American Desperado (52 page)

My dad was such a neat guy. He loved horse racing. I’ve always wished Jon could have met my father because they both liked horses. My dad didn’t bet like Jon. He bet at the two-dollar window.

My dad was honest. He was frugal because the construction business was cyclical. He’d always say, “When you have chicken, make sure you save the feathers, because you might have a day where all you have is feathers.”

When I was young, my dad died from cigarette smoking. I ran his business from the time I was a teenager. But it went downhill. Munday Blocks were labor-intensive to manufacture, and by the late 1960s air-conditioning was killing off the entire breeze block industry.

I street-raced motorcycles and cars. I love piston engines. I love speed. I became friends with a black motorcycle club because I was the only white mechanic who wouldn’t cheat them. From there I started a custom motor shop.

My best friend was a guy I must have drag-raced a thousand times. His name was Ray Delmer, but I called him Dad because he taught me more about engines and about life than anybody. After my dad died, I was closer to Delmer than anyone, and it was nice having someone to call Dad.

Delmer got his pilot’s license about the time Jimmy Carter became president, and the economy turned to poop. My custom motor shop was barely hanging on. Delmer told me that he and other pilots were getting into smuggling. I stayed away from smuggling until one day in about 1978 when Delmer told me that a guy he knew had lost a load of marijuana from his plane. It was now sitting unclaimed in the Everglades. I decided rescuing those marijuana bales would be following my father’s advice to save the feathers off the chicken. I said, “Let’s go get that marijuana.”

It wasn’t as simple as that. The bales were thrown over a wide area of wetlands. Delmer and I flew over it for a day searching for
clues. It was like a Hardy Boys mystery. Eventually I spotted the bales on the ground.

I learned then that I had a unique ability to find things. It’s more than that. If you show me something on the ground, I’ll find it from the air, and if I see it from the air, I’ll find it on the ground. Later, when I scouted airfields in jungles all over Colombia, that ability came in handy.

We sold the marijuana bales for $25,000. Back then $12,000 was a year’s income to me. From then on, when it came to smuggling, you could count me in. I learned to fly, but I never got a license. I worked as a kicker, as a mechanic, as a navigator.

Even though I didn’t smoke marijuana, I saw no reason why the government should tell people what to do with their lives. To me, it was a waste of everyone’s time and money to have the government out there chasing people like me. My word for all the agencies that were hunting us—police, DEA, Customs Service, Coast Guard—was the “Competition.” I dedicated myself to being better than the Competition.

I learned that success starts with logistics. Most smugglers didn’t have backup plans. I wouldn’t pick one place to land our plane. I’d pick three or four so we’d have alternates. I’d give radios to my crew so they could all communicate. If I needed one radio, I brought three in case the first two had heart attacks. If all the radios died, the people on my ground crew had flashlights and knew basic Morse Code so they could still communicate.

I picked my crew from friends who worked at repair garages and tire shops and from the black motorcycle club. They were all solid individuals. One of my biker friends liked to fish. I put my prime landing fields by canals. I’d send him out on a bass boat with a pole and a cooler of beer, plus a radio and binoculars so he could watch the access roads and keep an eye on the Competition.

I’d do everything possible with my planes to increase their capacity for distance, speed, and payload. I’d crank up the horsepower. When you do that, your propellers will cavitate—which is like a car
spinning its wheels. You mitigate against cavitation with a longer propeller, but if we put big propellers on little planes, it might make the Competition suspicious. To make the propellers look smaller, I installed tri-blades made for turboprops. You couldn’t tell they were turboprops, and they made my planes appear to have the right proportions.

To increase my range, I found a company that made rubber fuel tanks for racing cars. They were like water beds. You could fold them up, put them inside the plane, and fill them when you needed to. Fuel is key. You run out of gas in the sky, you can’t put down your kickstand and park on a cloud.

Putting the extra weight in my planes made them sit wallered down. I put in nitrogen shocks so even fully loaded, my plane would sit high and proud, the way a plane should look.

Deception was critical. I did everything I could so my planes, my boats, my cars all looked average. Every time I painted a car, I’d tell my painter, “I want you to paint it well, but I want it to look like it’s two, three years old.”

I also believed in speed on the ground. When my planes landed in the fields we used around Florida, my crew could refuel them in under three minutes. The trunks I built in my cars could hold six 15-gallon jerry cans. I’d carry 180 gallons in two cars. I put four fuel fillers on my planes. When we met the plane, I’d have four people gassing it up simultaneously. It takes forty-three seconds to empty a jerry can. Sometimes we’d fill a plane in just over two minutes. That’s getting up there with NASCAR pit crew speeds, okay?

My crew carried toothbrushes. We’d clean every crevice inside the plane after we took the cargo out. We carried extra seats to the landing fields and installed them in the cargo area after we emptied the plane. That way, when the plane returned to the airport, it would look like it couldn’t possibly have been flying anything but tourists on a fishing trip.

The Competition did very little to stop us in 1978. But by 1980, when Dad and I started doing some flights for Max, they were
getting better—studying airports, aircraft, pilots, docks. Smugglers had it easy for years, and when the Competition stepped up their game, those guys went down fast. We had to step up our game.

Max was intelligent, but he didn’t have the patience for new ideas. He didn’t want to spend money. When I met Jon, he got involved. He wasn’t afraid to try new ideas. He understood we had to continually improve.

J
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R
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Mickey did amazing things. He ran tourist flights from Miami to the Bahamas. He’d pay women to go on chartered tours. He and his pilot would dress up in uniforms and fly them to a luxury hotel. When the girls checked in, Mickey and the pilot would fly out and smuggle drugs for four days. Then they’d clean the plane, put on their uniforms, pick up the girls, and fly them back to Miami. Mickey called the girls he used the “cover girls.”
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Eventually he shut down the Bahama route because they started searching every plane. But Mickey made fools of all the big-shot government lawmen for years. What an evil mind Mickey had, despite his talking like the all-American kid.

He was always coming up with new ways to trick people. When cops in Dade County got aggressive about stopping cars and searching trunks, Mickey came up with the idea of buying a tow truck company. When we moved cars around the county with drugs in the trunks, we put the cars on flatbed tow trucks. The drivers had work orders. It never occurred to the cops to stop a tow truck and search the car it was towing.

One of the greatest things Mickey did was situate secret landing
fields in the last place anybody expected them—on government property. Mickey brought in most of our coke at old U.S. military bases. What a twisted guy. Don’t be fooled by Mickey’s little happy smile.

M
ICKEY
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The government locations I found were abandoned Nike missile sites.
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These were built with a high standard of quality, from the missile silos to the access roads. They made terrific landing fields.

When I started exploring the Nike sites, I’d go out with a fishing pole and a small cutting torch in a knapsack. These sites went on for miles, and they had fences everywhere. I rode on a Honda 70 minibike light enough to toss over the fences. That way I could climb over the fences and keep riding.

The grass was maintained beautifully at these sites. They were empty, but the lawns were still cut regularly. In case of nuclear attack, no one could have complained that the lawns weren’t well kept. Everything was gated and locked.

The military used a padlock that looked like a number five Master Lock, but the key had a groove on the side. I had a friend who supplied me with identical locks. When I found an area I wanted to come back to, I’d cut off the government lock with my torch and replace it with one of mine. Now I could come and go as I pleased.

When I replaced a government lock with one of my own, I made sure that there was a secondary way in. That way when caretakers came to the site, and their key didn’t work in one lock, they could enter through another gate. They might file a report about a “malfunctioning lock,” but being the government, it would be months or years before anyone would look into the matter.

The other sites I found to land planes on were federal lands along the Aerojet canal. In the 1960s when they started the moon rocket program at Cape Canaveral, they dug a canal through the Everglades to move rocket motors up there made by Aerojet.
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They shut down the program and closed the Aerojet facilities along the canal. When they dig a canal in Florida, they always make a “spoils bank” alongside it—a pile of excavations that is graded flat and turned into a road. The Aerojet facilities had miles of spoils-bank roads that made excellent landing strips. These were fenced off like the Nike sites, so I just put in more of my own locks so I could come back and visit whenever I needed to.

The Nike and Aerojet sites gave me numerous 12,000-foot-long runways. That length was my holy grail, because you needed only 6,000 feet to land or take off. When my plane landed, my crew met it in the middle of the 12,000-foot runway. When my pilot took off again, he didn’t need to turn his plane. That saved time. We could land the plane, unload it, fuel it, clean it out, refit it, and get it in the air in under six minutes.

There were workers who came onto the government sites we used, but they worked government hours—nine to five, at best, and all the holidays off. The rest of the time these sites belonged to me.

J
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After we landed drug planes on the government property, we still had to fly them to airports and service them. Mickey got the idea to make his own service hangar. We bought a 280-acre farm in Lakeland about two hundred miles north of Delray in the middle of nowhere, with barns Mickey converted into secret hangars. We started a fake crop-dusting company and kept the planes there. Sometimes Mickey’s pilot did crop dusting for farmers, so no one could say it wasn’t a real business.

At times, the Colombians would put thousands of kilos of coke
on a fishing trawler and send the vessel into the Gulf of Mexico. Then we’d send speedboats out to unload it.

Ultimate Boats was the boat shop Mickey started to make smuggling boats.
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His boats were the opposite of Don Aronow’s. Instead of being made for getting laid, they looked like garbage. Mickey built boats that, I guarantee you, no girl would get on, with or without Quaaludes. But he put huge engines in them and secret cargo holds. Mickey was so sure of his boats that one time, when he was driving in a load of coke and saw a Coast Guard boat that was having engine trouble, he threw the Coast Guard a line and towed them in. This, with a half-ton of cocaine in his boat. Of course, Mickey was friends with half the Coast Guard because he went for all the voluntary boat inspections and took special classes they gave in boat safety.

Mickey put spotters everywhere. He had people watching Homestead Air Base, where the Customs Service flew its jets, to tell us how many were in the sky. He had people watching their docks. We rented an apartment overlooking Haulover Cut in Biscayne Bay and put a girl there to watch and tell us when the government boats were coming in. When we had a drug plane returning from Colombia, Mickey sent up spotter planes to look for government jets.

What put us over the top was Mickey’s listening in on government radios. Mickey tuned in to them and recorded them twenty-four hours a day. We knew when they were sending patrols and where. If they were going south, we went north. If one day they were looking for a red smuggling plane, we made sure to fly only green planes.

We had a radio room at Ultimate Boats. For entertainment I’d go there and listen to the idiots in the Customs Service talk about what they were doing that day to stop us.

M
ICKEY
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I didn’t know about radios when I started in the smuggling business. One of the best schools I found was the local
RadioShack store. My education began when I bought a police scanner, and the people who worked there explained how you could tune it in to the Coast Guard. The key was finding what frequency their radios were on. It turned out, RadioShack sold a book for five dollars that listed frequencies used by most government agencies.

The FAA gave public tours of its main air traffic control center in Miami. They’d show you their radars and maps and radios. You could ask questions, and I’d ask about their radios. That was very helpful.

All the agencies kept some channels they used a secret. But I took public tours of Coast Guard facilities and boats, and I noticed that Coast Guard radio operators wrote down the frequencies they used to talk to the Customs Service on pieces of tape that they stuck to their gear. One time I brought a lady I knew who was an accountant and had almost a photographic memory for numbers. She was also a very chesty young lady, and while the sailors were ogling her assets, she was ogling their frequency numbers and memorizing them.