by Jason Ryan
As the second trial finished with the convictions of the Marriott Four and the government prepared for a new trial in Charleston, Greager received the phone call he had been waiting for. It was the yacht broker in Antigua, calling to tell him La Cautiva had returned and was moored in Antigua’s English Harbour.
“I’m looking at her now,” said the broker, who was, of course, unaware he was speaking with an undercover DEA agent.
Greager, portraying himself as the CEO of a fictional Colorado energy company, said he could fly down to Antigua the next day to see the boat. He’d like to bring the firm’s comptroller, too, Greager said, in case he was interested in making an offer and discussing terms of a potential deal. The broker said he’d make an appointment with the owner to show the boat and that they would expect the businessmen soon.
Forbes and Greager were on a flight to Antigua the next day. They wore shorts and T-shirts, giving the impression they were businessmen kicking back in the tropics, glad to be away from cold weather. Although he had no undercover police experience, Forbes felt comfortable acting as a comptroller. Given his undergraduate accounting education, his brief work experience as a CPA and his extensive investigative work for the IRS, Forbes was a natural fit for the role. He also knew a little about sailing—or at least more than Greager.
Such expertise could prove crucial in convincing Byers that they were legitimate businessmen. Given Byers’s fugitive status, he might be distrustful of strangers from the United States. It was more likely, however, that Forbes and Greager would blindside the alleged kingpin. What were the chances the classified ad would be brought to the government’s attention and the pictured boat be revealed as La Cautiva?
Despite having the element of surprise on their side, the American agents faced numerous challenges in the upcoming meeting. They’d be meeting on Byers’s boat in the middle of a harbor, away from any Antiguan police backup. As Americans federal agents, they had no power of arrest in Antiguan territorial waters. They also weren’t permitted to carry concealed weapons. Such limitations required creative thinking about how to apprehend Byers should they indeed meet him on board his sailboat.
Forbes put forth an idea to ask Byers for a test cruise, and to have him sail La Cautiva away from Antigua into open seas. When the sailboat entered international waters, he suggested, a Coast Guard ship could intercept them and take Byers into custody. U.S. diplomats, however, frowned on that course of action, disappointing Forbes.
Another tactic was for Forbes and Greager to board the sailboat, inspect the vessel, and conduct negotiations for its purchase. They would make a visual identification of Byers and then return to shore, where they could inform Antiguan police they had confirmed Byers’s presence in their country. From there, though, it became complicated. Should the Antiguans arrest Byers, he could fight extradition efforts, much like Riley and Wally Butler had now done for seven months in Australia. Not only would the United States have to be patient for his return, but the Antiguan government might be unwilling to fight an extended legal battle, as it would be expensive for the small island nation, requiring them to devote prosecutors to the case and jail the high-profile alleged drug kingpin for an indefinite amount of time.
Unwilling to endure the potentially long legal process, in which extradition was not guaranteed, the DEA instead insisted that the Antiguans deport Byers should Forbes and Greager identify him. Preferably, the deportation would be to a U.S. territory, where DEA agents could arrest Byers. Considering the difficulty the Operation Jackpot task force had in locating its top suspects, the DEA was eager to get its hands on alleged kingpins any way it could.
Forbes and Greager arrived in Antigua and quickly headed out to see La Cautiva in English Harbour. Stepping aboard the sailboat, they met a short, heavyset man with a beard and balding hair. He offered them Heinekens and regaled them with stories of escaping from Grenada, where he had witnessed intense fighting. Despite the bloodshed, the man said he enjoyed the intimate company of various women seeking to leave the island aboard his sailboat. He bragged that he had never gotten laid so much in his life. Without a doubt, the agents knew, this was Bob “The Boss” Byers.
During the ninety minutes or so Greager and Forbes spent with the smuggler, both sides refrained from asking about each other’s professions and instead focused on the sailboat. Byers promised to take them on a sea trial the next day and also said he’d get them laid that evening if they’d like. Impressed with La Cautiva, they struck a potential deal for the sailboat. Byers insisted on receiving cash and agreed to an offer from Forbes of about half a million dollars up front and another half million or so in the next few months. Forbes and Greager then headed back to shore, leaving Byers convinced he had found a buyer.
Upon reaching land, the investigators met with Antiguan police, disclosing that they had identified Byers.
“Ain’t no doubt that’s him,” said Forbes.
Enjoy the beach, the Antiguans responded, we’ll take care of it from here. They promptly headed out into the harbor and arrested Byers, who initiated a scuffle with the Antiguans, unwilling to leave his sailboat without a fight. Once he was restrained, the Antiguan police told him he’d be deported for entering the country with a false passport. He pleaded not to be sent to a U.S. territory, admitting he was a wanted man, and tried bribing officials to send him elsewhere. The Antiguans would have none of it and booked him on a flight to the nearest city in an American territory—San Juan, Puerto Rico. He sat in the plane handcuffed to an Antiguan immigration officer, with a plainclothes DEA agent seated nearby as a precautionary measure. When the plane touched down in Puerto Rico, Byers was greeted by federal agents and placed under arrest.
“Bob,” said the agents, “it just ain’t your day.”
On November 30, 1983, a few days after Byers was arraigned in South Carolina and held on a $7.5 million bond, the third Jackpot trial began in Charleston. Facing smuggling charges were Roy Riley; Oliver Mayfield; Kenny Pearce; and Kenny Floyd, the man who, two years earlier, had been arrested after leading South Carolina wildlife agents on a speedboat chase with John “Smokin’ Sneakers” Jamison while their smuggling colleagues unloaded thirty thousand pounds of hashish. Days earlier Lee Harvey’s brother Tom ducked out of the trial by pleading guilty to conspiring to import hashish.
Just as in the first two Jackpot trials, this one began with the government’s lead witnesses taking the stand for hours and providing a primer on the intriguing marijuana smuggling underworld, but rarely, if ever, mentioning involvement with the defendants in the courtroom. During testimony from Steele, Julian “Doc” Pernell, and Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs, Les Riley’s name came up often, and one of Roy Riley’s defense lawyers, Bob Fierer of Atlanta, cautioned jurors against punishing the youngest Riley for the actions of his older brother, whom he said Roy idolized.
Additional witnesses implicated Roy in assorted smuggling ventures. They testified, too, about trips to the Bahamas with Roy, concealing large amounts of bundled cash under skirts and inside pants. His role was minor, they said, with Roy serving as a lookout, or bagman, or driver. One witness, Wayne McDonald, described Roy as a “go-fer,” or errand boy, for his older brother. Another, Christy Campbell, said he didn’t even bother asking Roy about the considerable amount of money he was owed by Les and Lee Harvey.
“He was bottom of the barrel,” Campbell said. “He just wasn’t powerful.”
For the Riley family, the past year had been a tumultuous time. Government agents interrupted their Thanksgiving by seizing a car. In May 1983, Les and Roy were indicted and Les was arrested in Australia, where he still remained imprisoned six months later. For Roy’s bond, his parents put up their home and other land to guarantee he’d show up for trial. There was at least some good news: Nine days before being indicted, Roy’s wife gave birth to their second son.
Their sons’ legal problems weighed heavily on the elder Rileys, as Roy told a reporter a few months before his trial.
“I’m very close to my parents,” said Roy. “They are as upset as you might think. Whenever we get a notice that there’s a hearing, they think somebody’s going to come in and arrest us all.”
He also told the reporter that the government had exaggerated his role, perhaps because of his family name.
“I don’t know 90 percent of the people named in the indictments. Maybe if they showed me pictures, I could recognize some of them,” Roy said. “The government makes it seem like a whole lot more than it is because you’ve got two brothers. You’ve got two brothers with the same last name.”
During the trial, however, Roy was depicted as standing on his own often enough in smuggling ventures, and his involvement was more significant than that of the other defendants. Roy’s case suffered from the testimony of close friends, one of whom taped their conversations for the government, and another who had chosen Roy as his best man at his wedding three years earlier. Nevertheless, his lawyers sought to downplay Roy’s involvement. In response, the government used their familiar argument that “in the dope business, there were no little men.”
Predictably the defense attorneys tried to poke holes in the prosecutors’ case by attacking the government’s witnesses. In one inspired argument, Floyd’s lawyer, Jim Moss, was particularly inventive, making reference to nearby symbols of justice hanging in the courtroom.
“If that eagle on that great seal could have come off that seal and seen the vermin that testified in this courtroom,” Moss said, “he would have taken them out and dumped them on the street.”
In the end his argument fell short, as did the one made by Roy Riley’s lawyers. Both Riley and Floyd were convicted of the majority of counts against them. Pearce was acquitted, though, and Mayfield had changed his plea in the middle of trial, admitting to conspiring to import marijuana. McMaster was ecstatic over the results and claimed Operation Jackpot had stemmed the flow of drugs being smuggled into the East Coast. The public, he said, stood behind him and his deputies in the war against drugs.
“We’re confident,” he said, “that South Carolina juries are sending a message to drug smugglers that they’re fed up with the misery they’ve caused South Carolinians over the years, and they’re simply not going to take it anymore.”
The government’s strong showing, as well as the recent capture of Byers, cemented Operation Jackpot’s reputation as an effective crime-fighting investigation. In a December 4, 1983, editorial, the State newspaper praised the task force, saying, “Determined efforts like Operation Jackpot finally are showing concrete results where rhetoric once prevailed.” The paper didn’t know, however, that the Jackpot investigation was nowhere near finished.
For the Jackpot task force, the seizure of assets remained an important component of their investigation, even as trials were ongoing and manhunts were underway for the missing kingpins and other defendants. In August 1983, following the first Jackpot trial, investigators seized a 1979 Lincoln Continental from South Carolina Representative Thomas N. Rhoad. The elder, sixty-year-old Rhoad had been given the car by his son, Tom “Rolex” Rhoad III, after Rolex had won the car at a raffle on Hilton Head Island. The government reasoned that the younger Rhoad used drug money to purchase the raffle tickets, so the car was illegally obtained. Jackpot agents Mike Lemnah and Forbes seized the car from the state legislator, who was serving his first term.
“My son gave it to me,” said Rhoad. “He won it in a raffle.”
“We know that,” said Lemnah. “We’re still taking it.”
Driving away, the agents left Rhoad fuming, though they allowed him to keep his statehouse license plate.
Months later, in March 1984, the government garnered headlines by debuting at Sotheby’s in New York—the first time Uncle Sam disposed of seized assets through a high-end art auction house. Up for sale was smuggler Toombs’s collection of Tiffany lamps and glassware, which Virginia investigators had seized two years earlier. Sotheby’s described the art as the “finest collection of Tiffany glass and Art Nouveau objects to come on the market in several years.”
Prior to the sale, Sotheby’s Art Nouveau expert had claimed Toombs’s collection was composed of high-quality counterfeits, confounding the government and DEA attorney Steve Zimmerman, who had pushed to sell the art through an auction house. The Sotheby’s expert later changed her mind, however, and Sotheby’s held an allday event on March 24, offering 273 pieces, including lamps, vases, paperweights, mirrors, candlesticks, and more. Some floor lamps featured Tiffany’s patented colorful Favrile glass in designs of poppies, peonies, and bamboo. Table lamps being auctioned featured water lilies, poinsettias, and lotus leaves. And “the most fanciful and fragile flower-form vases,” said a writer for the New York Times, “are equally arresting but far less expensive. These delicate designs translate petals, stems and bulbs into a wonderland of satiny soft colors.”
Interested bidders lined up outside Sotheby’s more than an hour before the auction house opened. It was a motley crowd, at least compared to the more well-heeled art enthusiasts who regularly frequented Sotheby’s auctions. Once the bidding started, the auction house was standing room only, and bidders also called in from Tokyo, Palm Beach, Florida, and California, with Hollywood director Steven Spielberg purchasing a table lamp.
The prices bid for the lamps and other auctions greatly exceeded Sotheby’s estimates, with at least five lamps selling for more than $40,000. The highest bid received was a record $64,900 for a red, zigzagged Tel El Amarna Tiffany vase made circa 1910. At the end of the day, the art was auctioned for nearly $1.8 million, or $700,000 more than Sotheby’s best estimate. After deducting a commission and expenses, Sotheby’s gave the government a check for $1,451,824.50, an astounding amount for Toombs’s collection, the bulk of which he had acquired in a single purchase for $500,000.
“I think we’ve done our bit to reduce the [ federal] deficit,” said Robert Woolley, a Sotheby’s vice president and the sale’s auctioneer.
Some observers, however, thought the prices had been inflated by the hoopla surrounding the auction.
“When a sale has a lot of publicity—as this one did—people get auction fever,” said Paul Nassau, an art dealer. “They see people are bidding them up and they feel what they are paying is worth it. Some of the prices seemed senseless to me.”
The government could not have cared less if buyers overpaid. Their creative thinking regarding the art’s disposition had reaped large rewards.
“Fantastic,” said Zimmerman, the DEA attorney. “It was a risk which paid off and it’s hard to take risks in the government.”
After the conclusion of the first three Jackpot trials, Hawkins scheduled sentencing hearings for early 1984. He would decide appropriate punishment for the convicted and those who had pleaded guilty. For the Jackpot defendants, punishment was tricky. He judged the men to be gentlemen from the country’s “finest stock” who, for reasons that baffled him, got caught up in too much adventure and fun. He didn’t believe the majority of the men to be hardened criminals, but felt duty bound to punish the men as a deterrent to other would-be drug smugglers. During the sentencing hearing for Michael Harvey on February 22, 1984, Hawkins described his reasoning and the thoughts that troubled him:
I don’t think there’s any really big secret to how I feel about drug traffic, so there’s no point in me repeating all of that. Mr. Harvey was a bad guy. As you say he’s a nice fellow, he’s a good fellow, but he made some mistakes. And his situation is even worse in that in Virginia he’d already, I guess, thought he was home free when all that was over, but it turned out that was not the case, and that’s, of course, not been the case with, I guess, a lot of young fellows and older ones, too, involved in the Operation Jackpot. A lot of them thought they were home free. It’s turned out to be, I guess, a real nightmare for them.
And you know, I lay awake at night not counting sheep. It’s worrying about whether I am doing what’s right not only to the defendants and their familie
s but to the public and to myself and to the people that practice in this court. Then I have to resolve all that and weigh it and make a decision, and I never like any of it. I can almost name you every one that I have ever made.
Harvey, he said, would serve seven years in prison. Hawkins gave his codefendant, Gunn, eight years. The other two men on trial with them, Sanders and MacDougall, each were sentenced to ten years. From the first Jackpot trial, the stiffest sentence drawn was twelve years, by Larry McCall.
Those who cooperated with the government got much less severe sentences, either through the prosecution dropping charges or by Hawkins taking into account the help they provided government agents and prosecutors. When sentencing Steele and Campbell, the government said each man volunteered significant amounts of information and served as credible and authoritative witnesses. They noted how each man initially struggled with providing information harmful to their friends, but ultimately made a decision to cooperate fully. When the thirty-two-year-old Campbell went before Hawkins, he apologized for his actions, attributing them to immaturity.
“I would like to say that this was someone else’s fault, and that maybe I was with the wrong group of people or something … but it’s not really the case,” said Campbell. “I got into this on my own. I shouldn’t have. I apologize to everyone for it, but it’s just taken a long time to grow up, and I think this might be the case of a lot of people involved in this group.”
Steele and Campbell were among the most familiar of the gentlemen smugglers for Hawkins. For days, during two trials, he sat next to them as they testified. He observed their candor, humor, and matter-offact storytelling approach and found them to be attractive and agreeable men. He sentenced each of them to ten years in prison.