. The land stood on a twenty-foot bluff made entirely of discarded oyster shells and had a dock projecting into the creek. It was secluded, surrounded by dozens of acres of woods, marsh, and swamp. In other words, it was a perfect spot to unload marijuana, or even better, sacks of hashish. That’s what was coming over next, Riley told Bulter one day. Everyone involved would be making double pay.