by Jason Ryan
Campbell phoned Riley again through the radio. They were not ready, Riley said. Go back out to sea for a few days. Campbell was incredulous. “This has been two months and I’m not waiting anymore,” he told Riley. “I’m coming in right now whether you like it or not.”
Campbell sailed the Second Life past Hilton Head and into Port Royal Sound, disregarding Riley’s instructions. They anchored the boat. Should Campbell have tried to take them out to sea again, they may have mutinied. “My crew was getting crazy. I was crazy, the whole thing was crazy,” says Campbell.
He headed to shore aboard the Zodiac and purchased seafood dinners at Hudson’s. Before returning to the Second Life, he phoned Riley from a pay phone. Between bites of shrimp, he told the kingpin he had anchored the boat right off Hilton Head and was preparing to sail her in behind the island. Riley was so shocked he could hardly speak. The off-loading boats were nearby, ready to meet the Second Life offshore, and Campbell was sailing her right along the island, unable to hide telltale signs of a long sea voyage, such as the boat’s broken boom, its smell of diesel exhaust, and spots of rust. Riley handed the phone to Lee Harvey, who told Campbell to dock behind nearby Dafauskie Island. Someone would meet them that night.
Campbell’s arrival and phone calls set off a flurry of activity. In Virginia, Pernell and Toombs phoned their fleet of truck drivers and instructed them to drive through the night to Hilton Head. When the drivers, Toombs, and Pernell arrived about midday on June 9, 1980, they were taken to rented houses on Hilton Head and encouraged to rest. Meanwhile, two boat captains readied the Touch of Class and Hook ’Em Good, two forty-eight-foot sportfishing boats that would be used to ferry the hash off the Second Life and to the abandoned oyster factory.
Trucks entered the property by turning off the highway to Hilton Head and onto a dirt road. Drivers passed through a gate, and, after traveling a mile or so through woods, came upon a clearing with a small house and a creek. At water’s edge was a dock and a cinder block building, the spot where the oysters were once brought. The Atlantic Ocean was less than two miles away by water.
As evening approached, the drivers gathered, parking behind the house. A lookout sat at the gate, a walkie-talkie in his hand. Other men set up radios and antennas in the cinder block factory. The equipment was necessary to monitor law enforcement in the area, as well as communicate with the sportfishing boats. Surveillance was critical, and two other smugglers had already tracked the movements of a nearby Coast Guard cutter, satisfied it would not interfere.
At a hotel, Pernell and Toombs met a buyer from Virginia named Robert Reckmeyer, who agreed to purchase ten thousand pounds of hash. He handed over a down payment of $1.8 million. Pernell and Toombs took it back to the rental house and counted it with Riley. There were 180 stacks of $10,000 each. Some of the money was mildewed. Pernell suspected it had previously been buried.
A few miles away, at real estate agent Wally Butler’s house, other men gathered. They piled into small motorboats alongside his dock and took off across the body of water behind Hilton Head, Calibogue Sound. In a twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler sat John Jamison and Kenny Floyd. They had been hired by Riley to run a decoy boat, which they had loaded with fishing poles and a carton of green phosphorescence in case they needed to lead one of the sportfishing boats to the oyster factory.
By this time, Campbell had sailed the Second Life around the back of Hilton Head and anchored her behind Dafauskie Island. The crew had continued drinking, and Campbell was zipping around in the Zodiac, annoying Jamison.
“He was going like a madman around the sound in this Zodiac,” says Jamison. “I finally told him, ‘Either quit it or I’m going to run over the boat, and that’s going to be it … you’re jeopardizing the whole operation.’ ”
The sun began to set behind Hilton Head. Everyone was in place. Men waited at the oyster factory to load their trucks. Decoy boats bobbed in the water behind the island. Sportfishing boats cruised Calibogue Sound, waiting to rendezvous with the Second Life under the cover of darkness. And the men aboard the sailboat were ready to finish their journey and toss off the sacks of hashish.
“That’s when things started getting foggy for me,” says O’Day, whose hand still ached badly from punching Campbell, and who was still very inebriated. “I started getting caught up in a drunk front.”
At eight o’clock South Carolina wildlife officer Walter Baxter received a radio call from his partner, Tommy Simmons. Simmons said he was going to be late to that night’s water patrol, and Baxter didn’t see much point in waiting around the marina until Simmons arrived. He radioed back, “I’m going to go out in the sound, see what I can see.”
Baxter motored into Calibogue Sound to begin his patrol alone. The shrimping season was starting the next day, and he and Simmons would be looking to catch any boats using the cover of darkness to get an early, illegal jump on the trawling. It could be a busy night.
In the middle of Calibogue Sound, a quarter mile south of the bridge leading to Hilton Head, Baxter shut off his engines and lights. He sat in his boat and listened. To the west came the sound of a motorboat, but it was running without lights. The engine became louder … and louder … and LOUDER.
Baxter quickly started his engine, afraid the two boats would collide. He also turned on his spotlight and illuminated a fast-approaching thirteen-foot Boston Whaler. There were two men on board. He ordered them to stop.
Baxter questioned the men and issued a ticket to the boat’s operator, Les Riley, for running a boat without lights. As he wrote the citation, Simmons approached in his own boat, and advised Baxter he would continue the patrol farther into Calibogue Sound.
A few hundred yards away sat Jamison and Floyd, their eyes peeled and their nerves taut, looking for reason to spring to action and put the decoy boat beneath them to use. Throughout the evening they had seen the Second Life, Touch of Class, and Hook ’Em Good all cruise into Bull Creek. The men aboard those boats were surely in the middle of transferring the hashish as fast as they could, hauling each sack out of the sailboat’s interior recesses, heaving them above deck, and then throwing them across the gunwales to the other boats tied along each side of the Second Life.
Jamison watched as an unfamiliar boat crept slowly toward the mouth of Bull Creek.
“I don’t like that,” he said to Floyd.
Jamison quickly flashed his spotlight over the boat. He was disappointed to see his suspicions confirmed. Standing at the wheel was Simmons, wearing the distinctive cap of a South Carolina wildlife officer. Jamison’s mind flashed to the twin outboard motors mounted on his own craft’s transom.
“Thank god we got a pair of seventies on this boat,” he thought. “We can fly.”
It was time for the decoy team to earn its money. Jamison once again turned on the spotlight and pointed the bright beam directly into Simmons’s face, burning his eyes. Simmons gunned his engine and quickly turned his boat away from the creek and toward Jamison. The boat’s blue lights were flashing. Jamison let Simmons come within twenty-five yards before gunning his own engines and heading south across the sound toward homes on the north side of Hilton Head.
Jamison soon learned he had underestimated the power of the game warden’s motorboat. As Simmons pulled alongside, Jamison pushed his own throttle to the max, but it was no use, he couldn’t outrun him. Desperate, he turned toward the docks along the backside of the island, trying to buy time as he plotted his escape. He knew these waters like the back of his hand, working for eight years in Hilton Head as a marina manager and charter boat captain. He had also fished a lot of trout off the docks that loomed closer and closer.
His next move was suicidal. In darkness and at full speed, Jamison steered the boat under the docks projecting from shore. The boat’s radio antennas shattered as he and Floyd passed under the first structure. Wooden pilings and oyster beds passed by in a blur. Floyd went to pieces.
“John, don’t get crazy, don’t get crazy,” he said.
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br /> Jamison ignored his pleas, but soon ran out of docks to dodge under.
Simmons again pulled alongside, close enough for Jamison to make out his face. As the two boats zoomed along the shore, Jamison feared Simmons would run his bow up over Jamison’s stern, swamping the engine and stopping him dead in the water. He’d have to think of something else.
“Pull it back, pull it back,” yelled Simmons.
“I can’t stop. I hurt my leg on Dafauskie,” screamed Jamison. “It’s bleeding really bad.”
As the chase continued, across the sound Baxter finished escorting Riley to a marina, where he ordered him to dock his boat for the night on account of having no lights. Baxter had seen Simmons in the distance turn on his blue lights to follow a boat. From that far away, it appeared Simmons was escorting the boat. But as Baxter reduced his throttle, he heard Simmons on the radio, pleading for help with a boat that would not stop. Baxter and took off, leaving Riley behind.
At the oyster factory, men listened to Simmons’s transmissions, too. They grew restless, unsure if the wildlife officer was pursuing a decoy boat or one of the sportfishermen loaded with hashish. Some men were convinced the boat had been captured, others said the infrequent transmissions meant there had been no arrests. Harvey, doing his best to keep his trademark cool, stood next to his radioman, listening closely. Other men kept a close eye on the water, peering through a nightscope at the creek and the nearby Colleton River. Finally, they saw the sportfishing boats in the distance, coming up the river. They could hear their engines humming, and no police boats were in sight.
When Jamison saw Simmons speak into the radio, he realized he was running out of time. Backup would arrive soon. They sped past Palmetto Bay Marina, and Jamison suddenly turned his boat back toward it. Coming into the docks, he saw an available slip was filled with cordweed—a floating mass of dead spartina grass. He gunned the engines and ran the boat up on the flotsam, quickly jumping out with the bowline in hand. As Jamison stepped off the boat, he felt Simmons’s boat nudge the stern of the Boston Whaler. He dropped the line and peeled off on foot, leaving Floyd behind to be arrested by Baxter, who had just arrived.
The wildlife officers called the local sheriff’s office, asking for deputies to impound the boat and take Floyd to jail. The dispatcher questioned Simmons, unaware the smugglers were eavesdropping: “I thought you had two suspects?”
“Well,” said Simmons, “that man hit the dock, and all I saw was elbows and smokin’ sneakers.”
Incredibly, officers Baxter and Simmons crossed paths with the smugglers twice more that evening. After Floyd’s arrest, they patrolled together in the same boat and came across the Second Life. Half the crew was on board cleaning the boat, finding sacks of forgotten hash in the process. The wildlife officers knocked on the side of the hull, and a crewman popped his head above deck. His knees were shaking, and he felt like he was going to have a heart attack. The officers told him he needed to put on an anchor light, and then asked him where his captain was. Harbour Town, the crewman replied, eager to be rid of the men.
Baxter and Simmons soon found Campbell at Harbour Town Marina as the excitable captain and some friends left a waterside nightclub, piled into the Zodiac, and cruised into Calibogue Sound without running lights or life jackets. Simmons stopped Campbell and ticketed him back at the dock, provoking an inebriated Campbell to tell Baxter and Simmons they were dumb game wardens, that he could buy them both, and that Simmons was a son of a bitch. In turn, Simmons picked Campbell up by his collar and told him he was not a son of a bitch, and that he was now required to post a $300 bond. With the help of an attractive woman accompanying him, Campbell paid the money and left the dock for a nearby condo to get some sleep.
Meanwhile, the thirty thousand pounds of hash was unloaded at the oyster factory. The Touch of Class and Hook ’Em Good tied up stern to stern at the dock, and men formed a bucket brigade, passing sack after sack of hash into the factory and the backs of trucks. In the morning the trucks left at fifteen-minute intervals, blending in with construction crews driving on and off the island.
Weeks later Harvey reported to federal prison to serve a short sentence for his arrest in Georgia two years earlier. He’d just finished his first hashish venture with Riley, and he was already planning the next one. As Harvey’s defense attorney, John Zwerling said, “He was incorrigible.”
Chapter Six
The success of the Second Life hashish operation capped a remarkable run of drug- running ventures for the gentlemen smugglers. Ten years earlier they had casually sold pounds of pot around the University of South Carolina campus. Five years earlier, they nervously brought in hundreds of pounds of Jamaican pot before heading south for a few tons of Colombian Gold. Now the men were bona fide kingpins, coolly orchestrating regular shipments of more than twenty thousand pounds from Colombia and bringing hashish across the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Each deal they did was designed to be more and more lucrative.
Such growth is natural to any successful business, and by this point in their illicit careers, the gentlemen smugglers were, first and foremost, businessmen. The kingpins no longer sailed the boats or piloted the off-loading vessels. Rarely did they get their hands dirty tossing bales anymore. Seeking to maximize profit and minimize risk, they shied away from investing their own money, and instead solicited investments from other partners and distributors, promising them generous returns, but of course keeping the bulk of profits for themselves. Their operations became complex enough for Les Riley and Lee Harvey to insure their smuggling boats with Julian “Doc” Pernell and Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs, and vice versa. If one pair of kingpins’ boat got busted, the other kingpins would soften their loss with a payout.
As much financial sense as it all made, there were intangible costs to this evolution, with profits increasing at the expense of the fun and adventure that had once played an equal part in each smuggling operation. Greed increasingly overwhelmed camaraderie. The massive amounts of money to be earned made it difficult for many to walk away, no matter if the kingpins’ charm had worn thin. Originally, many of the smugglers, especially those who didn’t assume the status of a kingpin, reasoned they’d quit the business after a few years once they made themselves a nest egg. Yet the richer they got, the more smuggling they did.
“You can get out, you just don’t want to,” explains one smuggler. “How in the world can you go back and get a job after you’ve been flying around in Learjets drinking Dom Perignon at 50,000 feet, flying down to get on a yacht and go to the Bahamas? How you gonna compare that?”
Many marijuana smugglers knew no other way to make a living. It had become normal, and kingpins began to treat it casually. Smuggling ventures were scheduled so regularly that men couldn’t help but integrate their illegal activities with the more pedestrian experiences that filled their days. If you worked nonstop as a smuggler, you had no other choice.
Toombs, for example, earned his well-known handle when leading a convoy of loaded trucks through South Carolina, each one spaced a mile apart from the other cruising up a highway. As his stomach rumbled, the short and stocky Toombs suddenly spoke into his CB radio, ordering everyone off the road.
“We gotta pull over,” he said to the annoyed drivers hauling pot behind him. “I gotta get some ice cream.”
For Toombs, it was more than the money; it was also the allconsuming rush of a deal that kept him working full-time, missing holidays and family events in pursuit of landing another load. He’d been excited before, in the jungles of Vietnam, shooting his way out of death, and in Virginia pool halls, routinely gambling his life savings, sometimes losing it all. Neither compared to the highs that pot smuggling could provide, where men adapted the same set of daredevil logistics to different-sized deals.
“You’re caught up in the adrenaline, you’re caught up in the fun, you’re caught up in the women, you’re caught up in all the money,” says Toombs. “But what you do is you don’t think. You’re cau
ght up in the moment … it’s an adrenaline junkie’s dream.”
To enhance or merely sustain such highs, the smugglers abused drugs, including the one they would not traffic: cocaine. Toombs says he wouldn’t smoke pot often, but instead liked cocaine, tequila, and young women, so long as they could all be enjoyed at the same time. Just as Toombs felt comfortable eating ice cream during smuggling operations, others became casual about snorting coke and drinking alcohol while killing time and waiting for a boat to arrive. A few smugglers took it too far, incapacitating themselves at critical times by freebasing cocaine. Especially notorious were Harvey and sailboat captain Warren “Willie Frank” Steele. Steele, an excellent and wellliked sailor, freebased so often that Wally Butler joked he was going to make him a harness so he could carry propane tanks on his back, always able to use a torch and heat the coke. Steele wasn’t always so hooked. He went to college on a football scholarship, but quit school soon after his girlfriend broke her neck and died in a car accident.
“That was when Frank met drugs,” said friend and fellow smuggler Tommy Liles.
Liles remembers Steele hopping in his five-speed BMW and speeding down Interstate 95 to Miami from his home on the Banana River in Melbourne, Florida. Fuzz busters, or radar detectors, were stuck to the front and rear windows. A big bag of cocaine sat on the floor. Cruising at one hundred miles per hour, Steele would dig down into the bag with his fingers, bringing heavy scoops to his nose.
Another time, John “Smokin’ Sneakers” Jamison picked Steele up in South Florida, just after the boat captain had purchased an ounce of premium cocaine. Settling into the passenger seat, Steele opened the package and began to cut lines on a cassette tape as Jamison drove.