by Jason Ryan
The checks weren’t the only clue associated with Florida. An informant told federal authorities that Byers’s good friend and fellow Operation Jackpot fugitive Bob “Willie the Hog” Bauer was using a phone switch to place his calls, and the authorities were able to tap into the switch and determine that Bauer was calling an address near Fort Pierce, Florida, outside Port St. Lucie. Morris decided to stake out the house, parking a motor home down the street in the driveway of a residence owned by a retired Illinois police chief. He peered out the window, hoping to spy a familiar face, whether it be the man in the bank footage, Bauer, or Byers.
For two weeks Morris staked out the home, watching men come and go. To his annoyance, nearly every time men entered the house, they had their backs to Morris, making identification difficult. Rather than move the motor home to the other end of the street, Morris asked an attractive female deputy marshal from Miami to change into athletic shorts. When men were milling around the house, she jogged down the street. Predictably, they all pivoted their bodies to admire the running woman. As they turned to watch her pass, cameras inside the motor home snapped away.
After reviewing the photos, Morris identified Bauer and the man who purchased the cashier’s checks. They began following Bauer, and soon identified the other man as Daniel Kenneth Riley, of no relation to Les Riley and his brother Roy. The marshals began following the men, but soon were forced to make arrests after their surveillance was compromised. They pulled Bauer over on a Florida highway and handcuffed him. Little did they know Bauer was on his way to a car show in Stuart, Florida, where he was due to meet Byers.
Bauer’s arrest sent shockwaves through the already fractured smuggling community. Another confederate had fallen. Who knew who might be next? Foy soon got a phone call from Bauer’s girlfriend, advising him to change his habits and address. The feds had found Bauer’s phonebook, she said, and your number is in it. It’d be best to move on.
Since being indicted eighteen months earlier, Foy had spent much of his time in New York, renting a Manhattan apartment. He’d gotten married to his longtime girlfriend, Jan Liafsha, and had two children, traveling through Europe, Canada, and the western United States with them. Foy would have preferred to stay abroad, away from investigators and on board his luxury sailboat, Zakaniya, but his wife complained of being sick on the sailboat, especially while pregnant. So they moved often, trying to stay ahead of David Forbes and other Jackpot investigators, knowing the agents were getting close, trying to trace their phone calls. Forbes had questioned Foy’s in-laws on a few occasions, and one agent questioned his wife’s elderly grandmother in Tennessee.
Foy had even been detained, briefly, when returning from Europe by way of Canada. After a jaunt to England, Paris, and Montreal with a blond woman he met on St. Barts, Foy had arranged for a Canadian cabbie to drive them to New York, picking out a remote border crossing for them to travel through. As they approached the American checkpoint, Foy sat in the back of the cab, the girl to one side and a six-pack of open beer to the other, and lots of cash in his luggage. The border guard was not amused by the alcohol, ordering Foy out of the car, but not before the fugitive was able to stuff cash into the cab’s seat cushions.
Bringing him inside a Custom House, the border guards began checking Foy’s identification and luggage. They combed through his clothes, asking why he didn’t declare his Italian shirts. Aware of his rapidly changing fortunes and fearing the inevitable discovery of his fugitive status, Foy asked to use a bathroom, where he stashed some more money. While the guards were distracted, he bolted for the door and ran for miles. Foy tore through fields and swam down streams, trying to distance himself from unleashed bloodhounds and speeding state police cruisers, much like he did a decade or so earlier when he fled from the Columbia airport. He disguised his scent by hopping in cow pies. He inadvertently crossed back into Canada, realizing his misdirection when he spotted road signs bearing distances in kilometers. He trekked back into New York, staked out a country road from the woods, and eventually hitched a ride with a postman. Fabricating his story on the fly, Foy told the man he was a road laborer needing a ride to the hospital to meet his pregnant wife, who’d gone into labor. He inquired as to the kind stranger’s name, promising him he’d name his newborn son after him.
The kingpin and mailman parted ways at a gas station, where Foy called a cab and made his way to Vermont for a flight back to New York City. Before reaching the airport, he shoplifted some clothes to replace his severely soiled duds. Meanwhile, the blond was left at the Canadian border, being interrogated about her fleet-footed companion. Upon arriving in New York, Foy called his friend and lawyer, Bob Moseley, though he wasn’t too concerned about the lady’s well-being.
“There’s some money stashed in a Customs house,” said Foy. “Can you go up and get it?”
Foy’s half-serious request of Moseley betrayed the fact that for most of the fugitive smugglers, cash was becoming a scarce resource. In fact making money became a bigger concern for the men than getting caught, especially since all the kingpins wanted to maintain their luxurious standards of living. Apart from Byers, who made the U.S. Marshals Service’s top fifteen most wanted list on account of having a rocket launcher aboard his sailboat La Cautiva, most of the other men were not high-priority targets. If they stayed out of South Carolina and Virginia, they figured, few people were desperate to find them, at least compared to violent criminals. The men felt comfortable traveling through the United States so long as they had good fake identification. They continued to live on the run using the names of dead men.
Since smuggling into South Carolina was out of the question, as were much of their familiar haunts on the East Coast owing to the disastrous hashish flotilla in 1981, the fugitive kingpins began scouting the West Coast for potential off-load sites. Foy began coordinating a deal with Harvey to bring untied Thai—lightly pressed marijuana— across the Pacific, and Foy recruited Rhoad to join him on a trip to Seattle so they could tour the nearby islands.
By this point, the thirty-seven-year-old Rhoad was not unfamiliar with the Pacific Ocean, having rented a cliff-top home in the ritzy San Diego suburb of La Jolla in March 1984. The house afforded breathtaking views of the ocean, though Rhoad confessed he more often watched television than the waves. Before Bauer was arrested, Rhoad told him he had developed an addiction to TV while living on the run.
In California Rhoad did not alter his flashy behavior. When he paid the first six months of rent for the home in La Jolla, he gave his landlord a shoebox full of $13,600. When he traveled, which was often, he paid travel agents in cash. When he bought a new $20,000 Jeep, he pulled a plastic bag full of cash out of the trunk of his classic Mercedes and brought it into a salesman’s office. It was the registration of this Mercedes that would prove to be Rhoad’s undoing. The Operation Jackpot agents ran searches for license plates and motor vehicle registrations relentlessly, always hopeful of finding new clues to a fugitive’s whereabouts.
In 1985, nearly a year after Rhoad’s move to La Jolla, U.S. Customs special agent Claude McDonald contacted colleagues in San Diego, asking them to look for the blue Mercedes. McDonald had tracked the car to a Cullen Lee Brown Jr., at an address in nearby Del Mar, California. The address turned out to be just a rented mailbox. Weeks later, agents learned that Brown was paying utilities at a home in La Jolla. On March 1, 1985, agents drove by the home, spying the Mercedes parked across the street. The next day, the agents returned and watched a short man exit the house and hop in a cab that headed for Lindbergh Field, the San Diego airport. Among his luggage was a bag of skis.
At the airport, agents watched the man check in for a flight to Montrose, Colorado, outside the ski resort of Telluride. They let him pass through security before approaching him and asking him for his identification. He produced a Florida driver’s license in the name of Cullen Brown, with a distorted picture. As he was arrested, he insisted there was some mistake, that he didn’t know a Tom Rhoad.
The ruse did not last long. The same evening, federal agents executed a search warrant on the La Jolla home, finding a closet full of assorted fake identifications, a book describing how to create “alternate” identification, as well as degrees from the University of South Carolina and its law school in the name of Thomas N. Rhoad III. Beyond that, agent McDonald, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel, and cooperating witness and former Hilton Head lawyer Andy Pracht flew out to San Diego to make an identification of the suspect. When they walked in a room and found Rhoad, the suspect looked up, recognized Pracht, and realized he wasn’t going to be released. After almost two years on the run, the diminutive and profane fugitive had been nabbed by Operation Jackpot.
“He broke into tears right then,” says McDonald. “Just boo hoo.”
If Rhoad had booked a flight two days earlier, he would have been safe in Colorado, skiing with none other than fellow fugitive Foy, who was waiting on him to deliver much-needed money. He could also have visited with Byers, who had rented a condo in the mountain town of Frisco, between Vail and Breckenridge. After his friends had been arrested in Florida, Byers thought it best to move on, purchasing a new AMC Eagle automobile and heading out West.
But Rhoad would likely have returned to San Diego. As long as the federal agents tracking him were patient, he would have eventually appeared in their sights. The inevitability of being caught was a difficult truth to swallow for nearly all the fugitive kingpins, and most believed they could live forever on the run, a step ahead of government investigators. If you didn’t believe this, how could you get up each day, knowing that at least a decade in captivity could start at any minute when the police suddenly swarmed you and the handcuffs came out?
It was a frankly terrifying fate for the kingpins, one they refused to face. It meant exchanging landscapes of powdery ski slopes and waves crashing against cliffs for dusty recreation yards and concrete corridors of prison cells. It meant the color bleeding out of their rich lives. The chrome on their cars, the bronze of their skin, and the bright bottom paint on their sailboats would give way to the drab hues of prison life: beige walls, khaki uniforms, and gray bunks.
The gentlemen smugglers would not admit to such fears. Les Riley told authorities he moved to Australia not because of Operation Jackpot, but because life had begun moving too fast and his associations with drug smugglers began imperiling his family, estranging him from his wife and two children. Foy says he thought he’d never get caught, that his extravagant lifestyle was sustainable, that he could forever smuggle drugs into every side of the country to keep up with his expenses.
Keeping pace with these men could be taxing on lesser, rational mortals. Foy’s wife says she drank excessively while on the run with her smuggler husband and their two young children.
“I lived in constant dread of the end, which I knew, quite well, was coming,” says Liafsha. “[Barry] may say he didn’t think it was coming to an end, but [Barry] is a liar. He was then, and I am sure he is now.
“Being an accomplished liar is a requirement for success in illegal activities,” she added, parenthetically. “The most successful were the best and most audacious liars.”
It’s safe to reason, too, that without dread and by lying to oneself, a fugitive does himself more harm than good. A healthy fear of arrest benefits the fugitive, spurring him to change aliases more often, to keep a lower profile, to change vehicles and apartments frequently, to compromise his quality of life in exchange for a better chance of continued freedom. Without this fear, one doesn’t worry about an informer blabbing to authorities or federal agents tracing phone calls made home or car registrations being tracked. But these things were happening, and each time another Operation Jackpot suspect was rounded up, the government learned more information about those who’d managed to stay on the run.
As Rhoad was being processed in San Diego and readied for a return to South Carolina, U.S. Marshal Morris hopped a flight from Miami to Denver, arriving in Colorado’s capital dressed in thin pants and short sleeves. Weeks earlier he had learned about Byers’s purchase of the new AMC Eagle and learned its vehicle identification number after visiting the Florida dealership from which Byers bought the car. He had his office make a national inquiry with motor vehicle departments, seeing if any state had a match. The answer was yes. A man in Frisco, Colorado, had recently registered the car, and Morris recognized the name as an alias previously used by Byers. Arriving in Colorado he quickly made his way to Frisco, joining other U.S. marshals in a hotel room, where they were watching Byers’s rented condo through a telescope, though they didn’t think he was home.
At the time, says Frisco Police Chief Ed Falconetti, Frisco’s population was about fifteen hundred full-time residents, though it could swell to six thousand people during ski season. Many houses in the area were second homes or rental property, and the police kept busy with property crimes, whether theft, burglary, or the occasional armed robbery. Because Byers was thought to be interested in hightech weaponry, including rocket launchers, the marshals and Frisco police force agreed he should be apprehended away from residents. The last thing they wanted, Falconetti says, was for Byers to hole up in his chalet, initiating a shootout.
On Saturday, March 16, 1985, the marshals spotted the AMC Eagle parked in front of the chalet. Nearby, too, was Byers’s 1955 Gullwing Mercedes—an expensive, vintage automobile whose doors opened vertically, similar to a DeLorean or Lamborghini. Around four-thirty in the afternoon a man left the condo and hopped in the Eagle. Morris peered through the spotter scope and identified Byers, though he seemed to look a bit different. As Byers, age thirty-nine, drove away, the marshals and Frisco police officers scrambled to follow him in marked and unmarked police vehicles, intent on making an arrest.
Byers soon headed out of Frisco for the nearby town of Dillon, driving along a two-lane dam road that curled around the Dillon Reservoir. It was an isolated roadway, lined by pine and aspen. A quarter of a mile outside of Frisco, Byers suddenly turned around in the road, passing the first unmarked vehicle of marshals traveling behind him. The next police vehicle, however, pulled across the road, preventing Byers from passing. A Frisco police officer jumped out of the vehicle, a shotgun leveled at Byers’s stopped car.
“Put your hands where I can see them or I’ll blow your fucking head off,” he screamed.
Byers did so and was handcuffed without putting up a fight. About the same time, other police knocked on his chalet door and arrested his girlfriend. When they searched the chalet hours later, they learned Byers had recently married the woman and that the couple had applied for passports under aliases. Even more surprising was Byers’s appearance: A plastic surgeon had given him a facelift, removed a scar, and implanted hair plugs. He was barely recognizable.
When McMaster had gathered federal agents in 1982 to discuss the possibility of a financial investigation into South Carolina’s drug smuggling networks, he was clear he wanted this potential investigation to be different, unique for its ability to snare the kingpins and financiers behind the illicit drug trade in the Palmetto State. He wanted trophies for the wall, entire drug smuggling operations toppled by cutting off the monster’s head. He wanted Mr. Big, though he did not know there was an entire informal fraternity of Mr. Bigs in South Carolina, running up and down the East Coast, bombing loads in wherever they pleased. Obviously these men were adept at avoiding the law, but perhaps investigators and prosecutors underestimated how slippery the most talented gentlemen smugglers would remain even after their smuggling networks were exposed and dismantled. By remaining fugitives they prevented government investigators from fulfilling their ultimate mission: catching kingpins. Despite convicting almost a hundred men and a few women on smuggling-related charges, in three years the task force had few kingpin convictions to speak of, especially when it came to the men named in the original two Jackpot indictments.
The arrest of Rhoad and recapture of Byers finally turned the kingpin tide in the government’s favor.
The arrests proved the smuggling leaders, these almost mythical criminals able to evade detection despite the most brazen acts of criminality and consumption, were indeed fallible, susceptible to being captured through the betrayal of informers or their own sloppy, indiscreet living habits. The investigators were learning that if you pushed hard enough, one could break through the considerable smokescreen that surrounded these men. It was a law enforcement truth few people on the smuggling side of Operation Jackpot had recognized, enabling the drug runners’ exalted reputations among fellow criminals to become selfperpetuating.
Skip Sanders, to whom many of the kingpins came calling when needing an isolated off-load spot on Edisto Island, writes:
the thing with byers and I suppose harvey [lee] was, their roles sort of went to their head. the same can be said for flash [barry foy] a little bit. i did hang out with him some, but not as an equal. he wanted to project that “front” you know. he once told me he got a cut for everything entering the carolina coast. and i thought to myself, “well, that’s strange, i guess i won’t tell him about the three loads that came in the past two months.”
in actuality, no body ran shit. we all wanted to convey the illusion that we did. that’s it. you want to do a boat load of weed? hop your ass on a sail boat, go off the coast of colombia [around Cartagena] with around 100k in cash, and you can instantly get loaded with ten thousand pounds of weed within a couple days. simple enough. but a few, like harvey, like flash, would portray this process as their own devise. and thereby instruct others where to go and sometimes reap as much as half of the load. and when a man suddenly assumes this much control over a process ultimately zero dependent upon him, he became protective as a “run something” tough guy. when actually, all he has of any value is the secret therein.