Jackpot

by Jason Ryan

  “At one time they had three or four agents in my office microfilming documents,” one of Heyward’s attorneys, Roberts Vaux, told the Island Packet newspaper after his client was indicted for the income tax violations. “One interview session lasted nine hours. I would estimate they’ve got 5,000 hours invested in this case.”

  Forbes’s frequent trips to see Heyward and his associates had made him well-known on the island. During each visit, he endeavored to make new friends and overcome the negative reputation that dogged the nation’s tax agency. He handed out his business card often, encouraging residents to reach out to him.

  “Something funny,” he’d say, “you give me a call.”

  Perhaps this most recent tip on Riley was the result of one of these introductions. And so he was off to Beaufort County again, but this time, with no clear sign, like a plane full of pot, that someone was smuggling drugs.

  If nothing else, he’d have some pleasant scenery on his drive south to the Beaufort County Courthouse, which housed property records for Hilton Head Island. US 17 ran south from Charleston to Beaufort County, passing through the ACE Basin— 350,000 acres of wetlands and former rice plantations. The basin—named for the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers—was popular with hunters stalking deer or duck. It was also home to creatures men preferred not to meet, including mosquitoes, alligators, and rattlesnakes.

  From the road, though, it was just long-leaf pines and live oaks. Occasionally Forbes passed iron gates bordered by dilapidated brick masonry, the unassuming entrances to plantations that sprawled for hundreds, if not thousands, of acres. Behind many of these gates were oak-lined allées, the canopied, dirt lanes that sometimes stretched close to a mile, leading to historic plantation homes. Following the declining value of Lowcountry rice, indigo, and cotton crops in the 1800s, many South Carolina plantations were sold to Northern families in want of hunting retreats at the turn of the twentieth century. The new owners maintained the dikes and flooded the former rice fields, luring waterfowl flying south for the winter. In the early 1980s wealthy Northerners still owned much of the land in the ACE Basin, though they no longer arrived by rail but by private plane. And many spent little time there—perhaps the odd holiday or weekend—helping contribute to the basin’s decidedly rural and isolated feel. There were a few communities of full-time residents down side roads off US 17, the largest of which contained no more than two thousand people.

  Forbes drove past signs for these outposts: Bennetts Point, Green Pond, White Hall, and Wiggins.

  But for the most part, there was nothing, save the occasional farm stand as he motored toward the Georgia state line and Savannah. Close to an hour into the drive, Forbes turned onto US 21, crossing over the Whale Branch River and into Beaufort, the county seat. Beaufort was South Carolina’s second-oldest city, founded after Charleston. The little town’s commercial district consisted of three blocks on Bay Street, which backed into a waterfront park and marina on the Beaufort River. Mansions lined another section of Bay Street, along a breathtaking bluff on the river.

  Here, too, on the bluff, was the county courthouse, a white, twostory building built in 1884 and remodeled in the Art Deco style in 1936. Here were the county’s property deeds and car registrations—what Forbes had come for.

  Inside the courthouse Forbes started paging through the books, looking for homes or vehicles in the name of Les Riley—standard procedure for identifying assets. You started with whatever clues you had—in this case a name. Sometimes you’d spend hours in the courthouse and come away with nothing. But look hard and long enough, Forbes knew, and you could dig up the next clue. People had to own something: a car, a house, land. And people making money illegally, especially lots of it, had to spend that money somewhere.

  But this latest tip wasn’t panning out at the courthouse. Riley’s name wasn’t surfacing. Returning the books of deeds to the shelves, Forbes concluded he was at a dead end.

  Chapter Seven

  Upon release from federal prison for the second time, Lee Harvey had a choice to make, much like he had a choice after the first time he went to prison. One option was to clean up his life, start over, and maybe complete the master’s degree he was close to finishing. Another was to organize international smuggling ventures again. He chose the latter, and, with the help of others, including Les Riley, began planning for a flotilla of boats to cross the Mediterranean and Atlantic, carting approximately 180,000 pounds of hashish from Lebanon. If that wasn’t enough, he also planned for a freighter to travel back from Singapore at the same time, carrying Thai sticks or some other cannabis from Asia. In the autumn of 1981, more than a halfdozen ships would arrive off the coast of North America, dumping an astounding amount of potent pot into the hands of the gentlemen smugglers’ east coast distributors. At least, that was the plan.

  To pull off a caper of this magnitude, Riley and Harvey had to broaden their smuggling network, partnering with a handful of shadowy business partners, some of whom would never be identified by law enforcement. Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs claims Harvey made mafia connections when serving his second prison sentence, which gave him inroads to the Lebanese underworld and beyond, though Harvey’s brothers deny that to be true. It’s possible, too, that any number of people Riley and Harvey rubbed elbows with in the Caribbean, New York, Miami, or elsewhere turned them on to a source across the Atlantic—or that Lebanese men approached them, hoping to find able American traffickers.

  Even with new partners, Riley and Harvey still made use of old friends. Since they required much more cash than normal to make down payments on the large shipment of drugs, Harvey solicited investments from some regular distributors, including $600,000 from Toombs and Julian “Doc” Pernell for a portion of the hashish. More significantly, Harvey was alleged to have earned important capital by defrauding the First National Bank of Chicago. In April 1981, a company allegedly controlled by Harvey and his partners obtained a loan from the bank’s office in the Channel Islands, off the coast of Normandy, where banking secrecy laws were favorable. The money was to be used to buy yachts, and these yachts would be used as collateral for the loan in case of default.

  Harvey and his partners did not buy any yachts, though they submitted false paperwork to the bank pretending they had purchased thirty-six boats, all of which were apparently fictitious. They did buy two refurbished North Sea fishing trawlers, though, paying about $450,000 in the spring of 1981 to Dutch shipyards for vessels they named the Adeline C and Caroline C. These boats would serve as motherships, carrying massive amounts of drugs.

  Additionally, Harvey and his partners obtained use of the freighter Sea Scout, which would be another mothership. The boat was controlled by Mark Hertzan, a New York drug smuggler potentially bound for Hollywood fame. In 1979 he befriended actor John Belushi in a Manhattan bathhouse both men frequented and revealed to the comedian that he smuggled drugs in secret compartments of ships, as well as invested in horse-breeding operations. Belushi was mesmerized by Hertzan’s double life and struck an agreement with him to make a movie based on the smuggler, called Kingpin, so long as Hertzan’s identity was kept secret and Belushi could be the star. In 1979, Universal paid a screenwriter and Belushi for the rights to the proposed film, guaranteeing Belushi $100,000 if the movie was made.

  Belushi pitched the project to director Steven Spielberg, who wasn’t interested. He asked director John Landis, too, who also declined.

  “You got this problem,” Landis told Belushi. “You’re going to make a fucking hero out of a drug runner. I don’t like the idea of glorifying it.”

  “It’s just marijuana in the screenplay,” replied Belushi.

  “No,” said Landis.

  In the late summer and early fall of 1981, the boats moved to the Far and Near East to be loaded with drugs. The least amount of information is known about the Adeline C, whose logs indicate that it stopped in Singapore, traveled back through the Suez Canal, crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic, stopped in Flo
rida, and then sailed north to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where it was abandoned by a six-person crew, four of whom were supposedly female. Since portions of the $10.1 million bank loan were paid to an account in Singapore, and other portions were used to purchase waterfront property in Rhode Island, investigators speculate the boat was loaded with drugs, perhaps Thai sticks, in Asia, and unloaded in Rhode Island. No arrests were made.

  As for the Sea Scout, it sailed from Lebanon in August 1981 with approximately eighty thousand pounds of hashish aboard. At about the same time, the Caroline C sailed into Tripoli, Lebanon, to pick up ninety thousand pounds of hashish. At the helm was Christy Campbell, who had sailed the Second Life across the Atlantic a year earlier with thirty thousand pounds of hash on board, and now was lured into a second hash load by the promise of a $1 million paycheck from Harvey. In the weeks prior, he and his crew— each of whom were promised $400,000 for their troubles—had sailed around the Mediterranean, meeting with Riley and rendezvousing in Cyprus with two other boats that would be accepting pot from their mothership. One was the Anonymous of Rorc, a fifty-seven-foot luxury sailboat owned by Bob “The Boss” Byers and sailed by Willie Frank Steele. The other was the Meermin, a ninety-foot steel-hulled motor sailer crewed by Europeans unknown to the South Carolinians.

  When Campbell received the radio signal, he brought the Caroline C in toward the beach and Tripoli’s harbor, where he said bullets were flying. On account of the trawler’s arrival, he claimed, the fighting momentarily stopped, with enemies calling a ceasefire to facilitate the loading of the boat. The hashish was brought on board and soon filled every hold and cabin. Without any more room, the rest was stacked on the deck of the trawler. Militiamen escorted the Caroline C back out to sea and handed over a few AK-47 automatic rifles for protection against pirates. Of more immediate concern than pirates, though, was the foot of water that kept sloshing on deck. The boat was sitting perilously low in the sea on account of all the drugs aboard, and Campbell was afraid it might sink.

  To the Caroline C’s rescue came the Anonymous of Rorc and the Meermin. The two sailboats pulled alongside the trawler, and all three vessels headed west on autopilot, set to a speed of approximately five knots. As the sailboats were tied to the side of the Caroline C, the assorted crews worked together to transfer the hash and lighten the trawler’s load. Approximately thirty thousand pounds went aboard the Meermin and ninety-six hundred pounds of hashish went aboard the Anonymous of Rorc before they were untied.

  The boats continued cruising west, slowly separating as they moved at different speeds. The Meermin was in the lead, followed by the Caroline C, which slowed its engines to keep pace with the Anonymous of Rorc, which was having engine trouble. The Caroline C soon steamed ahead, too, as the Anonymous of Rorc’s crew decided to put up its sails, making slow but steady progress. Somewhere nearby, as well, was the Sea Scout. Each boat was told to head for the middle of the U.S. eastern seaboard. When each vessel got close, it’d be told exactly where to go.

  Of the four boats plying the Mediterranean and Atlantic, Campbell’s boat was among the fastest, its engines pushing it steadily westward. Before being loaded in Lebanon, the ship’s adventure had been trouble free, save for crewman Kenny Gunn falling two stories off the pilothouse while trying to change a staysail. He was drunk, which at least made him feel less pain as he thudded onto the deck, breaking a leg. The crew stopped in Algeria so a doctor could set the bone, and they were forced to bribe a threatening Customs inspector with alcohol, cigarettes, and pornography. Days later Gunn got drunk again, stumbled around, and broke his leg a second time, requiring another trip to a doctor.

  Now on the return voyage, Campbell and his shipmates encountered five hurricanes and were in danger of getting hit by a sixth as they bobbed 250 miles off the U.S. coast, out of fuel. They called in to friends for help, and, two weeks later, a boat captain was persuaded to bring them enough fuel to finish the voyage, supposedly at a cost of more than $250,000. By now Campbell had learned his point of entry: the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. They cruised toward its mouth, entering the river and steaming past Wilmington, North Carolina, in search of a private dock where they’d unload.

  But the crew of the Caroline C searched in vain, eventually running aground. Campbell then hopped in a Zodiac raft and continued up the river, where he found a dock he deemed suitable to unload on, even though it was not the one specified by Riley and Harvey. He and his crew began stacking the hashish there in broad daylight, and somehow the off-load crew made its way to this dock and transferred it to a nearby plantation.

  With the hashish off the boat and the tide high, the Caroline C was able to float again and head downstream, back toward sea. They soon ran aground again, this time in front of a Coast Guard station. Coast Guard officers came aboard and breakfasted with the crew, unaware that the trashed boat had just been unloaded of more than forty thousand pounds of hashish. When the tide rose enough again to lift the ship, the crew steered it out into the ocean and south to Savannah, Georgia, docking at Thunderbolt Marina. By this point they had been celebrating their homecoming for hours. As they docked the boat, the drunken men whooped and hollered, and some jumped in the water to take a swim. They tipped dockhands excessively, with half the crew driving into South Carolina and half the crew, including Campbell and Gunn, taking a cab to the Savannah airport. Before leaving the marina, they showed an AK-47 to marina employees.

  As Campbell, Gunn, and another crewman waited at the airport to board a chartered Learjet, U.S. Customs agents scrambled to catch them. Minutes earlier, other Customs agents had discovered scraps of hashish aboard the boat at the marina during an inspection. A check of a U.S. Customs database found that members of the Caroline C crew, whose names had been left with an inspector at the dock, had criminal records for smuggling. A supervisor raised Customs agents across coastal Georgia on the radio, instructing them to cancel their patrols and head to the airport. The men must not be allowed to fly away.

  Arriving first was Customs agent Rachel Fischer. Identifying the suspects, she approached the men wearing plainclothes. Gunn, the Burt Reynolds look-a-like who’d been starved of sex for two months, welcomed the woman’s attention. He offered her a beer from a sixpack he was holding and gave her a peck on the cheek. In exchange, she placed him and his friends under arrest.

  While the journey was ending at the Savannah airport for Campbell and two of his crewmen, the Anonymous of Rorc was still coming across the Atlantic, a few weeks away from landfall. It had been a long trip so far, to say the least. After flying to Europe and boarding the sailboat in Athens, the crew had cruised east between the Greek isles, Turkey, and Cyprus. At each stop they partied, often taking girls into the staterooms. Sometimes they watched movies aboard the sailboat on a small television.

  The Anonymous of Rorc’s hull was painted a pastel yellow and featured teak decks and grab rails. The vessel was gorgeous—“one of the best-built boats in the world, at the time,” recalled Kenny Brown, a member of the four-man crew. “Sailed like a dream, too.”

  “It didn’t look like a boat to be used for what we were about to use it for,” said his friend and fellow crewman, Ken Buckland. “God, it was like a yacht.”

  Both men were first-rate sailors from Florida, but neither was a veteran smuggler. In fact, this was Brown’s first trip. But for a $150,000 paycheck, the sail maker was willing to try a new line of work. Plus, it was all fun before getting down to business, bedding babes and “sailing around, having a great time.”

  Brown and Buckland were the tamer half of the crew. Also on board was Bill Thompson, a friend since childhood to the boat owner, Byers. Thompson, also known as LB, was short and stocky, tough from years of playing hockey in Minnesota and serving in Vietnam as a distinguished helicopter pilot. Among other military awards, he received the Air Medal with V device, indicating a notable act of valor or heroism.

  Despite Thompson’s courage, Vietnam was said to have taken its toll on the
man, and friends attributed his excessive drinking to the trauma of war. Day to day, though, he seemed to mask any psychological damage by inspiring hilarity. John “Smokin’ Sneakers” Jamison, for example, fondly remembers a number of Thompson’s inappropriate but amusing antics. There was the time they were on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, outfitting a boat for a smuggling run, when a boy came by with a board piled high with mushrooms.

  “My god, look at these magic mushrooms,” said Thompson.

  Jamison stared at the fungi—three or four dozen by his count. He had heard of their hallucinogenic powers, but had never tried them.

  “Well, LB, how many are you going to get?” Jamison asked.

  Thompson turned and looked at Jamison, giving him an incredulous look, like he was “totally wacko.”

  “All of them,” Thompson said, as if there were any other choice.

  Receiving the mushrooms, Thompson nibbled some first, to no apparent effect. Jamison then sliced a few, as if to top a salad, and plopped them down his throat. Thompson turned giddy, thinking Jamison was doomed. But, as the minutes passed, he was disappointed to see him remain sober. Concluding the boy had swindled them, they headed up the dock toward a bar. Somehow, someway, they would find a path to intoxication. That’s when the mushrooms took hold.

  Staring at the back of Thompson’s head, Jamison noticed it seemed to be melting. He looked at Thompson in terror, motioning to his skull. Thompson raised an arm to feel his hair, but Jamison grabbed it and cautioned him.

  “Don’t do that, you’ll mess it all up. It’s like wax,” Jamison told him in the most serious of tones, before both were cracking up, rolling around the dock with tears coming out of their eyes. “This psycho, the next day, I’m sitting in the cockpit of the boat, and this nice little family comes in on a bareboat charter, a forty-something footer.