American Desperado (51 page)

“You eat grits?” he says.

I tell him how I’d grown up in the North, and I didn’t know about grits until I moved to the South and somebody showed me the right way to put butter in them. This changes his whole attitude. He hands back my license and tells me I’m welcome anytime in Yeehaw Junction. Now that we’re best friends, I’m dying to ask him what’s going on with all the sirens and helicopters, but before I can ask he says, “Are you going to buy the car?”

I almost forgot my bullshit story about the test-drive. I say, “Maybe. It’s fast.”

The cop smiles. “I’m going to ask you a favor. When you pull back on the road, would you floor it? I want to see how fast your car goes. I’ll drive behind you so you won’t get in no trouble.”

I look at Lee. I’m wondering if this is some kind of redneck trick, like he’s going to write me a ticket after I speed. Lee just shrugs.

Fuck it. When the cop gets in his car, I drop my car in gear and floor the motherfucker. I take it right up to 110. Then I slow down, let the cop catch up in his car. He pulls alongside us and rolls down his window. We’re both going 80 miles an hour down the two lanes of the road. The cop has a big, shit-eating grin. He gives a thumbs-up and shouts,
“Yeehaw!”

Then Lee leans across me and sticks his head out the window and shouts
“Yeehaw”
back at the cop. I almost smash into the cop car. The two rednecks are laughing. The cop turns on his flashing light and gives us a redneck escort all the way to the main highway. Unbelievable.

T
HAT NIGHT
I found out from Roger that as he was coming to Yeehaw Junction, a Customs Service jet started chasing him.
^*
Roger
had been chased before off the coast, and he knew what to do. Pilots called it “outslowing” the government jets. If a jet flies too slow, it’ll fall out of the sky. A King Air or any plane with propellers can fly a lot slower than the jet. So when they were chased, they’d cut their speed. The Customs Service jet would then have to fly in circles to follow the slower smuggler plane. What the smuggler pilot would do, if he was good, was wait for the government jet to make its turn away from him, then slip under a low cloud and escape beneath the radar. Roger had found a cloud that morning and slipped away. He’d dumped his coke far away from the farm where his guys were waiting, and everybody got away. But the Customs Service had called in helicopters and cops, and they were searching the ground for the drugs. To us, those drugs were gone.

When I told Max I’d lost the load, he freaked. I was calm. I knew from working with Fabito that Colombians were okay if you lost coke. Their cost of making it was so cheap, they could make up the loss with no problem. The Colombians could accept you losing a load if the cops got it. A mistake was fine.

What wasn’t fine was ripping them off. If you lost a load, you had to get proof that the cops had taken it from you. This was very important. If you could show them a newspaper article proving that the heat took your coke, you’d be okay.

The hard part was waiting. Since I was new to Max and Rafa, I went to Max’s house every day and waited with him. But there was nothing in the news. When Max got nervous, he’d hyperventilate and get dizzy. He’d have to breathe into a paper bag to keep from passing out. Five days I spent in his dining room. On one side Max had a bag on his face, wheezing into it—then taking breaks to smoke a cigarette. On the other side Rafa was smoking bazooka after bazooka. What a fun couple these two were.

Thank God for Danny Mones. Soon as I heard from Roger, I had Danny ask some dirty cops he knew to look into police reports. One of the cops found an internal DEA report. There was no news story about kilos falling on Yeehaw Junction, because Roger had dropped them in another part of the state.

Everybody quieted down when I showed them the DEA report. Rafa was calm, and Max was able to breathe normally again. I gave my pilot Roger credit for escaping. But I was disappointed with myself. I’d run this job like a jackass.

What my mind kept going to was Max’s special Lincoln Continental. I wanted to meet the guy who’d built it, Mickey Munday. Rafa told me that Mickey had brought in many flights for them. When I brought up the subject of Mickey to Max, he said, “Oh, that guy. He’s just a stupid redneck.”

It shows how dumb Max really was. After I paired with Mickey, that stupid redneck defeated the whole U.S. government for years and years. Mickey was the most brilliant guy I ever worked with. He was also one of the weirdest. Mickey truly lived in his own world.

*
Barranquilla is a coastal city about two hundred miles from Medellín. Typically, cocaine from Barranquilla was controlled by a smaller cartel that was a rival to the Medellín operation.

*
The King Air was a relatively large and fast turboprop made by Beechcraft.

*
The Customs Service used Cessna Citation jets to interdict smugglers.

55

Every kid wants to be a pirate. Look at any map of any coast in the world, and I guarantee you’ll find places named “Pirate’s Cove” or “Smuggler’s Bay.” There’s a romance about it. It’s a fantasy, and I got to live it.

—Mickey Munday

J
.
R
.:
After the fiasco at Yeehaw Junction, Max told me I should run a load with Shelton, the English idiot. I told Max I wanted to meet Mickey. But Max put me off. I later realized Max was trying to get me to run loads with other pilots because he wanted to push Mickey aside. Max didn’t like Mickey because he was smarter than him. Mickey had a million ideas for smuggling. Max never had a useful idea in his life, except to marry Pablo Escobar’s cousin. Not only did Max like being
El Jefe
, he thought of himself as the mastermind, and Mickey threatened that idea because he made Max look dumb. I told Max that if he mentioned Shelton Archer’s name one more time, I’d put a bullet in the Englishman’s pea brain.

The reason my pilot Roger got chased at Yeehaw Junction was that the government had stepped up its efforts to catch smugglers. We were entering a very difficult time. The government was deploying more planes and boats, escalating their “War on Drugs.” The days were gone when you could pay off a few cops and hire fishermen to race speedboats in. It was a new game. Having a smart guy like Mickey became more important than ever.

I finally met Mickey one day by accident. I came to Max’s farm to look at some guns he wanted to sell me, and as I pulled in, I saw a hick parking a truck. That hick was Mickey. His name was written on the patch of his mechanic’s suit. Mickey was unloading ATVs that he’d souped up for one of Max’s stepkids. That’s what Max had this genius doing for him.

Mickey was hard to miss. He was over six feet tall, with a thick head of blond hair. Some people called him Red because of his hair color, but it looked yellow to me. I was worried about Max coming out and trying get in my way, so I immediately went over to introduce myself to Mickey.

M
ICKEY
:
The first thing I noticed about Jon was his car. It was a custom AMG that made a 450 SL look like a piece of poop because of its super-high-output engine. I believe you can never have too much horsepower, but I didn’t like Jon’s car. There were only three cars like his in Miami, and all of them were owned by drug dealers. Jon’s car might as well have had a sign on it that said “coke dealer.” That gave me a negative first impression of Jon, but when we talked, I liked him. He spoke like someone more intelligent than the car he drove.

J
.
R
.:
Right away Mickey wanted me to crawl on the ground with him so he could show me the motors he’d souped up on Max’s ATVs. He ended up trying to give me a lesson on the history of
the gasoline engine since the beginning of time. I found the guy annoying. He was like a hillbilly professor.

But I was intrigued by him. He told me how he made his own race boats and airplanes, which would go faster than anybody else’s. He had a funny phrase that was his motto: “If it rolls, floats, or flies, I can make it go faster.”

Mickey wasn’t a guy I was going to bond with by taking him to the orgy room at the Forge. He was a couple years older than me, but he talked like a kid. He used Boy Scout words like “Gee whiz.”

Mickey wasn’t a pilot. He had a pilot friend he worked with named Ray Delmer.
^*
But this shows you what a weirdo Mickey was. Delmer was almost Mickey’s age, but Mickey called him Dad. Mickey said, “Dad knows a lot about planes.” At first I thought he meant his father made planes with him, but then I found out Mickey had lost his father. Dad was his friend.

Mickey didn’t belong in my world. He didn’t do cocaine. He didn’t swear. His favorite thing was to eat milk and cookies that his mom made. Mickey lived with his mom. He’ll tell you today that he had his own apartment back then, but there was no furniture in it. He did his laundry at his mother’s. He ate there. Sometimes he drove her to church on Sunday.

I’m not saying he was a freak, dressing up in a skin suit made from his mom, like in the movies.
^†
He had girlfriends almost like a normal guy. For a while he had a little skinny girlfriend with blond hair like his who dressed in all-white-jeans outfits. Mickey got white jeans that matched. The two of them would ride up on Mickey’s motorcycle and step off in their white jeans and blond hair. They looked like they might have been out hunting unicorns together.

Despite the impression he made, Mickey was no pushover. He was not a tough guy with his hands. But I never saw him afraid. He didn’t like violent people, but he wasn’t cowardly around them.
He was very stubborn. He was a know-it-all. He could make you mad. I was annoyed by him many times.

But Mickey and me took the Cartel to the next level. Mickey made a system where however much they tried to stop drug imports, they couldn’t stop him. Mickey didn’t smuggle the biggest loads, but his loads always made it through. Mickey was like the FedEx of drug smuggling. If you saw Mickey on the street, you’d never imagine this guy was the technical mastermind of the Medellín Cartel. That was part of his true genius. This guy beat the piss out of the U.S. government, and he looked like the boy next door—if the boy next door was a little freaky and still lived with his mom at the age of thirty-five.

*
At the request of Mickey Munday, the name of his pilot friend has been changed to the pseudonym Ray Delmer.

†
A reference to Norman Bates in
Psycho
.

56

President Reagan visited south Florida to highlight his campaign against drugs today and vowed to “break the power of the Mob in America.” The president’s trip was designed to draw attention to the success of the task force, which Reagan created last January to curb the flow of illegal drugs. Vice President George Bush heads the task force.

—“Reagan Pledges War on Drugs,”
Daily News
,
November 15, 1982

J
.
R
.:
As soon as I met Mickey, I wanted to work with him, because I could see he was good enough to handle the heat that was coming down on smugglers. I pushed Max into expanding what Mickey did. Max called Mickey our “employee,” but Mickey and I worked side by side, like partners.
^*
Outside of work we almost never socialized because as people we were completely mismatched.

M
ICKEY
:
Kids should know I don’t advocate drugs. I’ve never inhaled a marijuana cigarette or sniffed cocaine. The only addiction I’ve ever had was chewing gum. Through most of my thirties I could not work unless I had a stick of gum in my mouth. Weird, huh? I guess you could say gum was my drug.

I was raised in a good home. My mother was a schoolteacher and a deacon in the Presbyterian Church. My parents were from Ohio. My mom was a Miss Cincinnati, and my father went to college on a football scholarship. He played professional football for a couple years in Cincinnati, but that wasn’t for him. In the 1940s my parents moved to Miami, and my father started a construction business. He invented a new kind of breeze block—a ventilated brick—that was common in Florida before air-conditioning was in every building. My dad’s design allowed air to blow through the block, but it kept out rain and direct sunlight. The breeze blocks my father made were called Munday Blocks, and they are in hotels and schools across Florida and Latin America. My dad manufactured them at his own shop. He built the house my brother and I grew up in out of Munday Blocks.

Our house was in an ideal 1950s neighborhood. We were by a canal, and I accidentally-on-purpose fell in the water every day of the week. I made my own boat when I was in elementary school. I loved exploring the swamps. I loved maps.

My dad’s shop was down the street. There were welding shops nearby, machine shops, electrical shops. I was curious about
everything, and I apprenticed in all the shops. I learned all the trades. Before I could drive, I was rebuilding my own cars, motorcycles, and boats.