by Jason Ryan
Such sentences could be considered surprisingly light given Steele’s and Campbell’s extensive involvement in the smuggling rings and the number of times they captained sailboats loaded with marijuana and hashish. Roy Riley, on the other hand, whom Campbell had described as “bottom of the barrel” and others had characterized as an errand boy for his older brother, was given the most severe punishment to date in Operation Jackpot: twenty-one years in prison. During Riley’s sentencing hearing, Hawkins dwelled on the fact that Riley’s wealth had become such a stumbling block in his case. Riley’s refusal to discuss his assets, for fear of them being seized, had derailed his plea agreement with the government, Hawkins noted, and the judge was struck at how Riley’s legal team hired an accountant in an effort to combat the government’s claims of what assets were obtained with illegal proceeds. To Hawkins, these actions were an affront to the court, as the defendant and his legal team demonstrated that Riley’s financial interests deserved their foremost consideration, not the criminal charges against him. Hawkins bristled at the audacity of conducting cost-benefit analyses in the halls of justice.
“He determined, rather than divulge his assets … that he would rather run the risk of the Court,” said Hawkins. “It really brings to bear on my mind the real business nature of the matter. It all really boils down to dollars and cents again, I guess, and weighing the costs for the profits. And I’m sorry it’s that way.”
While the youngest Riley brother said he was flabbergasted by the sentence, it was considered appropriate by McMaster.
“We have no sympathy at all for these drug smugglers,” McMaster told a reporter. “Drug smuggling is a serious crime and deserves a serious sentence.”
A month later, in April 1984, Hawkins handed down an even stiffer sentence, sending Byers to prison for twenty-five years after the kingpin pleaded guilty without striking a deal with the government. At issue was Byers’s refusal to forfeit, let alone discuss, his assets with prosecutors, including his sailboats La Cautiva and Energy. He didn’t want to see those vessels go the way of the Anonymous of Rorc, which had been seized in November 1981 during the hashish bust on Edisto Island. That luxury sailboat, says one federal law enforcement source, was then used for a time by the CIA to sail through the Caribbean and spy on Cuba.
Undeterred by Byers’s obstinacy, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cam Currie devised an innovative legal technique to have Byers disclose his assets through a judgment debtor examination. When Byers still refused to answer questions, Hawkins held him in contempt and jailed him, which delayed him from reporting to prison and beginning his twenty-five-year sentence.
Following this maneuver the government was bullish on its prospects of having Byers divulge details of his fortunes. McMaster wrote to Associate Attorney General D. Lowell Johnson in May 1984, “We think [Byers] will decide to talk before he finishes eighteen months ‘dead time’ in the Charleston County jail.”
Despite the confidence expressed in the letter, McMaster and the Operation Jackpot task force were not willing to wait for Byers’s cooperation when it came to persuading the Antiguan government to release La Cautiva. Since Byers’s deportation, an Antiguan police officer had been living on the boat and acting as caretaker, and the Antiguan government suggested it would not be a problem to sail the boat to the United States when the Americans provided a crew, so long as they got a share of the money it brought at auction. After realizing the sailboat had an estimated value of nearly $1 million, however, some Antiguan officials began having second thoughts about parting with such an expensive vessel. Fearing the Jackpot task force might lose La Cautiva, McMaster urgently lobbied U.S. Attorney General William French Smith for assistance.
“Our problem is that the Antiguans refuse to give us the boat,” McMaster wrote the attorney general in April 1984. “They want to keep it for themselves. We don’t blame them; it’s beautiful and valued at about $900,000.00.”
McMaster then suggested that the justice department enlist the help of Secretary of State George P. Schultz, characterizing the sailboat as an important symbol in the War on Drugs. Perhaps, McMaster wrote, Schultz could send a note to Antiguan Prime Minister Vere Bird emphasizing the importance of the sailboat’s return to the United States.
“We think it is important to go to these lengths in order to convince the drug smugglers that President Reagan is dead serious in his efforts to wipe them out,” wrote McMaster. “This would send them a clear, unequivocal message.”
Through memos among senior staff, the justice department would ultimately decide against enlisting Reagan’s cabinet members to get the boat back, despite noting La Cautiva was one of the top ten sailboats in the world. The justice department’s Office of International Affairs, however, did permit Assistant U.S. Attorney Bart Daniel and task force agent Forbes to travel to Antigua to negotiate with the foreign government, so long as they wouldn’t spark an international incident. Upon their arrival, Forbes and Daniel were taken out into English Harbour to see La Cautiva—the second such trip for Forbes. Boarding the boat, the men scoured it for clues to Byers’s financial holdings, examining papers and taking pictures, but finding little of significance. To their relief the boat was still in immaculate condition, save for a scrape against the hull from brushing against a buoy. The next day, Daniel and Forbes met with assorted ministers in the Antiguan government, who indicated they’d soon vote to give the boat to the United States. Forbes and Daniel promised to have a sailboat crew to Antigua within forty-eight hours of their decision.
While Daniel and Forbes met with staff members at the U.S. embassy, their agreement with the Antiguans hit a snag. A deputy attorney general who had attended the negotiations called over to say he could not support giving the boat to the Americans and that he’d recommend the Antiguan government return La Cautiva to Byers or his Antiguan attorney. The issue, he explained, was that the Antiguans could only seize property from suspects they arrested and charged with drug offenses. In his opinion, since Byers had been deported for passport violations, the Antiguan government could not legally seize the boat.
Alarmed by this report, Forbes and Daniel urged the Antiguan deputy attorney general to meet again at the U.S. embassy. There the men hammered away at the official, ultimately persuading him to soften his stance. Daniel later wrote to McMaster, summarizing their success: “After several hours of discussion, Mr. Henry agreed to dilute his original opinion that the vessel must be returned immediately to Byers. While he still felt the vessel had been illegally seized and that the Antiguan Government would subject itself to legal action by Byers, he tempered the opinion.”
Ultimately La Cautiva was given to the U.S. government, though it was not a swift process, owing to hesitancy from the Antiguan government. According to Daniel and Forbes, it was seized and sailed by the U.S marshals, then sold, with the U.S. government keeping about 30 percent of the profits and the Antiguans taking the rest. As an extra legal precaution before seizing the sailboat, Forbes says, the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs asked him to have Byers sign an affidavit regarding La Cautiva. Considering Byers’s exceptional lack of cooperation, Forbes couldn’t believe the request, judging it hopeless. Nevertheless, he called an FBI agent and asked him to try to have Byers sign the affidavit, warning him “he’s probably going to tell you to kiss his ass.”
A few days later, the agent called back.
“Well, you got it?” asked Forbes.
“I got it, but it ain’t signed,” the agent replied. “He didn’t say ‘Kiss my ass.’ He said, ‘FUCK you.’ ”
As Operation Jackpot sought to seize more assets and obtain significant sentences for its convicted defendants, they were also making other arrests and preparing for a new indictment of thirty-four men and women accused of participating in a South Carolina–based smuggling ring operated by Joseph Allen Patterson IV of Beaufort and Rocky Bradford, whose plantation home outside Charleston was seized in August during the first Jackpot trial. In five year
s, the indictment alleged, the accused smuggled more than $100 million worth of marijuana into the United States, making more than $30 million in profit. Over the summer of 1984, four more men were added to this indictment, and a woman named Carol Amend was arrested in the Everglades in Florida, accused of working with Bradford and Patterson and charged as a drug kingpin.
Although these smugglers also used the South Carolina coast, they operated independently of the men charged in the indictments with Foy and Riley. Among the newest targets of Operation Jackpot were a handful of curious characters, including a Beaufort game warden nicknamed the “Masked Marvel” for his habit of wearing a ski mask when helping to serve as a lookout in South Carolina marshes. Indicted, too, was Freddy Fillingham, a small, scrappy smuggler and talented sailor who, along with Amend, his former girlfriend, made a daring escape from a jail on St. Martin in 1979 as hurricanes David and Frederic pounded the island. Fillingham went first, during Hurricane David, slipping his slender frame out a jail window and taking with him a chair to which he had been handcuffed. Later, when Hurricane Frederic came through, Amend used a bobby pin to open her cell door and sneak out, meeting her crew on a beach before getting off the island.
By August 1984, two months after the Patterson indictment was unsealed, twenty-nine of thirty-four defendants had pleaded guilty. One of the few willing to challenge the charges brought by Operation Jackpot was the forty-year-old Amend, an astute ocean enthusiast unique for her Cleopatra-style haircut and eclectic assets, which included emeralds, Arabian horses, an avocado grove, and Dutch Treat, a yacht valued at $450,000. The government moved to seize it all, and Amend pleaded not guilty.
Operation Jackpot announced yet another indictment as Amend prepared for trial in September 1984, charging ten people in an alleged marijuana-smuggling ring based out of Little River, South Carolina, just north of Myrtle Beach. This ring, the government alleged, had smuggled more than $40 million worth of marijuana into Little River in the last five years. Among those charged as kingpins were Murray Bowman Brown, sixty-four, and his son, twenty-five-year-old William Murray Brown.
Amend’s trial began in October, and her Miami lawyer, whom she paid, in part, with ninety pounds of silver bars and coins, conceded to the jury that she was guilty of nearly every offense save the most severe one of being a drug kingpin. It was a flawed strategy, and a jury convicted Amend of every charge. Weeks later Judge Charles Simons sentenced her to thirty years in prison—the stiffest sentence yet given to a suspect in Operation Jackpot. To make matters worse for Amend, who had a two-year-old daughter, her husband would die three months later in a plane crash in South Florida.
During Amend’s trial, McMaster visited Salt Lake City to tout the success of Operation Jackpot to a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a group he told a reporter was “the premier law enforcement association in the world.” It was the latest in a number of speeches he had given about the innovative techniques South Carolina agents and prosecutors were using to investigate suspected drug smugglers. McMaster relished the opportunity to share news of his office’s success in convicting drug smuggling defendants. Two years into Operation Jackpot, his contempt for this class of criminals was as strong as ever. McMaster told a Charleston newspaper in January 1984:
Drug smugglers are like a high-altitude bomber who flies high overhead, drops his bombs and returns to base, never seeing the damage. These people smuggle drugs into the country, turn them over to distributors, and leave and go back to the peace and quiet of their beach houses or vacation retreats. They never hear the bombs explode and they don’t think of themselves as dangerous criminals causing harm to other people.
But in fact they are inflicting terrible pain and suffering onto fellow citizens, and all for money. That’s how we see them.
These drugs cause all sorts of problems in our society, related to all kinds of crimes. We know that people commit crimes while on drugs, they commit crimes to get drugs, and they commit crimes to get things to sell for money to buy drugs.
McMaster found receptive audiences at meetings of bar associations and law enforcement conferences from Baltimore to Boston, Denver, Chicago, Maine, and Washington. Drug use was on everyone’s mind, seared into the public consciousness in the early 1980s thanks to First Lady Nancy Reagan’s nationwide “Just Say No” campaign. But marijuana was often given second billing, with crack cocaine becoming known as an urban scourge and cocaine earning a dangerous reputation. Time magazine wrote cover stories on the narcotic in 1981, 1983, and 1984, and the major television networks each broad-cast hour-long (or longer) news shows and documentaries on drugs in 1982, including NBC’s “Pleasure Drugs: the Great American High” and ABC’s “The Cocaine Cartel.” In 1983, the film Scarface, with only slight exaggeration, showed the astonishing menace of South Florida’s cocaine cowboys. As Al Pacino portrayed the fictional Cuban refugee Tony Montana, chainsawing and machine-gunning his way to become a Miami cocaine boss, true-life kingpin Pablo Escobar was equally as murderous in becoming one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. In 1982, despite his notoriety, Escobar even managed to get elected to Colombia’s congress.
It was within this national drug dialogue that McMaster submitted the story of Operation Jackpot. Occasionally listening to his speeches was his friend and colleague Tim Wellesley, the criminal investigations director at the IRS who helped spearhead Operation Jackpot. Wellesley says McMaster would take the stage and, in his deep drawl, tell jokes taken from Southern comedian Jerry Clower, substituting names and places to suit his audience. Eventually he’d segue into the mechanics of Operation Jackpot. His determination to decrease crime and his passion for promoting cooperation across law enforcement agencies, Wellesley says, made him popular with cops and prosecutors. In South Carolina McMaster was just as effective a speaker, wowing rotary clubs with stories of his investigation, including how smugglers forced a ceasefire in Lebanon so they could be loaded with hashish.
At times, however, McMaster’s song and dance was sloppy. When describing the ceasefire to the Charleston Trident Chamber of Commerce in August 1984, he said the smugglers stopped fighting between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jewish Defense League (JDL). The JDL, however, is an America-based organization. And while dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, it has no domestic or overseas militias.
In that same speech McMaster told the crowd of 250 people the “amazing” aspect of Operation Jackpot was that “of the one hundred two people that have been charged, only one of them was ever suspected of any drug smuggling or any kind of illegal activity before.” Only thanks to the task force’s financial investigation, he said, were these inconspicuous citizens revealed as criminals. In fact many of the most prominent members of the alleged smuggling rings did have criminal records, including the government’s recent star witnesses, Steele, arrested aboard the Anonymous of Rorc, and Campbell, arrested twice before Operation Jackpot for smuggling charges. Additionally, Harvey had been to federal prison twice for drug offenses; Foy was suspected of bribing his way out of a drug conviction in Columbia, South Carolina, and having charges dropped; and Amend had been convicted of drug charges in Mississippi before she jumped bail. Riley and Byers also had criminal records, though for minor offenses.
Regardless, minor misstatements and exaggerations did not take away from the sixty-two convictions secured by Operation Jackpot through August 1984. An editorial that month in Charleston’s Evening Post recognized the work of the task force and praised its ability to combat men powerful enough to interrupt wars.
“Even if you discounted some segments as apocryphal—and we do not suggest they are—the Operation Jackpot story continues to come across as U.S. Attorney Henry D. McMaster describes it: ‘… the most amazing story going on in law enforcement in the United States today.’ ”
If McMaster was riding high in the fall of 1984, Byers was in the depths of despair. Nearly a year earlier, Bob “the Boss,” kingpin extraordin
aire, was aboard La Cautiva in English Harbour, Antigua, enjoying the Caribbean’s temperate autumn weather and making plans to cash out and head for the Pacific. Now he sat in the Charleston County jail, being asked to agree to a deal with the least desirable of terms. Reveal your property and bank accounts, the government said, and we’ll let you begin your twenty-five-year federal prison sentence.
Judge Hawkins had transferred Byers to the Charleston County jail after his lawyers complained their client was suffering from depression and would benefit from being closer to his psychologist. In Charleston, however, Byers’s mood did not lighten, and his position on speaking to the government did not change. He made reading lists composed of novels that depicted the criminal underworlds he recently inhabited and sought to acquire a variety of thrillers, horror stories, and tales of espionage and intrigue. He jotted down thoughts on writing pads and scraps of paper, questioning the purpose of his imprisonment.
“I feel like the side of the battery that says negative,” read one note.
“Human tide washed up on the shores of justice,” read another.
“County jail = waiting room to hell,” said one more.
Byers spent his time monitoring exchange rates and gold prices, too. He received love letters and notes from friends: correspondence that detailed trips to the beach, time on the water, and a trip to Costa Rica, all places he’d not be seeing for quite some time, if ever again. His friends and girlfriend asked if they could send photos and cookies.
Byers’s mood likely soured further when he was moved from the jail’s maximum-security wing, where he was kept with other inmates, to a solitary confinement cell. Agents had received information that Byers was contemplating trying to escape, prompting them to isolate him and limit his telephone and visitation privileges. Eleven days later, though, agents persuaded the Charleston County sheriff to release Byers back into the general population. He had indicated he’d be willing to cooperate with the government, and he would need access to a phone to pass on information and speak with his lawyers.