Jackpot

by Jason Ryan

  “You know,” Steele said, “some people say I waste this shit.”

  The package then promptly spilled over, dumping the ounce of cocaine onto the floorboard, which was covered with sand. Steele closed his mouth and solemnly ground the coke into the sand with his shoe.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s true.”

  Harvey allegedly jeopardized ventures, too, by getting high or overdosing. One night on Hilton Head, he nearly died and had to be taken to the hospital from his rented condo. Toombs says Harvey would pass out and vomit from taking too many drugs. His eyes and body were yellow from jaundice, another friend says, and he became paranoid. Bob “Willie the Hog” Bauer says he remembers when Harvey called a tree surgeon to his home in Virginia, asking him to fell a tree. The tree surgeon protested, unwilling to cut down a beautiful old oak. “But the little people live in the branches,” Harvey replied, referring to the hallucinatory Lilliputians that supposedly appeared to a number of smugglers and their girlfriends.

  Harvey’s brothers Michael and Tom disagree with such characterizations of their sibling’s drug use. Like most of the smugglers, Lee did use cocaine, they say, and tried heroin after a girlfriend introduced him to it, though he stopped after two bad experiences, ditching the drug and the girlfriend.

  “I was with Lee a lot. He never fell down, never vomited, never almost died in his own puke,” says Michael, who said a culture of exaggeration existed among his brother’s group of friends. “One thing that all those guys had in common was they liked to sit around late at night and talk. The lines are cut on the mirror, everybody’s got a lot to say … Conversation changed to bullshit and goes to full-fledged lies by sunrise. Everybody just trying to one up the other, and 90 percent of what was said was just fabricated crap.”

  One thing all smugglers agreed on was that cocaine was a destructive drug, making fast lives even faster. The smugglers lament the hold cocaine had on them and their friends, especially those who freebased. Jamison later wrote a poem about his struggles with the drug. From “All Honey Isn’t Sweet”:

  … let her possess you, she’ll strip you to bone

  Not just your body, but all that you own

  She’ ll peak out your senses, and keep you alert

  Then tease you and please you, she loves to flirt

  She has many names, to most she’s their “honey”

  She’s really Queen Bee, and her nest is your money

  Her sting can be lethal, or poison your brain

  It won’t matter to her, cause you’re all the same …

  Between friends, drug abuse could cause rifts. Riley speaks with a combination of sadness and disdain about how his close friend and partner, Harvey, put most of his money up his nose and slept most of the day, only to rise and party into the night before sleeping again into the afternoon. Riley says he liked having a good time, too, but he also enjoyed being with his family, exercising, and spending time outdoors. On Hilton Head, he regularly fished and played basketball with Barry Foy. Although the men didn’t work together all too often, they were friendly. Some people found Foy and his partner, Tom “Rolex” Rhoad, exasperating, but Riley says he liked them, in part because he had learned what to expect from Flash and his 2 Percent Man.

  Foy was fun, says Riley, and a good guy, though “he would be the first to leave when the shit hit the fan. But you accepted that with him, and some people didn’t like it. It didn’t bother me, but I said I’m not going to do any more business with him.”

  Many times Riley visited the Rhoad family farm to enjoy big meals of fried chicken and barbecue with the kingpin’s family, and traded them seafood for bacon and pork. Some of Riley’s family and friends failed to see Rhoad’s appeal, finding him arrogant and nosy. One particular detractor of Rhoad marveled at how Riley could tolerate the man. Then he learned that Rhoad and Riley hunted together.

  “No wonder you can put up with him,” the man told Riley. “You had a gun in your hand.”

  The dynamic between Foy and Rhoad, or Flash and Flash Jr., as some liked to call them, could be intriguing, and their interactions were often over the top. Riley recalls the pair coming over to his home once to ask for his help on a deal. In typical fashion, Foy sent Rhoad off on an errand and then proposed that he and Riley work alone, cutting his buddy out. Riley sighed and explained to Foy that he doesn’t tell on people, but that he would have to bring this up to Rhoad when he returned.

  “Y’all are partners,” he told Foy. “Come on.”

  Moments later Rhoad walked through the door and beat Riley to the punch.

  “What kind of deal did he try to offer you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Riley, smiling. “What kind of deal will you offer?”

  Among the smugglers Riley had a good reputation for being honest and straightforward, though a few complained he had an ego and distanced himself from people he considered subordinate. During the unloading of the hashish off the Second Life, Toombs remembers getting into a confrontation with Riley and that it almost turned physical, which would have been a rare occurrence among the gentlemen smugglers. Harvey, he says, intervened.

  “Les had a big, sort of control thing,” says Toombs. “I like Les, but he rubbed me wrong that day. We didn’t get along after that. I think that ended it.”

  When it came to smuggling, personality differences were rarely the cause of major disagreements, and people who didn’t care for each other just opted not to work together. The root of almost all conflict was instead money. Paradoxically, the more money the men made, the harder it was to keep everyone satisfied.

  Dissention in the ranks was often provoked by the so-called hillbillies of South Carolina. Although the terrain is, without exception, flat along the South Carolina coast, smugglers from other parts of the country referred to the Palmetto State smugglers as “hillbillies.” The hillbillies, they said, could be particularly duplicitous members of the smuggling underworld. Among the top kingpins operating in South Carolina, none were immune from payment disputes, and their thrifty and shifty reputations began to precede them. When it came to broken promises of payment, the most egregious cheat differed depending on who one talked to. To some, like boat captain Steele, almost all his employers proved frustrating.

  “Lee Harvey had problems paying … people. By nature of being Lee Harvey’s partner, Les Riley had problems paying people. Bob Byers obviously had some problems paying people,” said Steele. “Those would probably be the major offenders.”

  Others felt Foy was particularly unreliable and greedy, warning each other to keep their wallets close and their women closer when in his presence. If Foy was regarded as greedy, others felt Les Riley was stingy. Following his successful piloting of a decoy boat as the Second Life was unloaded, Jamison went to Riley’s house on Hilton Head to be paid $10,000. As Riley handed Jamison the money, the kingpin remarked about a nightscope he had just bought his young son that cost just as much. Jamison bristled at the remark. If Riley has so much extra cash, he thought, why not share some with the man whose daredevil driving helped ensure the hashish was unloaded safely.

  “To me that was a slap in the face,” says Jamison “[I] kind of never looked at Les the same way again, you know, because I really felt like what I did was over, above and beyond … and that really ticked me off.

  “Maybe he was high, I don’t know, but I definitely took it wrong … and I feel like I could take it the only way it came to me. Like, ‘Here’s your ten grand, and I’m going to give my kid a ten grand toy to play with.’ ”

  More notorious than Foy and Riley was Harvey. Although two of his brothers insist he was more than fair when paying his debts and never made much money because of it, others characterize him as manipulative and prone to avoiding payment. One smuggler labels Harvey an outright thief, and another recalls Harvey stringing him along until he finally made a visit to Harvey’s farmhouse in Virginia. There, he said, Harvey came down from an upstairs bedroom, informed him he was on the ph
one, and tossed a bag of cocaine on the table. The diversion worked. The smuggler soon dived in and forgot his reason for visiting.

  In similarly controlling behavior, Harvey once instructed smuggler Steve Ravenel to wait on a street corner in downtown Alexandria. He’d pick him up, Harvey said, so they could negotiate a price for thirty thousand pounds of pot they had just worked together to bring into South Carolina. As Ravenel waited, a car cruised up. Harvey was inside, with his brother Michael at the wheel.

  “He picked me up, he handed me a slip of paper and said, ‘This is what you’re going to get, and I don’t want to discuss it any further,’” said Ravenel. “ … It was just a short ride around the block, and, before I could get into any discussion about it, I was out of the car. He popped the trunk, and I took the suitcase.”

  Such tactics were familiar to many of the men who worked with Harvey and his partner.

  “This was what Les and Lee were famous for—‘I never agreed to that,’ ” says Bauer, who counted Harvey as a friend. “Lee was one of them guys you had to pin down. Don’t take nothing for granted.”

  The trick, Bauer says, was having the courage to confront these men to keep them honest. This could be a full-time job, but, as Bauer says, “It’s on you to cover your ass.”

  “Basically, they were nothing but punks,” Bauer says. “They were tricky to deal with, but hey, that’s business. That’s fucking business.”

  When men would come to Riley seeking payment, he’d often instruct them to go find Harvey, informing them that payment was his partner’s responsibility. Many smugglers didn’t buy it, feeling like Riley was passing the buck. Riley says he, himself, was shorted by Harvey, and that Harvey had problems collecting money they were owed, letting people slide.

  When Riley agreed to take on Harvey as a partner, he outlined the basics of running a smuggling operation, which were straightforward:

  • Pay your captain and crew first, because they worked the hardest.

  • Pay your overseas suppliers next, so nobody gets killed.

  • Then pay your off-load crew and drivers, so they stay loyal and want to work again.

  Harvey, the business school student, had received different training when it came to making payroll, a lesson he once shared with Toombs.

  “Barry, one thing they teach you in school: pay yourself first,” said Harvey. “That’s what a good businessman does.”

  Another paradox among the gentlemen smugglers was that as their operations became more and more sophisticated, they were increasingly controlled by men incapable of sailing a boat. Such lack of experience could be harmful, as those planning smuggling ventures had unrealistic expectations and did not appreciate the rigors of moving a sailboat across oceans, through hurricanes, and past patrols, all while loaded with tons of illegal drugs. These men wanted to do too much, too fast.

  “People were looking for an easy, fast way to make money—it ain’t easy,” says Riley. “Let me tell you something, you pay your dues, whether it would be with weather, boats, conditions, [or] worrying about the possibility of getting caught.”

  Riley went out of his way to caution potential employees about the hardships and dangers of smuggling, including his own kid brother, Roy, who began to work security for Les’s operations. If Roy did not have the same knack for smuggling as his older brother—he once fell asleep while guarding a gate—he was at least an exceptional athlete. In high school he played basketball, and, after graduating from the College of Charleston, he moved to Florida to work as a tennis pro at various clubs, even playing on the U.S. Tennis Association’s Satellite Tour. Working at this level of athletics was fun, but didn’t pay well. By the late 1970s, he fattened his wallet by helping his brother and moved near Cape Cod to help unload pot on boats sailed up from Colombia by Christy Campbell and others.

  Also joining their older brother in illicit pursuits were Tom Harvey and Michael Harvey. Michael, in particular, was familiar with brother Lee’s maneuvers, once accompanying him to an Alexandria, Virginia, diner where Toombs and Pernell passed a manila envelope containing $600,000 worth of rubies and diamonds to his brother as a down payment on a hash deal. After the Second Life landed on Hilton Head in June 1980, Lee came to be regarded as a mastermind, coolly planning five gigs at a time and taking orders while Riley stayed in the background, organizing crews.

  With Harvey, the sky was the limit. He allegedly saw stunts on television or in movies and figured out how to incorporate them into a deal. Foy says Harvey believed in the power of volume, reasoning that if only 50 percent of the drugs he smuggled made it, he and his partners still stood to make a lot of money. His friends started to joke that his ego was as big as the world; that if his head got any bigger, it would explode. Nearly everyone liked him, even the people who complained he didn’t pay, and even as he tried to outpace his partner and benefactor, Riley. He began working with other people, and contemplated even bigger hashish deals from Lebanon. If his ambition was excessive, it was all by design.

  “Sometimes Lee Harvey had more partners than he knew what to do with. He was pretty slick,” says Toombs, who regarded Harvey as the ultimate con man. “He had the charisma, and he had the stones. If you’re a beautiful liar, things work pretty good.”

  The gentlemen smugglers were so wrapped up in deal making and their high-flying lives that they didn’t realize, or didn’t care, about their notorious reputations at home. On Hilton Head, the rumors were running rampant that the island was crawling with drug smugglers. IRS criminal investigator David Forbes finally decided to check it out in 1981, meeting with a man particularly convinced his neighbors were crooked, that the resort island was the home of a vast drug network. President Ronald Reagan had just taken office in the White House, and the man, like many other Americans, was suddenly convinced marijuana was Public Enemy Number One. During his presidential campaign, Reagan appealed to conservative voters and families by attacking marijuana as “perhaps the most dangerous drug in America.” This Hilton Head resident no doubt had helped Reagan crush Jimmy Carter in the previous November’s election.

  Arriving on the island, Forbes asked the man what clues he had of islanders smuggling.

  “I just know,” the man said.

  “Have you ever seen anyone smuggling?” Forbes asked. “Ever heard anyone talking about it?”

  “Well, no,” the man replied.

  Forbes walked away.

  “What have I got here?” he said to himself. “A nut. A big conspiracy theory.”

  Forbes had been working money laundering and tax evasion cases for five years at the IRS, spending most of that time in Charleston, South Carolina. It was turf he knew well. The Holy City was his hometown, and he stuck around for college, graduating from the Citadel military academy in 1973 with a business administration degree. Seven years later, he had settled down to a cozy suburban life, living on James Island with his wife and two young kids, across the Ashley River from downtown Charleston.

  The IRS had taught Forbes how to follow a paper trail. Because tax evasion was so difficult to prove, their criminal investigators spent time only on truly egregious cases, when the numbers didn’t add up. When a man, for example, reported an income of $25,000 a year, but owned a Corvette, a swimming pool, and a big house. When Forbes saw a situation like that, he pounced.

  He’d investigated cases against doctors, car dealers, and lawyers—cases that didn’t make any headlines. He wasn’t one for making a splash, anyway. Many law enforcement officers he worked with wanted to make big busts. Forbes preferred rifling through records before kicking doors down.

  Soon enough, another call came in.

  The caller sounded nervous. He didn’t want to stay on the line, or give his name.

  “You need to look into Les Riley,” he said. “He’s living high on the hog down here in Hilton Head, and he doesn’t seem to have a job.”

  Click.

  The veteran special agent wasn’t getting his hopes up. Ninety percent of
the tips Forbes received were bad—“kooks calling during a full moon,” as he called them. Many of the callers had hopes for financial gain. The IRS promised tipsters a reward of 10 to 25 percent of any collected taxes or penalties assessed by the government should their information pan out. Such a payoff could motivate many a neighbor, or friend, to pick up the phone. Forbes had learned that you never knew when you’d catch a break. And you didn’t catch suspected crooks by staying behind a desk. Forbes joked that he’d yet to have a criminal walk into his office and confess.

  Actual drug busts weren’t unheard of on Hilton Head, either. The year before, on February 5, 1980, a DC-3 airplane belonging to Island Aviation Service and loaded with five thousand pounds of marijuana landed in a pasture in Metter, Georgia—seventy-five miles west of Savannah. After a Georgia resident called to say a plane had crashed nearby, police converged on the plane, arresting two men in pickup trucks and seizing marijuana.

  Immediately suspicion fell on the owner of the aviation company, Tommy Heyward, who called to report the plane stolen four hours after it landed in Georgia. In explaining the unusual timing of this call, Heyward said he had been suffering from back pain the last six weeks and was unable to visit the Island Aviation office and keep close tabs on his fleet, including the DC-3, which was used by Heyward to spray mosquito insecticide over Beaufort County.

  Authorities didn’t buy it, especially after discovering that the plane’s insecticide tanks emptied into the main fuel tanks, ostensibly serving as auxiliary fuel storage during long flights to South America. One of Heyward’s corporations, too, allegedly bought nearly twenty thousand gallons of fuel from 1976 to 1978 that was unaccounted for. Still, authorities ultimately dropped two sets of drug charges against Heyward and charged him with filing a false and fraudulent income tax return. These charges were the result of an investigation by Forbes and some colleagues, who traveled to Hilton Head often to review Heyward’s financial records and question him extensively following the seizure of the plane.