by Jason Ryan
The smugglers weren’t the only ones out late in the South Carolina marshes that night. U.S. Customs Patrol officers Mike Bell and Louis Jefferson sat in a cramped trailer, listening to radio transmissions and keeping an eye on the North Edisto River. They probably could have stolen a few winks without consequence. There wasn’t much to see. There had been a new moon five days earlier, and the slight crescent in the sky cast a faint light on the river and its offshoots. Passing clouds blocked what little moonlight shone. The officers had parked their trailer near a creek on Wadmalaw Island, about a mile from where the North Edisto met the Atlantic Ocean.
The kindest adjective with which Jefferson could describe the trailer was ratty. It was a utility trailer, meant to hold tools and machinery. Tonight it held the two men and shelves crammed with radio equipment. Jefferson’s colleague, Bill Southern, had already volunteered for the first patrol shift that night, preferring to sit on a boat than hunker down in a sardine can. He left Jefferson and Bell behind, floating near the banks of Seabrook Island in his patrol boat, right at the mouth of the river. Behind him, inland, on each side of the river, were Wadmalaw and Edisto Islands.
At least it wasn’t too cold, especially for the second day of November. A night in the stakeout trailer was even more miserable when the temperature dropped, forcing its occupants to light propane heaters, never mind the dangers posed by the trailer’s poor ventilation. Jefferson, Bell, and Southern could be encouraged by the fact that tonight wasn’t a total stab in the dark. Customs agent Claude McDonald told Bell that he had spied a suspicious trailer on Edisto Island while conducting aerial surveillance earlier in the week. It was parked on a bluff on West Bank plantation, which lay just across the river from the stakeout position. Tonight it was eerily quiet. No shrimpers or crabbers could be heard plying the waters. Jefferson and Bell knew the near—pitch-black darkness was pregnant with possibilities.
“It’s a good night for smuggling,” Jefferson told Bell, thinking out loud.
The waiting heightened the tension, allowing the officers ample opportunity to imagine what desperate men might do to avoid arrest and defend their multimillion dollar cargoes. Jefferson was all too aware that, besides guns, just about anything aboard a boat could be used to kill, from filet knives to fiberglass antennas. When Jefferson boarded a smuggling boat, he did so swiftly and fiercely.
“I took them all as a threat,” he says of his outlaw quarry. “Normal people don’t [smuggle drugs]. You have to have something twisted in your psyche.”
Jefferson had survived two tours of duty in Vietnam, fighting as a member of the Army’s mechanized infantry. Returning stateside to a job with U.S. Customs, he found it impossible to turn off the killer instincts that had kept him alive overseas. He considered his job an extension of his service in Vietnam.
“When we worked for Customs, it was a war on drugs. That’s what it was called,” Jefferson says. “Instead of dealing with gooks I was dealing with smugglers.”
He pushed himself hard and pushed his colleagues hard, too, sometimes crossing the line. He’d been reprimanded for use of excessive force against suspects more than a couple times. He had been trained to eliminate threats, not reduce them. If you reduce a threat, he reasoned, it still exists. Nighttime raids in the marshes of South Carolina didn’t help Jefferson shake his demons from Vietnam.
“I had the same mentality—you or me—every day.”
Bell had seen his Customs colleague in action, and was glad to have such a hardened veteran as a partner, especially when things got hairy.
“Louis don’t mess around,” says Bell.
Sitting in the trailer, the men used their radio equipment to monitor the airwaves, listening for signs of smuggling. The officers had a VHF transmitter and receiver as well as what they called a DF, or directional finder. Since Southern was on the water with a radio, too, they could pinpoint the location of any other transmissions using triangulation. But the airwaves stayed silent. The only excitement of the night had come hours earlier, at about nine o’clock, when Southern heard an outboard motor. The trio of Customs officers waited in darkness, anticipating a break.
“It was like waiting for a storm,” says Jefferson. “Everyone knows it is coming.”
The clock was creeping toward two o’clock when the radio came alive. It was Southern: He had spied a green running light offshore. Bell and Jefferson snapped to attention.
A half-hour later, Southern called in again. A boat was heading their way, he said, entering the North Edisto River. A half-hour later he updated the men again, reporting that a large double-masted sailboat had passed him, still heading up the river. Bell and Jefferson scrambled out of the trailer, driving across Wadmalaw Island to reach an undercover patrol boat that the U.S. Customs Patrol kept docked behind the home of a friendly former government employee. By five minutes after three they were on the water, motoring quietly down the river. In the darkness they soon noticed the sailboat’s weak running lights. With Bell at the helm, they approached the boat, passing slowly before turning and pulling in behind its stern. Bell activated the boat’s bow-mounted, remote-controlled spotlight, suddenly throwing bright light across the water.
The shot of light illuminated not one boat, but two. Bell and Jefferson saw a twenty-four-foot skiff alongside the large sailboat. A man stood on the skiff’s deck, reaching up to receive what looked like a bale. Stacked in the bow of the skiff were large white bundles. Bell noticed the sailboat was flying the Union Jack from the stern. He glanced at the transom, quickly reading “Anonymous” and a home port of “Jersey” before clicking off the spotlight and turning away toward sea.
There was no doubt in the officers’ minds that they had witnessed smuggling. There was the late hour rendezvous, the suspicious bales, the foreign registry … it was obviously time to call in the cavalry. Floating a safe distance from the sailboat, the men turned their attention to the radios.
They reached Southern and asked him to rouse officers on the mainland. Wary of the smugglers listening to the airwaves, Bell used codes to reference Customs paperwork and his superior officer.
“Bill, we’re going to have a forty-six twenty-one to fill out tonight. Go ahead and call one one oh one and let him know,” said Bell.
Bell also called Sector Communications in Miami, an aroundthe-clock dispatch for Customs officers. He asked them to check any records for the Anonymous, unknowingly truncating the name of the boat. Miami responded that they had nothing, missing a potential record on the boat possibly filed under its full name.
Soon the airwaves were crowded with the voices of law enforcement officers across Charleston. As Bell later explained, you called everyone that could respond—“local cops, troopers, wildlife [officers].” He couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Finally there was a break in the chatter. He was still worried he might tip off the smugglers, so Bell broadcast a mysterious message to the early risers, hoping Customs special agent McDonald would understand his reference to West Bank plantation and the trailer spotted on the bluff a few days earlier.
“Claude, you told me about somewhere interesting on the island. Send everyone over there.”
Waiting for backup, he and Jefferson kept watch on the sailboat, peering through a nightscope.
The spotlight had only shined for a few seconds, but it sent shockwaves across the river. The off-loaders near the bluff had seen the light and were wondering if the Coast Guard had intercepted the sailboat. Byers ordered someone to fetch Sanders from Granny’s house.
Sanders had seen a string of vehicles streaming toward the island with the radar he had mounted on the roof. Brickman had called from the bridge, advising Sanders that seven cruisers had “just hit the island lights out at eighty plus.” They were “dark blue and coming deep.”
Sanders radioed the off-loaders and urged them to flee, but he was ignored or unheard, as some of the radios were broken. Against the advice of his grandfather, Sanders left the house to join those working his plantation
. He conferred with Byers, who dismissed his suggestions to cut and run. “The Boss” was intent on finishing the deal. Other smugglers said Sanders was paranoid and spurned his recommendation to “hop on the speedboat and haul ass.”
Soon the men heard an outboard motor. The skiff returned piled high with sacks of hash. Its operator, Mike Martin, wore a ski mask over his face, hoping to keep his identity a secret among the other smugglers. Martin had already finished a few trips in the skiff, ferrying back more than eight thousand pounds. He began poling the skiff as close to shore as possible in the extremely shallow water, the boat’s outboard motor now turned off and raised to avoid scraping bottom.
Aboard the Anonymous of Rorc, Steele turned the boat out toward sea, cruising slowly. Brown was below deck, throwing hash sacks upward through the hatch. Buckland and Thompson grabbed the bales and tossed them overboard, reasoning that, should they be arrested, the less hash on board, the better. They considered jumping into the water, but given their distance from shore, their heavy clothing, and the cold temperature, such a move might be suicidal.
“There was no way I was going to jump in that river,” says Buckland. “I would sink.”
The Customs officers saw the sailboat pass them in darkness, about one hundred feet away. Bell told Jefferson they must stop the sailboat now, before it reached the open sea, where boarding would be more difficult; not that it would be a piece of cake on the river. Bell had hoped backup would have arrived before having to board, or that daybreak would come, or that at least officer Southern was there to help. Instead, it was just the two of them in the dark.
The preferred method of boarding a ship for Customs officers was to approach a vessel slowly, announcing “U.S. Customs” with their bullhorn as they surveyed the scene. “How many men are on board?” they’d ask with the bullhorn. “Do you have any weapons?” And so on.
After that, the patrol boat would pull alongside, asking for cooperation as they tied off to the other boat and secured fenders. Two Customs agents could board while a third Customs officer kept at the wheel of the law enforcement vessel.
Tonight Bell and Jefferson couldn’t count on cooperation. In light of the sailboat heading to sea, the boarding could not be a protracted, by-the-book affair. The only choice was to “ram ’n’ board” the sailboat, they decided, with Jefferson as the sole boarding officer.
Jefferson readied for a full-assault boarding, weapon drawn. He held a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver—a veritable cannon capable of instantly dropping a man. It was one of the few weapons the marine officer said he could count on not to be corroded by salt. Strapped to his body were speedloaders and at least five pairs of handcuffs.
Bell flipped on the spotlight again and gunned the motor. He turned on the boat’s flashing blue lights, too, as he drove toward the Anonymous of Rorc’s starboard stern. He knew that the spotlight cut both ways, illuminating both the smugglers and Jefferson. As the Customs boat pulled alongside, the sailboat turned hard, seemingly attempting to pull away and thwart the boarding. Jefferson, adrenaline flowing, vaulted from the Customs boat’s bow onto the sailboat. The Anonymous of Rorc’s teak deck sat much higher than the patrol boat, and such a maneuver was, said Bell, “like trying to get up on a horse.”
Bell, yelling “U.S. Customs! U.S. Customs!” tried to stay alongside the veering sailboat. He could have benefited from some help, or at least a few more arms. He turned the wheel to keep the two boats close while also directing the spotlight via the remote control on the console. He left the helm to try tying up to the long sailboat. At the same time, Jefferson stormed the cockpit, the menacing Vietnam veteran confronting the men on deck.
“Don’t shoot us, don’t shoot us,” the crew yelled.
“Anybody down below,” Jefferson yelled inside the cabin “get your ass on the deck!”
Brown slowly emerged from the cabin and laid facedown on the deck. Brown said Jefferson shook as he pointed the gun at him, making him nervous and eager to explain he was unarmed. Jefferson straightened the wheel as Bell came aboard. Gathering the crew around the cockpit, Bell stood watch while Jefferson searched below deck, finding bales. The officers handcuffed the four sailors and continued their preliminary search, finding an automatic Chinese-made Mauser machine pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle, one tucked under a seat cushion and the other wrapped in a towel. The men had used the weapons for target practice at sea.
At West Bank, instructions crackled over the CB radio: “Drive the vans from the clearing to the bluff.” As the vans pulled up, men moved frantically in the marsh to move the hash off the skiff and up to the vans on high ground. It was wet, dirty work.
“There was about six or seven people running around crazy,” Dennis York, a driver from Atlanta, later recalled. “One guy backed me in, gave me directions where to go and everything; lights out and everything. And before I know it, they’re just throwing the stuff in.”
The vans were loaded within a half-hour, finished just as the sun was beginning to rise. The men then noticed flashing blue lights moving down the nearby roads. They panicked. York drove his red van away from the bluff and became lost on the plantation’s dirt roads. In his haste he drove into a ditch. The van was stuck. He left the disabled vehicle and walked back to get help pulling it out.
Instead, he found the police.
“Some vehicle started coming down with a light and told me not to move,” recalled York. “I moved.”
Everyone, in fact, was moving. The off-loaders fled every which way as law enforcement of all stripes descended on West Bank plantation. Federal, state, and local police were arriving en masse. The masked man in the skiff took off by water. Others ran through the woods, including Ray Zeman and Jay Hoffman, both men dripping wet from wading in the water an hour earlier and unloading the skiff. At daybreak the pair ran back to the white vans in the clearing and changed into dry clothes. They returned to the woods and soon met with friends Mike Abell and Bob Roche. Roche decided to try to make it on his own, splitting from the group.
Law enforcement officers started gathering around the red van stuck in the ditch. The men milled about casually when Clark Settles, the Customs Patrol chief for the Carolinas, arrived on the scene. Moments before, an officer unleashing bloodhounds had asked the men to stick close to the van, or else risk erasing the fleeing smugglers’ scent trails. Nonetheless, Settles was not pleased to see them standing around like sitting ducks.
His mind flashed back to a bust he worked years ago in the Florida Keys. There he and other officers relaxed around an abandoned van, oblivious to a smuggler with a shotgun sitting twenty-five feet away in tall grass. Fortunately the man did not blast away. Settles had always been thankful to walk away from that scene with his life.
“We can’t do this,” Settles told the men. “I’ve been through this before. We need to secure the area.”
As the men scattered to look for suspects, Settles racked his shotgun.
“There are two sounds any man understands,” Settles later explained. “One of them’s a rattlesnake … the other’s a pump shotgun being racked. Both of them will stand the hairs on your head up.”
The shotgun was part of a barrage of sounds assaulting the smugglers’ ears, making their hearts beat faster. The on-the-run smugglers could hear the crunching of leaves and twigs under police boots, barking hounds, chopping helicopter rotors, and the drone of an airplane. Ace pilot Sonny Huggins of the State Law Enforcement Division had been called in to help with his eyes in the sky. Officers joked that Huggins was afraid of heights, because he never seemed to fly above one hundred feet.
Soon Huggins was on the radio, telling officers on the ground he had spotted a man in a bean field, lying close to the red van. Officers combed the rows of three-foot-tall plants until one policeman stumbled over a prostrate York.
Officers also arrested Roche when hounds picked up his trail. Martin, the man in the ski mask who sped off in the skiff, was arrested after he crashed his boat on a sandbar.
And Customs officer Dean Patterson arrested a man leaving West Bank in a brown Pontiac. The man said he was from Miami and struggled to tell Patterson exactly why he was in South Carolina bean fields at seven o’clock in the morning. Patterson found a handgun on the passenger seat and crack cocaine in the man’s pocket—the first time he had seen the drug.
Officers had also found the deserted white vans parked in the clearing. They took photographs of the hashish and groceries packed inside. McDonald arrived on the scene, itching to visit the cottage a half-mile away and see who might be around. Police cruisers soon were parked all over Granny’s yard.
The officers found three men in the house: Skip Sanders; his brother, Johnny; and a man named David Evans from Miami. The officers, invited into the kitchen, had a barrage of questions for Sanders.
“Where were you all last night?”
“Did you notice anything unusual?”
“Why are you wet?”
“Why is there an antenna on your roof ?”
“Are you aware you fit the profile of a smuggler?”
“Would you mind taking a ride with us through the farm?”
Sanders played dumb and answered their questions while trying not to incriminate himself. His grandmother vouched that the men spent the night in the house. She was puzzled why her grandsons were receiving so much attention and was clueless to the massive manhunt occurring on the other end of her large property. The officers didn’t believe her or her grandson, but knew they had too little evidence to make arrests. As they continued to question the men, Granny interrupted, asking if they’d like any waffles. The officers declined.
Bustling about the crowded kitchen, confused, she and Sanders briefly bumped together. She leaned in close to whisper in his ear.
“Skipper, I tell ya one thing, that these people mean business about this DUI stuff,” said Granny.