by Jason Ryan
“Dad’s at the helm, just real careful, you know … coming in,” says Jamison. “All of a sudden, just when they’re about to the dock … there’s this blood-curdling scream. I mean blood curdling.
“The dad locks up, just freezes,” he says. “The boat goes careening into this concrete dock, destroys the pulpit on the boat.
“Guess who they all look at?” Jamison says. “I’m the only one there, right next to them on a boat. The kids and the wife are going, ‘Well thanks a lot, you just ruined our whole vacation.’
“All I can hear was this snickering down below. I go down there, LB has got his head covered up with two pillows, laughing his nuts off,” says Jamison. “He was psycho.”
That bang up paled in comparison to the trouble Thompson caused in Vietnam.
“One of his favorites was, he would fly over an area where he knew there were friendlies,” Jamison said. “Then he would call Saigon and ask for permission to open up.
“Saigon would come back and go ‘Negative, negative. They’re friendlies, they’re friendlies,’ ” Jamison said, imitating their panicky tones.
“He’d go, ‘Uh, Saigon, tower, you’re coming in garbled and broken, do I take that as an affirmative?’
“They’d have, like meltdowns, and he’d laugh his nuts off. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world.”
If Thompson’s antics could be a bit disconcerting when trafficking massive amounts of drugs, boat captain Steele was no more reassuring. By this point in his smuggling career, his reputation for drug abuse preceded him, and even if it didn’t, he unfailingly demonstrated to new acquaintances the depths of his addiction to cocaine. Buckland remembers once sitting in on Steele’s crack-smoking sessions in a mutual friend’s grandmother’s house. Nude whores ran wild in one room while Grandma asked everyone to keep it down from another, complaining that she was trying to watch her soap opera. Steele would drive around after such sessions with Buckland riding shotgun.
“Scared the shit out of me,” Buckland says.
For this trip, Steele had, of course, packed a propane tank and torch in his suitcase when he flew to Europe. Lucky for him, it went undetected by airport security. As he indulged his drug habit in Greece, it gave Buckland pause for concern.
“Jesus, man, this is our ringleader,” he thought. “Our captain.”
“That always bothered me about him,” Buckland says, but “you untie those lines, man, he was sober.”
When tying up to the Caroline C, Brown remembers counting 145 sacks of hashish being placed in the Anonymous of Rorc, the drugs filling the cabins and covering the comfortable beds and television room. The hash was stacked just a few feet shy of the ceiling, and only the galley was left open. The men were impressed with their new cargo. Each plastic-wrapped bale contained approximately fifty small cloth bags with drawstrings and stamped wax seals. Inside each cloth bag were two soles of blonde hashish—oval-shaped patties the size of dessert plates. Each was wrapped in plastic and weighed about a pound. The hash came so beautifully packaged it might have been sold on store shelves.
With the product loaded, the crew watched the Meermin and Caroline C disappear on the horizon. Steele and Buckland took turns navigating as they sailed through the Mediterranean, occasionally using the engine. Three days into the trip, the fuel pump malfunctioned and the engine conked out. The boat was so crowded with hash it was difficult to diagnose the problem. They anchored the boat off Fomenter, within Spain’s Balearic Islands, where an Australian friend named Digger brought them a replacement part. It worked only briefly before failing, forcing them to raise the sails again in a treacherous area of the world—the Strait of Gibraltar. The crew labored for days to leave the Mediterranean, frustrated by weak winds that came from the west, nearly putting them in irons.
“We were tacking back and forth, all the way down, as close to the land as we felt comfortable,” says Buckland. “We’d be sailing all day long and we’d maybe make a mile, two miles. We were going, ‘God, can we ever get the hell out of here?’
“Sail down to Libya, sail back to Portugal,” he says. “We just couldn’t get out.”
Complicating their maneuvers was the stream of humongous supertankers traveling through the strait.
“It’s like a street trying to go through Gibraltar, it’s only eight miles wide. They’re just going back and forth, back and forth, and we’re trying to go this way with the wind,” says Brown, describing the perpendicular paths taken by their sailboat and the imposing ships. “It takes [the supertankers] five miles just to stop.”
After finally exiting the Mediterranean, the crew decided to stop in the Canary Islands to buy another engine part and food. Unable to clear Customs because of all the hashish, they sailed the boat within ten miles of the shoreline and dropped a dinghy, putting Steele and Thompson aboard. The pair motored ashore at sunrise with plans to meet again in twenty-four hours back at sea.
Buckland and Brown sailed throughout the day and night, cutting back and forth, killing time. As the sun began to rise, there was no sign of the dinghy. Hours dragged on, and Buckland started worrying, wondering if Steele and Thompson had been arrested for entering the country without a passport. He knew he couldn’t stay offshore forever without attracting suspicion. He didn’t want to be paranoid, but considering the hashish was almost overflowing from the staterooms, it was hard to forget the massive amount of illegal drugs on board and the consequences it could bring.
“Well, it looks like it’s you and me across the Atlantic, buddy,” he joked nervously to Brown, his eyes scanning an empty sea.
Buckland remembers thinking, “You didn’t want to leave them, but then again I don’t want to keep sitting here with this thing full. What do you do?”
The sun climbed higher in the sky.
“We were really within minutes … I’m about ready to toss a coin … [then] bzzzzzzzzzzzz, I see this little dinghy,” Buckland says. “Thank God.”
Steele and Thompson climbed aboard and explained the delay. The men had arrived on shore safely, gone into town to shop, and returned to find their dinghy missing. The Canary Islands were notorious for thieves, and Steele and Thompson decided to take justice into their own hands. The former jocks marauded the small fishermen camps on the shore, beating men up until they were told where to find their boat. Upon finding the dinghy, they discovered that the outboard motor had been removed. So, they told Brown and Buckland, they had to fight a few more men to recover the motor.
The rest of the trip was still slow going but less dramatic. The engine remained disabled, requiring that they stay under sail across the ocean. The crew passed time reading spy novels and smoking hash. They played cassette tapes of Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett, and classical music. Attempts to fish were unsuccessful. They had caught a tuna or shark every day in the Mediterranean, but had few bites on the lines in the deep Atlantic Ocean. The occasional storm stirred up trouble, and strong gusts tore a few sails to shreds, requiring replacements.
Halfway across the ocean, they were told over radio to change their course from New York and head to a back-up location in South Carolina. The crew concentrated on navigating south and fixing the engine. It would be difficult to maneuver the ship in the shallow creeks and rivers of South Carolina if they had to rely on sails alone. Once they had the engine working at a minimal level, they were nearly out of fuel, so they, too, arranged to have a boat meet them offshore to deliver large jugs of gasoline and groceries. Despite the engine problems and trying sailing conditions, the crew felt relaxed. On the other smuggling ships, men had formed cliques, started fights, and turned to drink to combat nerves and frustration. The crew of the Anonymous of Rorc kept themselves calm as they approached the mouth of the North Edisto River. After more than seventy days at sea, the trip was almost over.
The change in course for the Anonymous of Rorc was made for good reason. In New York, disaster had struck, eclipsing any anxiety Riley and Harvey may have had over Campbell’s a
rrest. Scuba divers were now trying to rectify the situation, but it didn’t look good.
Days earlier, the Meermin had arrived off the coast of New York City, ready to transfer the thirty thousand pounds of hashish it had on board. A fellow smuggler and paramour of Riley, Madeline Wasserman, had arranged for two wooden fishing vessels to meet the large sailboat, but they delayed departing on account of rough seas. As days passed, and the seas did not calm, the crew on the Meermin became impatient, suffering from a lack of water and food. They screamed into the radio, demanding to be met. On October 9, 1981, they got their wish, and the two wooden boats, the Falcon and the Tanqueray, left New Jersey to rendezvous with the mothership.
The smaller vessels cruised for four hours or so before finding the Meermin offshore. After dancing around each other for a few minutes, the Falcon pulled alongside the ninety-foot motor sailer, its crew tying them together and throwing aboard groceries. The weather was brutal, with heavy wind, rain, and fifteen-foot waves. Slowly, sacks of hashish came over the side of the Meermin and were stored below in the Falcon. The Tanqueray stayed nearby, ready to ferry most of the men back to shore once the transfer was finished, leaving a skeleton crew aboard the hash-filled sister ship.
After approximately ten thousand pounds had been transferred, an aft cleat busted loose on the Falcon, loosening the bond between the boats. Still tied together toward their bows, the two hulls, one wooden and one steel, started clapping violently together. The collisions cracked the Falcon’s hull below the waterline, and the ocean began to flood the boat. The crews untied and pulled away from each other to inspect the damage. Some wanted to head to shore immediately, but others argued the leak was manageable, that the boat’s bilge pumps would compensate for the flooding. A decision was made to keep loading the Falcon. The vessels were tied together again, and the rest of the hash was transferred. It was early in the morning when the Meermin sailed away and the Falcon and Tanqueray headed back toward New Jersey.
Twenty miles from shore, however, the Falcon could float no farther. The boat was going down, and the smugglers hastened its demise by opening the seacocks—valves on the hull below the waterline. They did not want the drug boat to be seen come dawn. As the Falcon slowly sank into the ocean, its few crew members jumped aboard the Tanqueray and headed to shore to break the news to Wasserman, Riley, and the other partners waiting in New York City.
As they gathered in a hotel room to discuss the fiasco, the partners doubted the story’s legitimacy, threatening to kill people until the truth came out, and even obtained a samurai sword for purposes of intimidation. When they accepted the fact that no one had ripped them off, they sent out boats with scuba divers to try to recover the hash. By this time sacks of drugs were escaping out of the broken, sunken hull and floating to shore. A fishing boat had inadvertently snagged the Falcon in its nets, too, and alerted the Coast Guard. The deal was falling apart, and Riley decided he wasn’t sticking around. As Wasserman and other partners stewed about the thirty thousand pounds of lost hash and began plotting their next move, Riley shocked them all.
“Well,” he said, “I’m going fishing in Australia.”
Such a swift departure did not endear Riley to the men gathering on Edisto Island, South Carolina, on November 1, 1981, to receive the ten thousand pounds of hashish aboard the Anonymous of Rorc. Those expecting him thought he had abandoned them. Still, the sailboat was coming in, and the show must go on.
Nearly a dozen men were scattered throughout Skip Sanders’s grandmother’s Edisto Island plantation, West Bank, waiting for the sailboat to appear. The men had been arriving since the day before, coming from Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and New York. Byers arrived by private jet at the small airport in Walterboro, forty miles away. Traveling with him were two goons—men whom he called, perhaps half-jokingly, “Moose” and “Vinny.” Byers wore an expensive suit and Italian shoes, in which he seemed to tiptoe. He wore shades, too, giving him “the look,” according to Sanders.
Such fancy attire surely had struck Byers as impractical when his car turned into West Bank Plantation on Halloween, driving down a dirt road, past two hundred acres of bean fields and through forest and a covered clearing before finally reaching the water. The roadside oaks, arched overhead and trailing Spanish moss, made it seem like Byers was traveling through tunnels.
From West Bank’s bluff, Byers could see old, dilapidated dock pilings and a creek that led to the North Edisto River. There, the kingpin was introduced to Sanders.
“Just what is it I’m buying here?” he asked.
“Not much of anything,” Sanders replied, coolly.
Byers, nearly ten years older and with an entourage in tow, was intimidating. But Sanders had become something of an old hand in the smuggling underworld of South Carolina, too, used to dealing with such men who fancied themselves as kingpins.
In the last two years, he’d been paid for at least sixteen deals on his grandmother’s remote property. Granny provided the perfect cover for Sanders, as no less than a retired DEA agent would later describe her as a “ninety-something-year-old pillar of the Edisto community.” The matriarch lived in a small cottage on the property—a home the visiting smugglers referred to as “Granny’s place.”
Deceiving the sweet old woman wasn’t ideal, says Sanders, but he couldn’t pass up the lifestyle her plantation helped him afford. Plus she had been shocked enough when another grandson, Sanders’s brother Johnny, had a month earlier been arrested and charged with driving under the influence. It was better, he decided, to keep her in the dark.
Staring back at Byers, Sanders continued his short sales pitch.
“Not much of anything,” he said. “When a guy is doing something illegal, he wants nothing much else to be around.”
Byers laughed, sold on the land and its seclusion. At this point, he had little choice but to land the load here, given the disappearance of Riley, the arrests of Campbell and his crew just south in Savannah, and the Falcon’s sinking up north off New York. The Anonymous of Rorc was offshore and ready to come in, forcing Byers to make a fast deal with Sanders, a man whose land he’d never happened to use.
“Hey, kid … I like you,” Byers said. “What’s your name?”
“My friends call me Skip,” said Sanders.
“So your friends call ya Skip, huh?” said Byers. “Did you hear that, Moose?”
Moose and Vinny started laughing, anticipating a punch line, perhaps one they’d heard before. Byers took his time, adjusting his collar, allowing for a dramatic pause.
“Well what the fuck should I call ya? Eh?”
Moose and Vinny were now rolling. Even Sanders cracked a smile and laughed at the wiseguy routine. He was about to collect handsomely. He could afford a joke at his expense.
The next evening, while Sanders kept an ear to the airwaves, men milled about in a clearing close to the bluff. Four vans were parked there, some packed with expensive groceries, including champagne, beer, soda, and steaks. The food would be welcome fare for the sailboat crew. The men had been sailing since leaving the coast of Lebanon more than two months before. The other vans had been unloaded, emptied of Zodiac inflatable boats, rope, an anchor, and an outboard motor. For purposes of stealth, the men covered the vans’ brake lights and taillights with pads of masking tape.
Sanders had distributed handheld radios and nightscopes to the men that afternoon before using his Jeep to tow away a portable trailer from the bluff. He planned to keep a watch on things from his grandmother’s house, removed from the action. Sanders was happy to take a cut for providing access to smugglers, but he wouldn’t lend a hand lifting bales. Before dying, his grandfather had left Sanders with some advice he found useful as a so-called spot salesman: “If you own the plantation, don’t work the plantation.”
At his grandmother’s home he turned on extensive surveillance equipment, though Sanders admits the “radars and all that were mostly for show … as if to portray the illusion I was on top of things.�
�� More helpful than radars and radios, according to Sanders, was the black community living on Edisto Island.
“Island blacks have the uncanny ability to instantly receive updates on local activity. I don’t know how they do it. They can’t seem to peg it either,” he wrote in a letter. “But if a dark blue Crown Vic would turn down my avenue? I would hear about it twenty minutes later when going into the Edistonian to pick up laundry from a very cool island queen named Annie Mae.”
Critical to this underground island network was the island swing bridge tender, Brickman. Watching from the bridge’s observation tower, Brickman could tell the weight of every vehicle that came onto the island. He also had a pretty good idea of where it might be going.
“Somehow, when any police car hit the island, Brickman would get the word to someone quickly,” Sanders recalled. “And I would know, within minutes. Didn’t matter if I was playing golf or boating, whatever. I’ve had greenskeepers tell me stuff, crabbers, oyster guys, you name it. It would be short and sweet, ‘Hey, the Brick say must tell you police to ride to yo place shree deep.’ And that would be it.”
As darkness fell, Sanders felt at ease. He’d yet to have a problem at West Bank, and there was no reason to suspect that tonight would be different. A twenty-four-foot skiff sat in the water below the bluff, ready to meet the sailboat in the North Edisto and receive the hash. The tide had turned just after eleven o’clock, beginning its sixfoot drop. If the sailboat didn’t come soon, the off-loaders would be unable to bring the loaded skiff alongside the bluff.
The men drank beer and soda as they waited. Sometime after two in the morning, the smugglers got a message from the sailboat. They were ready to meet in the North Edisto River. The skiff cranked its engine and puttered away from the pilings.