by Jason Ryan
Chapter Five
Cold seafood, booze, and Valium: a sailor’s feast. Christy Campbell had just returned to the Second Life in the sailboat’s inflatable dinghy on the evening of June 9, 1980, dinners from Hudson’s restaurant in hand. After sixty-one days at sea, fried shrimp was plenty tasty to the crew, even if it wasn’t hot.
They had been drinking since leaving St. Martin in the French West Indies, and taking Valium with greater frequency the closer they got to the South Carolina coast. The cocktail responded to opposing emotions: the alcohol enhancing the ecstasy they felt at journey’s end, the pills easing the anxiety over possibly being nabbed. God forbid they get arrested after coming this far—crossing an ocean and a sea. God forbid they lose thirty thousand pounds of hashish.
The Valium also dulled hangovers, which was good, since Captain Campbell and his six-man crew had just plowed through most of a $400 liquor purchase, staying up all night and dancing naked across the deck. For weeks they had been limited to the hash and Cisk beer, provisions obtained in Lebanon and Malta, respectively. Tons of hash and cases of lager would provide sufficient intoxication for most voyagers, yet on this boat was an exceptional collection of spectacular drunks, boozehounds, and bon vivants, each capable of truly impressive feats of debilitating debauchery. It took the liquor from St. Martin to restore morale on the ship after the long journey, creating, as one crew member put it, “One happy ship of crazies again.”
The crew’s raw nerves and desperate drunkenness were to be expected. Besides the threat of prison hanging over their heads, they had been starved of comfort for two months as they crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Every return trip on a smuggling run is marked by the inconveniences the cargo of drugs create, and this one was no different, save for the extended length of time the Second Life’s crew sailed with sacks of hash stuffed into nearly every available space.
“It was no longer a boat. It was no longer a living quarters, it was no longer nothing,” says Campbell. “The whole aft stateroom was full of hash. There was a forward forepeak, it was packed full … the only thing that was left open was the bathroom, the kitchen and the main salon.”
Campbell had flown to Europe with his crew late in the winter of 1980. Just before taking off from Washington, D.C., on the Concorde, he was handed $15,000 cash and a scrap of paper that told him exactly where to find the Second Life— a seventy-one-foot double-masted racing sailboat docked in Mallorca, Spain. Among the world sailing community, the Second Life was famous, one of seventeen yachts to compete in the inaugural Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in 1973. Three men died competing in that race, and sailors had respect for any boat that completed all four legs of the journey, as the Second Life had.
Campbell was friendly with most of his crew, having sailed with many of them on previous smuggling runs. Among this group was his reliable friend, Kenny Gunn. Despite being arrested with Campbell on the Love Affair fourteen months earlier, Gunn was eager to try sailing loaded across the Mediterranean and Atlantic. The rest of the crew was just as enthusiastic, no matter if they had little experience making long voyages on such a large sailboat.
The lone sailor unfamiliar to the rest of the crew was Kenny O’Day, a Virginian placed on the Second Life by kingpins Julian “Doc” Pernell and Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs. O’Day was there to help sail the Second Life, of course, but he was also tasked with keeping an eye on the sailboat’s illicit cargo and protecting Pernell and Toombs’s investment. The Virginia distributors had paid $500,000 as a down payment on their share of the load.
Once in Spain the crew spent two months in Mallorca, partying, prepping the boat, buying equipment, and installing new electronics. Campbell rented an apartment for his crew, and the seven Americans became quite popular in town, though no one seemed to know why they were there.
From Mallorca, the Second Life sailed to Malta, where they continued their fast lifestyle. The movie Popeye, starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, was being filmed at the time, and a few of the crew crawled to the set on their bellies to try to catch a glimpse of the stars. The crew also organized a footrace through Malta, with Gunn tearing through the streets, shaking off his sea legs.
From Malta they sailed for Rhodes, Greece, and had their first indications that the trip would not be without obstacles when a mysterious military helicopter flew above them. The crew guessed it was from Libya. Then they encountered a wicked storm, with winds so powerful it spattered their faces with sand carried from Crete, miles away. Their navigation antenna was blown clear off a mast, into the deep. They’d replace it in Greece, where they stopped for more than a week, awaiting word to enter a war zone.
Lebanon was entering its fifth year of civil war in 1980, and the country was a hotbed of violence. Peace seemed implausible in the tiny nation, considering it was home to a handful of homegrown rival militias, militants from the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and occupying armies from Israel and Syria.
While the civil war and lingering violence ruined Lebanon’s economy, it allowed a black market to flourish, especially the sale of highgrade hashish and opium grown in the country’s Bekaa Valley. To protect their crops, farmers in the valley placed tanks and antiaircraft guns in their fields. The profits from drugs were so important to Lebanon’s shattered economy that warring factions would regularly drop their guns to facilitate trafficking, so long as they received a cut of the money. At Lebanon’s ports such cooperation was commonplace. Temporary ceasefires were negotiated when drugs needed to leave the docks.
Outside Beirut the Second Life waited offshore three days for the seas to calm. As in Colombia, the crew saw beaches and mountains while waiting to load. Unlike Colombia, the crew was not alone. Israeli jets flew overhead, at low altitudes. Large ships surrounded them in the harbor, waiting to enter the port. A trawler cruised by the Second Life, with intimidating armed sailors pacing the deck. Soon their American contact, whom they had met last in Mallorca, came aboard with a Lebanese militiaman who had suffered two gunshot wounds in his lifetime, including one to his heart. The man pointed to a German freighter nearby. It was allegedly full of weapons and would enter the port immediately after the Second Life picked up the drugs. The obvious implication, thought the crew, was that their hash purchase enabled the militia to buy arms.
Such a truth sat heavily with some of the crew. More troubling, however, was their fear. They felt vulnerable in the war zone, and weren’t comforted by reports from their contact on shore, who said he had been close to gun battles in Beirut. He looked haggard from living on the edge for weeks.
Finally, in the middle of their third night spent offshore, the crew was instructed to come in and be loaded. The Second Life headed to shore on the northern side of the city, where Christian forces held control. The seas were still too rough to try to dock, so wooden launches piled high with hashish met them just off the shore, and tied alongside the sailboat. The crew of the Second Life could see a roadblock being enforced on the coastal highway, ostensibly so there’d be no interference. Militiamen in the boats beside them tossed bag after bag of hash up on deck as the Second Life’s crew scrambled to store it below. Each sack was wrapped in heavy black plastic. Inside, wrapped in more plastic, were oval-shaped bricks of hashish weighing a kilogram each. They were stamped “New Lebanon,” and placed inside white or blue cheesecloth. In an odd but kind gesture, Campbell says, the Lebanese men applauded as the crew finished loading the drugs.
The crew set sail and headed west. Gunn put on a Bob Seger album. They were glad to be alive, even if they were saddled with awful beer for the long journey ahead.
They enjoyed exceptional winds across much of the Mediterranean and made good time. At night they witnessed a spectacle of lights around them, and they surmised ships in the distance were playing war games. At one point, a submarine popped up on their port side.
They traded shifts up on deck while also being responsible for maintenance duties. Two men cooked. One man was in charge
of provisions, another maintained the boat’s electrical systems. Two crewmen were responsible for the sailboat’s engine. They used it sparingly, wanting to conserve fuel in case of an emergency.
As they approached Spain, they were almost flying, sailing the hash-laden championship racing boat as fast as it could go. Then disaster struck. Coming down a wave while sailing downwind, the boat unexpectedly jibed, it’s mainsail violently flipping from one side of the boat to the other in an instant, snapping the thick aluminum boom with a crack so sharp one could have mistaken it for a firing cannon. The broken boom splintered off like a wayward helicopter blade. Fortunately, no one was hurt, though the crew despaired over the damage to the vital equipment.
They quickly made makeshift repairs. They reefed, or reduced, the mainsail and replaced the snapped boom underneath with the smaller boom from the mizzenmast. On the mizzenmast, they fashioned a boom from a log that had providentially been aboard and strapped to the gunwales. The boat could sail again, though it had been crippled.
The sailing became grueling. The crew spent four days trying to leave the Mediterranean, frustrated by a storm that kept pushing them back. In three days, they calculated, they had made a measly three-quarters of a mile. They were tempted to use fuel, but refrained. The going was absolutely tortuous.
Each time they went up on deck for their shift, the storm would soak them immediately, dampening spirits and clothes. They became demoralized, unwilling to enter a port and repair their boat because of their cargo, and they still had such a long way to go. Seeking to renew their spirits, Campbell ordered the boat to anchor off Spain for a good night’s rest.
The next day, as they set sail again, there was a glimmer of hope. The boat received a visitor. He was short, just six inches tall, winged, and covered with yellow feathers. On his head was a spiked tuft of fluff. Since the bird shared a hairstyle with British singer Rod Stewart, they named their new friend Rod.
The crew figured the storm had blown Rod out to sea and he was desperate for a place to land. Their spirits lifted as they observed their marooned friend scurry around the deck. Perhaps, unconsciously, they realized their predicament was not as hopeless as poor Rod’s, disoriented and stranded at sea. He stayed on board for four days before taking wing. Rod flew a hundred feet before being blown into the sea and swallowed by waves.
Those same winds that doomed the small bird helped push the sailboat through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic. Here the crew had new reason to become anxious. They discovered a leak in the boat’s water supply, meaning they’d be dependent upon bottled water as they crossed the Atlantic, and forced to ration. They sailed slowly through the Sargasso Sea, the light winds letting them travel at only a few knots. The Second Life’s spinnaker kept tearing, too, further hindering their speed as they struggled to harness the sea’s faint breeze. Of course, with hundreds of miles still ahead, they were cautious about using fuel. If things got really bad, they joked, they could commit mass suicide with the handgun Campbell had bought from a man on the docks in Mallorca. There was only a single bullet, however, so they decided they’d have to stand side-by-side and take care when aiming in order to send it through all seven heads.
Despite the grim jokes, spirits remained high. When not on watch, the crew spent their time reading or listening to music. They exercised, doing push-ups on the deck and dips on the boat’s handrails. They tuned in to news, music, or sports games broadcast by the BBC or Armed Forces Radio. One crew member particularly savored hearing Boston Red Sox baseball games while he took the midnight shift. He felt emancipated from the hassles of routine existence as he enjoyed the national pastime standing above a massive stash of potent drugs, skippering a world-class sailboat in the darkness through an empty and calm sea.
Girlie magazines were essential for morale on the boat, and a few women became favorites of the crew. If a man could not satisfy himself without a particular sweetheart’s picture, he could be heard across the deck and through the cabins, ransacking the salon for his favorite lady’s image.
“Who’s got her?” he’d bellow. “She’s mine!”
One slow-going day in the Atlantic, the crew devised a particularly zany game to amuse themselves. They began by tying one end of a one-hundred-foot length of rope to a cleat on the stern and the other end around a rubber fender. They tossed the fender in the ocean and let it trail behind the boat, bobbing in the waves. Next, a crewman stripped and walked to the bow of the boat, carefully stepping to the end of the bowsprit—the most forward part of the boat. He crouched, mustered the necessary courage, sprung hard, and dove deep into the ocean. Beneath the waves he kicked swiftly and reversed direction as he swam underneath the length of the seventy-one-foot sailboat hull and beyond. His fellow crew members watched from the stern in anticipation of a perfect performance, counting on their friend to gauge the remaining hundred feet to the target correctly and pop triumphantly out of the water, mouth open to capture air and arms spread wide to catch the fender and attached lifeline.
The water was exceptionally clear in that part of the ocean, giving the men a fair shot at seizing the target. Should they miss, they knew, they’d be bobbing in the middle of the Atlantic, without a life jacket, with thousands of feet of ocean beneath them. Swimming naked in the immense ocean, the transom of the Second Life steadily moving away, with no land in sight, was an overwhelming experience. One man said he felt like a guppy swimming in the water, waiting to be gobbled up. Treading water, he was without the protection of clothing, without hope of reaching land on his own, and dependent upon the goodwill of his crewmates to retrieve him.
No matter the diversions, progress was agonizingly slow. The crew had put their faith in the twenty-eight-year-old Campbell, and he was acutely aware of the tedium of the journey and that critical supplies were running low. He changed course and headed to St. Martin in the French West Indies to refuel and take on more water and food. Wary of the drugs being discovered, the crew anchored in a harbor and used their inflatable Zodiac raft to motor to shore. Campbell authorized the purchase of liquor, lifting the semi-enforced ban on alcohol he had decreed in Rhodes owing to one crew member’s tendency to become so obliterated from drinkin’ and druggin’ he could hardly walk and talk, let alone satisfy his duties on the boat. On a boat full of drunken sailors, this man, nicknamed the “Gold Dust Twin,” managed to consistently set new lows. Now his drinking seemed to be sanctioned again. What did it matter? They had crossed a sea and ocean without loss of life or cargo. It was time to raise a glass, or entire rum bottle.
Energized by their landfall, Campbell phoned Les Riley at his home on Hilton Head, shocking him with their location. Campbell told them they’d be to South Carolina within a week. The crew returned to the Second Life, but not before an old salt on St. Martin made a comment to them that their boat seemed to be sitting abnormally low in the water. They sailed north toward the United States, relieved to be in familiar waters with ample fuel, water, and food. Although they had tried not to dwell on their difficulties after leaving Lebanon, worry often pervaded their thoughts on the long voyage. Owing to the broken boom, they had worried across half the Mediterranean: Would the repair hold? Then, more worries during the interminable crossing of the Atlantic: Would they go thirsty before making landfall? Now, as they approached Hilton Head, they worried again: Would they get busted?
The men drank to distraction on this final leg. Their minds were scrambled, and they wet their throats with Heinekens and booze. Tension, bottled up for the last two months, soon erupted. Such discord was common on long sea voyages, and the Second Life had been the scene of previous frustrations years before as it circled the globe. Then, ship physician Robin Leach spoke of the irrational grudges that could fester on the open sea:
One of three or four members of the crew would quite unannounced become the person to moan at for a few days. The issues were often trifling and that crew member had to take the abuse that was given to him until the needle was pointe
d to another. Trifling things became blown up at sea. Somebody had a perpetual sniff. One seat was always occupied by the same person. Somebody started reading a book before someone else finished it. Someone was late on watch again. The heads were blocked and no one admitted to being the last to use them.
Such pettiness had more or less been avoided on the Second Life’s hashish trip, but it would not be avoided altogether. A day out of Hilton Head, the crew became rowdy and began horsing around on deck. Campbell started harassing a crewman and doused him with a bucket of water. O’Day took umbrage at his buddy being soaked and retaliated by clocking Campbell in the face, knocking him to the deck. The horseplay suddenly turned serious. O’Day had hit Campbell so hard he broke his hand, permanently dislodging a knuckle.
“You can’t hit him, he’s the captain,” yelled another crewman, as Campbell recovered from the swift sucker punch.
Campbell’s eye was cut, and he was enraged. With his head throbbing, he could think of one thing—the .45 caliber handgun stored below deck. He knew exactly where his souvenir from Mallorca was stashed.
“I had one bullet in there,” says Campbell. “I wanted to kill him.”
But the bullet stayed in the chamber.
Campbell’s anger subsided, his eye was patched, and, with alcohol flowing, harmony was restored aboard the Second Life. Campbell chalked up O’Day’s actions to the long journey and too many beers. “He was a pretty nice boy,” Campbell says. “He just wasn’t supposed to drink.”