Roger Reaves: Smuggling Drugs for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel | Lex Fridman Podcast #199

the following is a conversation with roger reeves one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history he worked for pablo escobar and jorge ochoa the leaders behind the medellin cartel roger was the employer and close friend of barry seal the infamous drug smuggler who was the main character in the movie american-made roger transported countless tons of cocaine and marijuana covering six continents he escaped prison five times was shut down in both mexico and colombia and was tortured nearly to death in a mexican prison through all of this his wife mari the love of his life was there with him and when he was in prison she waited for him he recently got out of prison where for many years he worked on his memoir called smuggler this podcast is an exploration of a story quick mention of our sponsors noom all form expressvpn four sigmatic and aidsleep check them out in the description to support this podcast let me say a few words about roger reeves pablo escobar and the war on drugs this conversation with roger is unlike any i've ever done in the eyes of many including the law roger is a criminal a bad man who has added to the suffering in the world but he never directly engaged or participated in the violence unlike his bosses pablo escobar and jorge ochoa his crime was a transport of drugs i thought about this and about pablo escobar who was at once both a brutal murderer and a robin hood figure who helped the poor and was loved by thousands if not millions we sometimes idolize murderers and destroy good honest men we give power and money to corrupt politicians and dictators that starve and murder their own people given this i think about what makes for a good man and what makes for a bad man and who decides sitting across from roger i saw a complicated man but one who has kindness in his heart a love for money and adventure and a disdain for violence again his crime was the transport of drugs since 1971 the war on drugs has cost us one trillion dollars marijuana legalization alone would save and make 13.7 billion dollars that could send more than 650 000 students to public universities every year then there's a human stories of the 500 000 human beings sitting in prison for drug-related offenses and the 1.1 million on probation and parole their life is damaged or ruined beyond repair due to the prohibition of drugs there's a lot more to be said about the damage done by the war on drugs but when reading about roger's story and talking to him i couldn't escape the thought that while society wants to label him a criminal and a bad human being there are much worse men out there who we give a path to even give power to even men who hold political office or run companies i also think about my role as an interviewer sitting across a man like roger in these interviews in life in many ways i continue to be myself a person who like dostoyevsky is the idiot seeks the good in all people but is hurt by it on occasion and maybe is destroyed by it in the end i'm not naive but i'm also optimistic and have hope for humanity that's who i am and that's what these conversations are i hope you join me and i hope you understand that i come from a place of love this is the lex friedman podcast and here's my conversation with roger reeves you are one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history what would you say motivated you money power the thrill or was it something else money but isn't there a point where you've had more money than you can possibly know what to do with was it always more money you know i had plenty of money several times and i think it's sort of like if you was in las vegas and you had the slot machine handled down and the gold coins were stumbling around you and you had sweepers bagging them up when would you let it go but isn't some part of that the thrill then oh it was a lot of real sometimes way too much you made uh certainly tens of millions of dollars probably much more what memorable experience did having that much money make possible for you so there's one thing is the money and the other thing is what that money can buy well i bought everything that i could hide i bought seven farms i owned uh the uh the city the land where the city of moreno valley california is had an option on that land did the planning and development of that uh the most expensive corn in the world yachts ships airplanes galore that bring you happiness no absolutely not in fact i think i'm happier now i know i'm happier now so looking back would you do it the same way all again no way really even the thrill of it not even the thrill of it it wasn't worth 33 years in prison being away from my lovely family so money what about the power just being on top of the world where nobody can not the the governments the police all the big bad agencies chasing you and you could do whatever the heck you wanted as far as having to look over your shoulder everywhere you went and every phone call you made make sure that you was naked with somebody in the ocean before you talked it's rather uncomfortable yeah um i like to make phone calls the same way what was it like meeting and working with pablo escobar the leader of the medellin cartel he was just uh just seemed like a gentleman when i met him just like you and i sitting here shook hands and i had flown one load for a fella and uh it didn't work out well the fellow that i give it to got shot and it took a while to get my money and they didn't put as many kilos on the plane as they're supposed to and so i wasn't going to work with them anymore and my contact down there introduced me to jorge ochoa and uh we went up and in vegata we went up and the gate opened and we was escorted in they must have been 50 men out in the yards a hission rail on an old house and we was escorted right in and they was a beautiful woman in there i mean gore drop dead beautiful and she made us a cup of coffee then was ushered in to see jorge ochoa and he had 12 telephones on his desk and all of them was a different color and he shook hands was very friendly spoke english and he said that each one of those telephones were represented in another city in the united states this is chicago and this is new york if i ring i knew who's calling and so we chatted a while and uh he asked me what type of airplanes i had and what experience i had flying across the u.s border and i told him he seemed pleased with it and he called the lady in and she went next door and came pablo escobar and he introduced me to pablo escobar and he asked the same questions again and uh i answered them and i said and i i asked them how much they paid and they paid five thousand dollars a kilo to haul it and uh so that's how much he put on the plane he's 300 500 that's one and a half two and a half million dollars for an eight-hour trip sounded pretty good to me and we're talking about cocaine cocaine we're talking about colombia colombia and cocaine and medellin cartel and uh jorge ochoa was one of the what would you say founding members of the probably the brains behind the whole thing the brains and spoke good english yes and they were nice people really nice people were you scared not at all what's wrong with your mind that you weren't scared here's some of the most dangerous men in this world and you weren't scared well i knew i was going to do exactly what i said i was going to do murray and the children were down there they went down and they stayed in the hotel five star and treated royally on my first load and they just did ask security to make sure that i wasn't a dea agent so i uh i did the first load and they would they can say they were hostages but they really weren't it was just insurance so there was some integrity to the way they operated completely i mean straight straight up the money was ironed and bad banded and just right and the numbers were never once anything wrong with it what would you attribute that honesty to within the their own moral system and their own set of rules why weren't people crossing the line and shaving off the top and and uh injecting chaos into the system to where it would be unpredictable and people would be dishonest and greedy and all those kinds of things that's true most people are but there's certain people at the top of the food chain that they don't need that and if they're completely honest then they don't have to think of remember the lie they told and and plus they just honest to start with they're they're they making plenty of money they was making as much money as i did i uh i'll tell you how that um that came about i understand that 10 000 people were killed every year in medellin colombia and what they were doing they didn't they didn't have any organization and uh if one fellow had 10 kilos and he wanted it shipped to new york he would tell his friend and his friend said sure i'll ship it i have a pilot and i'll ship it up and then he would look in the newspapers oh 40 kilos was busted in new jersey i'm so sorry yours got busted bang bang he's dead so here comes jorge ochoa and the three ochoa brothers and pablo escobar and gotcho and they decided that we will make an insurance company that we would charge you ten thousand dollars to take it to your contact in miami if it gets lost anywhere between the time i put it on the airplane or the time you give it to us and the time we give it to your man we will replace it in colombia for you so there was no way anybody could lose and i understand they got a hundred tons piled up under that insurance program and i was right there the first day so i had all the work i could do i would land in this i said when you want me to come back we waiting on you senor well let me ask a difficult question uh some see escobar as a brutal murderer and some see him as um maybe a robin hood like figure who helped the poor how do you see the man both of them i think he started out to be honest would help the poor and then they had a war down there and they blew up and killed his people and uh the country was divided almost equally three ways they had the uh the military they were just as much into it as anybody and then you had the farc guerrillas they had about a third of the country and then you had the contras it was like the white farmers and uh they're the ones that i was dealing with and they were at war with one another and so if one of them started killing their people i'll kill some of yours too so that that's how it happened and then when i heard about pablo escobar blowing up that airliner and killing those women and children i was sorry i ever shook his hand that's that's brutal murder so you would say escobar is not a good man not at all he's terrible now looking back on it when i met him he was good did just exactly what he said he would do could he be a bad man and a man you can trust are those absolutely you could trust him yes so from your perspective in terms of business he was reliable he was honest had integrity you could work with him oh he felt safe completely we flew up and uh to his ranch and even we brought out motorcycles to start with and can you ride a motorcycle of course i can ride a motorcycle so i took off across the grass and there was a little ditch there and the front wheel dropped in that thing and i must have slid across that grass 20 feet before i got stopped he almost fell off for his bike waiting because they knew what it was going to do and then we got on horses and went out there and pretended to round up some cows and he put a mac 10 machine gun pistol over my shoulder you know how to use this well i never had but it was all right i think it was like okay you got 10 bodyguards what do you need me for so that's the kind of time we laughed and talked and drove some cows over the stumps you said jorge ochoa was perhaps the brains of the medellin cartel what was he like and why do you say he was the brains well he was a gentleman and i suppose he shipped and don't tell me how many more times of cocaine than pablo did just in him and his brothers you could tell by the they had on each hl load they was in duffel bags and there's big football shaped uh fluffy stuff made with ether and they would have three horns on it or a rattlesnake or four x's on each bag you kind of got to knowing which was which was which and they shipped a lot so um and he was just a gentleman i took the family we went one weekend to his ranch or his uh malaysia place out near barangay and oh we he just treated the family and his family had his younger brother wrote we made a bull fight and we had uh skiing and little airplanes on floats on the water it was really nice and he was really nice how do you make sense of the tension that a man could be a gentleman can have integrity but also be a murderer well murder is is a is a stronger word than killing can you explain the the the line the gray area we're talking about i mean i've just talking with jocko willing and we talked a lot about killing in the context of uh military conflict and context of war so there there's a line between murder and killing that you can draw what's the line that you're referring to it's something similar if you if people shooting at you and you shoot back and kill him i don't that's not murder whatsoever it's uh he's trying to get away or out of the situation but if some woman don't pay you and you send a hit man over to to kill her and her children that's that's that's murder that's murder was jorge involved in those kinds of things i don't think so at all it just i mean he was he was just such a gentleman he had a restaurant before and and he was just smart i understand that uh the first 10 kilos he sold he was sitting on them on a motorcycle in the in the sidelines in a parking lot when the dea come in he sped away so he didn't come back to america he was just smart some people just have are savvy and he was such a gentleman and the whole family the mother and the father the two brothers their sister it was i was there when she was kidnapped and uh finally he kidnapped our i guess 100 liters of the farc and uh said all right and she don't come back none of these are going to come back so they made a deal is there something you can say about the power structure the hierarchy of the median cartel that you interacted with was uh was it a dictatorship where pablo ran everything was there a bunch of power centers was it like a company would you have ceo cto kind of thing and then there's like managers and all those kinds of things what's the like how did it run from a leadership perspective i understand that about five of them got together and made this i would call it an insurance company and uh now known as the medellin cartel and i didn't see any difference each one of them had their own business and their people from the jungle or wherever made the cocaine gave it to them and they shipped it and uh so didn't it didn't seem to be any any power play between them at all but my main contact was jorge ochoa and pablo escort bar was right there and i saw plenty of stuff for him too it's strange that they didn't betray each other regularly you know uh greed makes men betray each other how do you explain that how much betrayal did you see i didn't see any absolutely none if if they shipped his 100 kilos he got paid for it if the other one uh shipped his i'm sure they got paid for it how do you explain that well there was no need to the money was just unbelievable you think about 500 kilos in the plane at fifty thousand dollars a kilo at the time and they paid five thousand dollars to ship it and they made five thousand without even touching it they just had somebody to load it onto the airplane i gave it to their man in miami they gave it to whoever it belonged to by the uh by the marks on the duffel bags so they was making just untold millions just uh no reason but greed can blind men i you know it's still it's still strange to me that there was not more betrayal it speaks to something else perhaps that's bigger than money maybe maybe not but it seems like just like in the casino like you mentioned uh we um get accustomed to the whatever level of money we have we get accustomed very quickly yes and then there's a tension that's natural between human beings and when that tension combined with money combined with power combined with like you mentioned beautiful women and a bit of violence it seems that um betrayal should be commonplace but it's not it was not at all like carlos later i don't know he betrayed anybody but he started that he was running cocaine through the bahamas and he had the island i didn't go i was offered to fly with a dc3 with that but i didn't like it so i had my route through the old wheels in louisiana and uh so i you weren't going to change but uh he he talked a lot and i don't know he betrayed but they didn't like him yeah so as you expand there could be tensions that yeah that lead to conflict colombia was like you said an ultra violent place how did you survive who protected you i was a hero they they liked me i mean i was just treated royally all i did i would come over el banco there's a radio station at the forks of the magdalena river i believe at 7 20 if i remember right on the am and i'd fly in at 10 000 feet and i'd see below me there'd be a cessna and i'd wiggle my wings and he'd wiggle his and i'd fall in behind him and we might go 100 200 miles i'd land on some jungle strip or some uh banana plantation and they'd fuel me up i could eat steak in the night it was just like treated royally and i mean take off the next morning whenever i wanted to it was just like that was protected and i was i was honored guest it wasn't anything like in that movie putting you putting a gun to your head and taking your sunglasses and betting so one time i uh complained to um jorge ochoa that the runway was pretty short that they were using and i went back down and it looked like los angeles international they had bulldozers in there had that thing 5 000 feet long just like just the next week it was all done the jungle was gone and clay put up there and and all the while you were not afraid you were treated like royalty yes there i was i was afraid when i landed in the united states well maybe let's go back to the beginning what was the first time you uh flew an airplane with drugs on it tell me the story the first time you smuggled drugs all right i uh i flew down to halapa vera cruz with a cessna 182. and uh we landed the town it was a lovely town and this an old town looked like bible times people women were washing their clothes in the streets and with stone basins in the stream running through i just was just dumb struck it was just so pretty and i went in a church and a catholic church and it had the stations of the cross all carved magnificent i'd never seen that and i come home and told murray about that that was just almost brought tears to my eyes it was so beautiful and three o'clock the next morning i went out to the airport and taxed it down to the taxiway and there was a guard came out and uh wanted to know what i was doing and i pulled out i was on the i was on the fire department at redondo beach california so i pulled out my wallet and then and it was the fire department bash and oh he shook my hand was so glad so i taxed it on down and we loaded up about 400 pounds in the plane and uh came on back and i was uh running the headwinds more than i thought and i landed on a little strip you're talking about on the way back on the way back on the way north after we loaded up early in the morning and uh for only time i ever got vertigo the mountains were coming down at a 30 or 40 degree angle and uh milky was where he was overhead and somehow i wanted that airplane to be level with the stars and it got it got me it's just a phenomenal pile of house vertigo the only time i ever had it was on that load so anyway the wind was on the nose of that cessna i wasn't going to make it to the dry lake where i had fuel so i landed on a little bitty strip there was a little house that was caved in and there was a little boy named lazarus about six or seven years old and he was heard and some goats so we put the marijuana in that house and the man stayed with it so while i flew into some town and got fueled and came back we sat down with the lunch that i brought back and little lads were sat there and ate with us and we had a good time we loaded them back and came over oh wow i wonder where he is now what was it like to fly maybe describe the details of do you have to fly low um is there details that are unique to this experience of flying an airplane with drugs on it on board all right well one of the mistakes that just thousands hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pilots make they don't stop at the border going down and get their permit once you get a permit to be in mexico you've got it for six months you can go anywhere any fishing village any little town any little place show them this and you're welcome if you don't have that you go straight to jail so you go down there and you think okay they're going to have fuel for me to come back and so forth oh sorry senor that was uh had a rusty leak in it we don't have any well you better be able to go to town and get it yeah so that's what i did and when i was coming back for several years i would fly uh fly up at mexicali and cross the border right at calexico just i would act like i was landing on the clexico side just after dark and then i'd zip across the border and i go over to the salton sea and go below sea level 100 and something feet i believe 170 feet and come on up and go out there and above palm springs and land out 29 palms in the desert and put my stuff under joshua tree and fly into town and get my pickup and go on back out and get it and that was fun and then it got really dangerous they had a operation starlight i believe was the name of it and they caught a lot of pilots coming across the border so i changed it and by that time i was flying bigger planes i was flying beach 18s and i would refuel in moulihae on the halfway down on the baja peninsula and then over in the middle 20 miles from the nearest road was a was a goat ranch where they milked goats and made cheese and i would go there and unload the load coming up out of anywhere in southern mexico and i would land there and a guy named juan would uh we'd put the put the marijuana under the trees and i'd fly in the mullet and they'd wash my plane and gassed it up my i'd ease a lunch and rent a room for a few hours and take a nap and shower and then go back afternoon and fill up and then i would go northwest out of there and fly 200 miles off the coast of the island of guadalupe and from there i would fly on a more northwestern heading about 300 miles out over the pacific and then i would come in behind the santa barbara islands down low and then i'd come up and go out in the desert and land and i did that for the rest of the marijuana trips what was the hardest part about flying those routes the hardest part was getting good marijuana so the hardest part isn't the flying flying just like driving your car down but then i had people that would bring me on strips that were just unworthy of an airplane right when i'd land on a highway and uh and this and in the rainy season i'd come back to land again and the guy wouldn't think about it have like little hills on both sides and the wings right there well the grass and the weeds would grow up and it sounded like i mean it sounded like tearing the airplane apart when those wings hit mowing the grass down both both shoulders of the airplane the weeds grew up high in the tropics so some of that stuff was bad and oh getting bad gasoline and telling me that land here and the light and and knock the wheels off when you land oh you should have landed a little further up here saying you know they ditched down yeah you know that sort of thing what was it like landing on a highway and and when did you have to land on the highway i landed a highway most of my life most of the times in mexico first time i went down there was a place called picchulingi and they had a 900-foot strip and i would fly down and i'd carry gasoline wing with me and mari and i would go to the grocery store and buy all kind of little goodies and candies and toys to bring to the children and uh that sand strip in the in the bend of a river was just too short to take off with a load so there was a young man there named pedro must not weighed much over 100 maybe 120 pounds and he'd get in a plane with me and he'd direct me 20 30 40 miles away to a highway and the people walking and the people would pull out in a two-ton truck with a machine gun on it and a bunch of guys with their arms were just and they'd block the road and then another one block it up about a mile away not land right over that truck and they'd load me up it looked like a bucket brigade when the marijuana coming i'd shake hands with all of them and i'd take off right over the other trucks and sometimes maybe 20 30 40 cars lined up i one time i remember a patrol car a highway patrol car he didn't have his lights on to go right over him and then when i started flying to louisiana the bridge over the mississippi river there were several contractors that went broke and that thing was out for years and about five miles from the river was flashing red lights and a detour and then the swamp on both sides of it in the middle of it we've grown up with 20 feet trees and that was like an international runway from anywhere in the world so i landed on that and over and over those red lights just like the end of a runway and then the next morning we'd go out and scrub the marks off the highway where i'd landed before daylight wow let's go to somebody you've known well somebody who is who's also a drug smuggler is barry seal who is barry seale how did you meet him bear seal is a friend of mine uh mari and i and the children went down in uh honduras and we went up uh lake azul i believe it was and was looking at a ranch to buy i was looking for something in central america where i'd have a halfway place oh it was lovely we stayed up there for some days and our clothes got muddy and we went in the river and all kind of thing so we got to san pedro sula and uh was going back to new orleans so uh went to to the cleaners to get our clothes and most all of them was in there and they got old senor they'll be ready tomorrow morning we're not ready now well the plane leaves it nine o'clock or whatever so i told murray to for her and the children to go into the airport because it'd be easier for one just on a standby flight so i went to the laundromat for the clothes and they were ready and they was a pile up and i put them on my back and got into taxi and the old taxi would drive him with it and i'd give him a hundred dollars to go faster and he just blew his horn more rapid finally we got to the airport and i jumped out and ran around on the tarmac and here's a brand new 727 taxiing out oh no so i'm waving to the pilot and this young fella he waves back then i see mari's face in the cockpit and the nose goes down where he puts on brakes and he laughs and he puts some stairwell out and i run for the stairwell and he pulls it back up and goes like a hitchhiker gonna pick you up and go go again then he put it out and i got on an old crowd clapped and i'm coming home with that load of clothes so i go way down in the middle and the plane's full and miriam my daughter's about nine years old then and she was sitting in the middle and by the window was seal of course i didn't know it and i sat in the middle and uh we took off and the wheels come up with clunk and then i got up about 5000 feet we had a little click link and she said what was that daddy i said he just turned on his autopilot that fellow reached over and i looked at him i said he looks like c.i.a or fbi something he ain't supposed to be here clear blue eyes gentlemen looking man and he he said you fly these things i said i got a few hours mister he said i i fly them too or something other than they said my name barry seal and he reached over miriam shook hands and we got to talking and i thought no choice of seats on this it's just open seating so but i don't believe him one bit and he started talking about he just got out of jail that morning just got out of prison and i said uh-huh and he told me he'd been a pilot with a twa in this another and uh told me what he was for and so we had a nice conversation with a couple hours to new orleans i didn't believe him yeah so he got off in front of us and what a crowd of people to meet him an old mother and a wife and little children hanging on to him crying and hugging and kissing him i said he was telling the truth so i reached over and gave him a little piece of paper i had maury to write it out with our address i said barry i might have some work for you because he's in jail for he got caught with 100 kilos of cocaine and a small plane and so he served a year and that was from colombia i don't know where he comes from he got caught in honduras probably refueling but he'd be he'd been in prison down here before for bringing explosives to the um cuban contras and he lost his job with the airlines and then later on i found out he was xcia and george bush seniors protege and had a thousand parachute jumps and was there he was a hot shot there's a million questions i want to ask here but uh maybe can we linger on a little bit longer what was your relationship with him like you you were a drug smuggler he's a drug smuggler um your friends how often do you guys talk how often do you work together what was the relationship like well i back up and just finished where i started off there he uh i gave him a thanks bear i may have some work for you i know i got some work for you and uh i said come out santa barbara and so i don't know a week or two later he flew out and went to our house and stayed with us a couple of days and i had a almost brand new uh arrow commander 690b that thing was turboprop and it was hot it's the hardest thing i'd ever had so i said let's go barry let's see what you can do so i'm sorry i said that we got about 9 000 feet and he was like one of them blue angel pilots he wrung that thing out yeah you know that's enough and then um he did the falling leaf that's where you cut the engines and the plane falls from side to side i saw bob hoover do that in the air show once and that's the only person i ever saw do it and i was my hand was white knuckle hanging onto the seat you shut off the engine yeah he shut off the engines and landing flying side by side like this how do you explain that was he just uh a wild man or was he sufficiently skilled to wear sufficiently skilled absolutely he knew what he was doing i can get a plane from one spot to another and i guess i'm known as a good pilot but that guy it was aerobatic [Laughter] so anyway he stayed with us a couple of days and then i told him i said this plane needs uh needs tank and i guess i got some work done in colombia needs to come back to louisiana and i need 2 500 mile range he said i got somebody in mina arkansas do that and keep the mouse shut so i gave him 10 000 and he flew away and in a few days he called me and says come to my house in baton rouge so i went out to his house in baton rouge and i stayed with him for a few days and that plane was tanked i mean beautiful from stem to stern i could went from bolivia to canada with him so uh he was uh then i hired him to fly and uh he was funny i paid him a million dollars a trip i beat him two thousand dollars a kilo so about a million ultra and i didn't get paid until they the people received it they had to ship it to chicago and new york and then the money come back so it was a couple of two or three weeks pipeline well i was had to pay him before before he'd go again i mean and he bellyache i mean he had moaning room so uh one time i uh i gave him a million dollars and i put it in a box real nice so how big is a box that contains a million dollars so we're talking about 100 bills hundred dollars it's not very big you can put in a large briefcase it weighs exactly 10 kilos each hbill weighs a gram so you can weigh your money and almost get it exactly 10. 20 something pounds is a million dollars 22 pounds 22 pounds 100 bills but a hundred and one dollar bills it's one ton two thousand two hundred pounds we didn't even accept them were you the one that introduced barry seal to uh pablo escobar no i didn't introduce him at all and uh he and i our deal was that you don't meet my people i mean we just kind of crossed you working for me to fly the airplanes so he wanted these panther conversions cost four hundred thousand dollars each with a storm scope and radar so i want anything you want what's that mean sorry to interrupt panther conversions a panther conversion was a these people called panther they took everything out from the firewall the instruments and all them converted them and put q-tip propellers on them four-bladed and you're very quiet and the cia developed those in southeast asia for running behind the lines and that's where barry had flown those things so he knew about him so hey that's what he wanted and that's what we got him how does that connect to pablo and so he worked for you and you got those upgrades i i think he flew about 30 loads for me and then i got arrested and was better for everything in the world got 35 years sentence but let me back up a little bit barry uh was our friend uh mari and i befriend we should pause real quick and say mari is uh uh your wife and we'll hopefully she'll uh we'll convince her to join us in a little bit she's the love of your life and sort of she uh weaves in and out of many of these stories that you tell yes she was there she was behind the scenes but i kept her out of it completely and then also you mentioned miriam as a your daughter yes rhett our son was a was a baby yeah and uh i remember we went out to the festival was my favorite restaurant in carl gables oh god it was good and barry knew about it anyhow we went out to dinner and uh so we came back and there was no rooms so very well would spend the night with us so he goes to our hotel room with him we got two two big beds in the omni hotel and he lays over there gets down to his stripy undershorts and his t-shirt and he puts the baby up on his belly and gives him the bottle said ain't that good red oh my my and he just feeds the baby we laugh and talk and that's how close we were that we could all stay in a hotel room together and would you say he's a good man a wonderful man a gentleman southern gentleman just he's looked after his mother his family everybody around him everybody loved barry he just had a he had a little little smile on his face always so you got arrested and then what happened to barry well barry knew the the people that uh unloaded of course he sent the cars down and all that so he met the unloader guy named lito louis carlos bustamante of venezuelan and uh so he's just kept on flying but he uh yeah i believe he had three of my airplanes at 400 a piece and they owed me some money well he collected a lot of that and gave murray the money and put it in his safe and took her to his house and all after i got arrested and sent all year in he got me the best lawyer in the country albert krieger he was head of the defense team for all america wonderful man can you tell the story of the months that led up to barry's assassination what it what what what did you know what did you sense what did you think okay when i got out of prison i hadn't been out long i was uh watching eating breakfast and there was ronald reagan's face right in the television we have absolute proof that the communist sandinista government is in the cocaine run in business and there was that fat lady the c2 c-2126 on the runway would build it in and i thought oh god he had done it so i had heard that barry might been working with him so what mom working with with the dea whoever yeah he did he is he was no longer on our side you know so uh can you clarify how you got that from the reagan making a statement about we've heard okay there was his plane there was a bearish plane and okay on the way north we could stop in in nicaragua and land on a military base or on a a basis they used those crop dusters and all and refuel yeah and so that shortened our trip would go further into the jungle and come up and that was what pablo escobar and ocho and him and they had there was associates with the people in nicaragua so barry was if that plane was there that means barry was feeding the dea information he was working with him at that time but let me back up a little bit when when i was flying and i told barry we would we would refuel and trains airplane the loads in police where i had a spot up there and then that's when the they told me we can refuel in in uh nicaragua and then you fly all the way and barry couldn't believe it he says all right but i wanted to land i had a place in louisiana for ten thousand dollars that i could unload and sheriff and oldham was paid off and uh he said no no no i can't get caught in me in arkansas i said what do you mean you can't get caught in maniac so you get caught anywhere he said i can't if it can't but it's going to cost you fifty thousand dollars every time my wheels touch the ground why can you explain why he can't get he said he was he was hooked up with the with him the very top and he even said i'm gonna have dinner with the governor tonight that's at that time i mean the arkansas mr bill clinton undoubtedly and it's a little like did bill clinton did you give him any money and i said no i never give the man any money but it was like the money that i had went to grand cayman islands and i told my lawyer i never touched that money he said you don't have to fondle it to be guilty so so what i mean there's a lot of conspiracy theories around the relationship between pericle and the clintons absolutely what evidence do we have what would you say from your best understanding of what was the relationship between bill clinton and barry seal barry said and he knew that he couldn't get caught in me in arkansas and when that movie was going to come out be called mina somebody stopped it i mean they stopped it dead in the tracks for two or three years and the producer even quit you mean the american meds with tom cruise movie it wasn't it was going to be called meena it's the name that was written and produced in mina and wait waiting on hillary to be elected they they would not let that movie out and that movie was changed drastically but to push back on that that doesn't mean there's truth there that means they were worried about the power of the conspiracy theory which stuck exactly i don't know i mean you know some conspiracy theories just because they're popular doesn't mean they're true and ones that uh but it also doesn't mean they're not true and there's ones that are not very popular that could be true but that one that one really stuck did you do i mean what's your sense well i paid one and a half million dollars for barry to land at meena arkansas so i was pretty well assured that he couldn't get caught and i said well i can't get caught in colombia we can't get caught in nicaragua i guess we got a license it's that we went for it so when you say i can't get caught just to clarify there's a there's a sense where this is a safe place to land yes like completely safe so you don't think he was referring to some kind of um you know like my grandfather who fought in world war ii would talk about bullets can't hit him so it's almost like believing back he's taking that fifty thousand dollars and giving it to somebody to somebody and barry was honest so he wasn't just taking it from me because he was making a million dollars he didn't care for the fifty thousand ah man taking the story forward uh the months leading up to his assassination what what uh what do you understand why he was assassinated who were the players involved maybe could you have stopped well i'll tell you after i saw reagan's face on the television saying we have the absolute proof the phone rang and it would bury i hadn't heard from him in a couple years he said i'm coming out tonight roger and oh boy so uh he came out he said i'll meet you in this uh french restaurant i don't even know in santa barbara and i walked in there's about 20 or 30 people in there and he was all 30 40 years old women would plastic leather skirts and me and their blue jeans and i looked around and barry was at the back he was leaned up he'd gain weight and i walked up and i said barry you wired he said no i said i'm not going to talk are these de agents he said every one of them [Laughter] with jeans and skirts i like it i said well barry i'm going to set you and you just talk to me buddy and tell me what's on your mind and he sat there and he just went to talking and he told me about he was left holding the bag and that um what do you mean by that like that nobody's supported him or another he was uh and and i don't know this i mean this is just what what happened uh putting it all together that he had some cia buddies that was pretending we're going to supply all of our northwood arms and with that you can land cocaine back here by the ton so he's taking his little planes and putting some ak-47s and maybe ammunition or whatever and takes it down to the contras against the communist party of nicaragua where we've been landing and oliver north was involved in this so uh when the when all that and so his cia buddies was certainly involved and we know they were and barry had been in the cia earlier when he first got out of school so uh when when uh as i say the [ __ ] hit the fan they all fled and left barry hold in the back the cia and the dea yeah no not the dea the cia the dea wasn't in on it cia was was selling that cocaine bringing it in and uh just to clarify it uh what's iran contra scandal what was the alleged involvement of the cia in uh in using drug trade to fund things what do you know what do you think is true what should we know well i know what i know is true that barry was taking a small amount of arms back to central america and giving them to whoever oliver north group group were who oliver north was a colonel that got implemented and almost brought the government down and so they said all right we're getting the guns from iran and we're taking cocaine to pay for them yeah and since congress won't give us money to fight this war we're gonna we're gonna circumvent it so that was that was a whole thing so it was uh cia's effort to circumvent the funding mechanisms of government by you selling drugs yes but it was a handful of renegade cia agents it was barry's friends that was making a load load of money tons of it come up if you would like to read the book the the big white lie the cia and the crack cocaine epidemic the cia put according to this uh the book in michael levine i i didn't remember his name last time i talked uh wrote that book and he was a head ci agent he was a dea agent that exposed this and the cia tried to kill him and he says they put crack cocaine they developed their their chemists developed crack and they put it in every country every city in the united states on one weekend so they were bringing it up by the tons and that's for sure and barry was bringing it can i ask you a small tangent question do you think the public should trust the cia and the dea do you think they're mostly good people that are carrying out a good mission yeah because this kind of makes it sound like there's renegade agents that are just doing whatever the hell they want and with uh sometimes no regard for human life well that's certainly true but that's not everybody in there that's just sometimes you get a few policemen in the department that do these things i i don't believe i believe that our government is is good i think we've got some fools running it yeah i don't know how we get them there but i don't think i know okay so what was barry's involvement here so barry very lean back in that chair and he told me that you know he'd uh he got caught with one and a half tons and he built it in the runway in nicaragua and uh had cameras flashing inside and out and he flew it back to homestead with with an agent there and he brought the agent over um jake jacobson really nice fella i think he was a crop duster and we'd have got along we'd have been on the right side and uh so we uh we sat there and drank chevis regal until i got pie-eyed and barry told me about it he said that he went to see edwin me see flew he got out on bail and he flew his learjet up to washington and went in to see the attorney general edwin meis and they run him out of the office the next day he went back said i have absolute proof that the cia is bringing tons of cocaine are they running sons of cocaine into the united states and edward put him up with this agent jacobson i believe it was and they went down and got one and a half tons and on the way back they bellied it in and pablo escobar and some of the other ones on general there in nicaragua you can see them toting it from one plane to the other side in the book called the big nose uh kings of cocaine it's got a mention of me too and also the other one has a mention of me in it said i'm in more files for the dea than noriega so who was wanted to get rid of barry is that is it who wanted to get rid of barry moore the cartels or the cia the cartel but uh so barry leaned back and he and he he told me the story and the tears came down between his fingers and he put his hands over his eyes and he said i i got you couldn't do it roger i just couldn't do three life sentences so i've told him everything i went to congress and i've testified before congress and he testified before congress for all these things that he'd done and he said i told them all about you but you're under my umbrella you got to testify with me before grand jury in miami and so the guy said you can come down the de agent said you can come down tomorrow with mari first class or i'll take you down in chains and if you don't testify with barry the only place you'll ever see your wife and family again is in a federal prison visiting room was that a difficult conversation oh looking into my my guts was just like ice water i can't testify against my friends i just can't do it how am i going to do it i just i can't work with people and he was honest with me how am i going to testify against them i can't spend the rest of my life in a federal prison what on earth what a mess barry you've got me into so uh is that a kind of betrayal there yes but it's still i wish he left me out of it i understand him getting his in such a mess that he told because if the cia and whoever else would find him betrayed him then he's going to tell everything if you so i says all right i'll be to miami so murray and i flew down first class and i and i went to a lawyer one of the biggest lawyers in miami and i said man i am in a mess this fellow's told everything and i've got to say something but i'm not a snitch man i mean i can help what can i do and he said well being a snitch is like being pregnant you either are you're not [Laughter] uh and he says i i don't represent snitches but if you want to fight this case i'll do it for six hundred thousand dollars and uh boy my face turn red well i'm not a snitch he said well that's what you're talking about he said let me tell you something if you go in there and say one thing and sign that paper and you don't tell them everything you know yeah then they will convict you of everything you've ever done and you tell them so you can't do it so uh i said barry i'm having trouble with a lawyer give it i'll go tomorrow let's go so all right use my lawyer and he gave me his card the lawyer's card so murray and i went to the festival restaurant that night and barry and debbie came in she was dressed pretty and barry was and so he's already about finished so we had dessert together and i said barry they're going to kill you friend he said no they ain't going to kill me so and so such and such is going and this another i said barry they going to kill you man they know you can't deny it and uh you know i said i didn't tell him i wasn't going to testify so i i hugged his neck i really like and we fled to brazil i took murray and the children went to brazil so you decided there you're not going to find you and still i wasn't gonna i didn't know what i could do i'd talk to a lawyer i mean i just didn't i didn't know what what i could do but the best in miami is what he told me so i had to go and he went to brazil we went to did you have a conversation with anybody at the cartel just i mean that's such an interesting moment that tests the man's character to not snitch and did you have a conversation with anybody no pablo was you know about it like so it's just understood i just didn't couldn't do it but how many men like you are there not many i had all my friends testified against me i had 11 friends and every one of them put their finger up roger did it and i was facing life continuing criminal enterprise care still you couldn't do it i just couldn't do it do you ever get respect from the cartels for that from the oh they were time i got back and stuff they owe me money and i can't get it so well that's about money i just mean about human beings oh i think so i've been back down there and i've been welcomed i i have my uh my contact and when i was in brazil i was trying to get this money they owe me three and a half million dollars so i called up there and he was gonna pay me oh i got six hundred thousand today and i'll get you some more tomorrow and then the next week i called hey hey got great news great news barry seal has been killed so oh no when i went back to the hotel we was up in the northern part of brazil and where was it mighty uh yeah and uh so i went back and i told mario and miriam and uh and they cried and i cried i really cried how how's that great news from the cartel well now there's no case against me and him and them do you know who killed them yes i'll tell you about that story on the first load i did i landed in a at a banana plantation and it was raining and it was a muddy strip clay and they put the 300 kilos of cocaine and then the ugliest man you could imagine named ronaldo got in there with a mac 10 and uh he would make sure i took it to louisiana so this is many years before yeah a couple years before so anyway he uh uh we took off and the mud got up in the wheel well so so thick until the wheels wouldn't come up well i'm going 200 miles an hour instead of 300 miles wide with wheels coming down well i can't go back there if i do i'm gonna be in the same situation until the sun dries it out in a few days and so but in belize i had a runway that we've been used for ten thousand dollars used to refuel so i told the guy listen we got to land in police to refuel and no no no he put them act in and i'll shoot you go ahead fool you're going to die too so yeah who's in the turf so he wasn't just ugly he was also he was a bad bad killer yeah so uh he's the one to actually kill barry the one that went up on the first load with me and uh ronaldo and he's in doing well he's just a killer yeah he's doing life in louisiana i wonder who uh is is it known who made that decision uh the younger ochoa brother i understand fabio which one paid for the hit i don't know that but that's what i've heard which probably sounds about right he's he's down in jessup georgia doing a long long time i think he's about to get out he's been in 30 years or whatever the movie american made what do you think that movie got right what did he get wrong almost everything wrong it was disgustingly wrong okay um which parts can you can you um he may be a librarian it's about barry seal and it just didn't even it was nothing and whoever wrote it had no idea who barry seale was they sat in a rocking chair and just tried to think of what was some baby bashing drug dealer doing yeah and just like god just you just don't have any idea of the spirit of the man so they wanted to try to tell a fun story without actually uh studying the story he they didn't know we made just that new idea and barry was such a nice person such a really nice gentleman person they talk to you or no no the people that made them and uh i see all these people telling me about barbarian never met him they telling all about it i think that's just ridiculous yeah and uh that for one thing for his character coming out of [ __ ] houses and all that that was just like ugly and then down in columbia putting the gun to his head going to take his sunglasses and then he put 25 000 million dollar worth of cocaine on his plane and then they're gonna bet a hundred dollars he don't have enough room to take off that's just insane i mean just just the whole thing and then he's talking to the de agents when he's coming up you don't know what a frequency they own how he's got five planes and they all split when the dea comes out these are just somebody just fantasy but those are like those are details of the man details of the story is there some big profound things they missed about just this whole period but that's something that's really important to you that was missed yes they just tried to uh sensationalize on little things that people remember and it's just not true it's just it was just like a business deal and and and good people and good airplanes and good flying and um it was like a a good watch that was made it just clicked and it just went on and they missed all that they tried to make it sound like it's something very ugly do you think it was a story that could have been told way better and it would still be a hell of a good thing well there's a there's a series called chernobyl done by hbo and because i have sort of family connected to that period you know they did an incredible job of being historically accurate and only not being historically accurate when it helped the story only in those rare cases when they on purpose left the story to uh to make it easier for people to understand but it was it was still somehow accurate and even though all the actors were british actors speaking english with the british accent it was still somehow accurate like they captured the spirit yes so it was historically accurate and the spirit was captured that was one of the most incredible like series i've ever seen it convinced me that the movie was made by non-russians it convinced me that if you really care about a story you don't have to have been brought up in it you don't even need to speak the language if you're truly a scholar of it if you talk to a lot of people if you learn if you just pour your heart and soul into it you can create something really special and so your sense is you could do that with you with uh with the story with this period of time oh yes it was it was a a story that needs to be told it need to be told in the correct way not like we're trying to bash a certain angle yeah well if if netflix or hbr are watching this you need to tell the story of rogers in my opinion there you go is this young picture you yeah there you go that's from national geographic jorge pablo escobar it's you roger and barry yeah smuggler a memoir yeah i really do hope that they make a movie of this one there's a movie called blow that tells the story of george young boston george did you know george young that's one way to ask it the other is what do you think of the movie blow i didn't know george young but it was a wonderful movie absolutely it captured it it did yes it did that's the way it should be so he was a little bit before your time exactly the same time exactly the same same he was using stewardesses to fly the marijuana out of manhattan beach and i was on the fire department in redondo beach 10 miles away flying it up sending it back somebody was sending it back he might have been sending it back but he didn't have near the excitement that i did he i was shot down twice i escaped from five different prisons i was tortured almost to death in a mexican prison so he didn't have all that fun that i had funding quotes yeah so yours is a heck of a fun adventure just to linger on a little bit so uh johnny depp plays george and ray liotta plays his father and there's this son father kind of seen at the end i don't know it's heartbreaking like that scene paints a picture of a life that could have been had if none of this wild drug smuggling happened i don't usually i mean i don't i almost i really never get like teary-eyed in a movie but that that got me it's almost like confronting at the end of your life what your life could have been with your father the way he calls him georgie it um like you [ __ ] up georgie yes i did too i really really did mario waited for me all those years and the children raised them without me visiting me in prisons all over the world it's unbelievable just nothing's worth that kind of money yeah can you tell the story of when you were tortured nearly to death in a mexican prison i sure can and i'm smiling but it was nothing to smile about i can tell you i was uh i was in a pool and a gentleman came over and shook hands with me and put handcuffs on me and i thought what in the world that was at one of the nice hotels and they put me in a in a jail cell and i sat there and all the trunks and the thieves and stuff kept coming in and they had a bucket and they're overrun and i said man like 18 people in a room about 12 12 foot square oh it was hot and i thought somebody's got to come get me this this ain't real i hadn't done anything it's like it was a pilot coming to see me and up in her mercea and he stopped and he made a mistake and went to the international runway instead of where he was supposed to go and he had my phony name in his pocket so they got me so they said i was a drug smoker so after about three days they put me back into the into the back and it was a torture place and they put me in a little cell like i guess it wasn't hard it wasn't six feet must been about about five feet square and about 12 feet high and it was june into june and it was hot i mean hot and uh they left me in there for i guess a few days you didn't know they uh so every once while they come dragged me out and first off they put my head underwater and it had seltzer in it or some kind and i took one whiff of that and three or four of them couldn't hold me down so then i learned it just before you have to breathe tear loose like that and they'll let you up and uh that was the first treatment and then then they started beating me and uh they beat me blackjack rubber hose until i was black and blue and yellow from the bottom of my feet to my head what did they want from me they wanted to sign me to sign a confession that i was a drug smuggler and they put the papers under you under your nose this is all over fuel sign well i knew if you signed you got six years i wasn't gonna sign i was one on the side so they didn't want you to snitch on anybody they don't want to say they just want me to sign that paper and you still didn't about to beat nate that bad so anyhow he's coming to the good part so then they come and they take me out and i'm bug naked and they bend me over and they have things to pull you like change click click click and they bent me over and they put butter on my bum and they commenced to put hot chili pepper up there and that stuff was bad i mean it was red hot and that was that was awful and still it was just awful yeah but still you didn't i didn't think about it i ain't going to i guess if i'd known he's going to kill me i wouldn't have done it but i'm but i wonder about you get hurt bad enough you'll pass out so i didn't pass out so i was all right so then the last thing they did was they brought a a dead man in there and he was wrapped he was frozen and he was wrapped in newspaper little strips about a half inch wide just like a mummy and he was frozen and he hung him on the wall with a meat hook and uh god you next son of a [ __ ] you next yeah and so he's sitting there like this and as he starts to throw out which is pretty quick it looks like he's crying and it looks like he's peeing and the papers start unraveling on him and the formaldehyde puddles on the floor yeah what a smell that rotten insides and the formaldehyde and there was a little uh space it wasn't even a half inch high under the door and i lay on that filthy floor of my cheek and put my lips right up under that door and was sucking that fresh air and i went to sleep after some time and i know where walt disney gets it gets his ideas i saw white pink pigs with wings on them all kind of stuff flying around so when i woke up i didn't know which was real and which was the nightmare it took me a minute to figure out where i was and what was going on how did you stay mentally strong through that time like what i don't know that i did i would yeah i was merely strong so i was just like i am now stubborn i mean you could be that man they could have killed you yeah so you would have so what gave you hope did you have hope yeah or you're just a stubborn son of a [ __ ] i think some of both of you and i think they aren't going to keep you here forever yeah you know you're going to get out into the prison or they're going to let you go or something if you sign that paper you ain't going nowhere and i want to go home i got shot down uh a few weeks before that i got shot from out the sky 80 bullet holes through the plane killed a fellow on the ground shot the shot the leg nearly off the man was in this in that little place of peachy lingy and they were shooting away from the ground yeah yeah all right a little nine hundred foot strip there at pichai lingard poor poor village with starving donkeys that's where they'd i'd give them seventeen thousand dollars for loading and i'd go over on the highway and load well on day 13 i did a load every day for 13 days they had a bunch of marijuana pretty good piled up and i was going low today and uh on day 13 i had that little warning sign going off in my stomach oh don't do it but i asked this walking oh we had the federalists paid off know where we were so i spent the night in the hammock and walked down to the airplane just as it did in daylight and 10 or 12 men walked with me and pedro got and i brushed my teeth in the little stream was about foot deep little river coming through there got in the airplane and uh i fired her up and bam i thought a tire blew out i looked over see it still ain't dawned on me and pedro's yelling please see ya please see him roger please see ya well it dawned on me and i shoved it the throttle to the firewall and uh i only had so that was a bullet yeah somebody they there's off to the side say it shot they'd shot just a warning like get out stop we're gonna rob you whatever it is that's what they do it's taken the plane to me and put me in prison the whole thing so but i even though i had papers so uh i just shoved it to fireball and there wasn't enough room to take off on that strip and there's half of it was behind me or some of it was behind me and so just at the end i'm just like i think that thing stalls at about 50 miles an hour just just turning 50 and i just pulled it right up and put the flaps on and as i pulled off the ground they opened up on both sides of me with machine guns and they riddle that airplane i mean the windshield came out i got hit three times uh do you like your body yeah and uh uh i didn't know i was hit i mean it was just the adrenaline the gasoline just pouring in the world turned yellow i must have went into shock so it just stopped in slow motion and uh one bullet hit the strut right by my head and it just parts of that bullet just went all over me i just looked like i'd been peppered which would uh lead and uh the gasoline was just pouring in and i'm just pouring it where they'd shot the wing up above and the windshield's gone i didn't i mean i i couldn't him it's just like like a hail storm so i uh i was airplanes the staller now it i was in a stall anyway and i didn't realize it and i guess you wouldn't unless you trained for it but when you install the elevator is kind of flappy and i didn't realize at the time i thought they had shot the elevator cable in too so i thought oh god so i just reached over and switched it off switched to pull the mixture pulled everything and uh in the river there was rocks about as big as this table and they were like the turtle back all the way up until there was a waterfall there was quite a pretty place and i crashed straight on to it i thought if i get those rocks and when i did the first time i hit the wings came off and then it bounced and the next time the nose came out and came under the plane and i'm sitting there i must have been knocked unconscious called pedro's shaking me come on roger come on roger so i stepped out into the water and here comes these four federalists still shooting at us and i'm bullied the two hit the airplane and i kept a nine millimeter browning high power taped to the top of the radio in case i ever needed it so because one of those times didn't want it in the airplane so i just it was just handy just laying there so i took and popped a few caps out of them and they ran into the rocks so uh we took off up off running and then i looked and pedro's foot nearly shot off had shot him on one side the ankle and it gets blown out the other side and it wasn't even hardly bleeding it the shock of it so i took my t-shirt off and gripped it and tied it best i could but yeah it's still bullets in you so like you could still i shot the top of my toenail off yeah i shot a job across my head in my kneecap so i was just nicked okay it was very painful later on but right that time i didn't it was it was just hot there's a bullet stealing my foot from it a piece of a bullet good sized slug so we went on up the mountain through the cactus and it's running just going i want to go down no no avail federalists are going in this the easy way let's go this young fellow and we came to an old donkey she must have been 30 years old long and way back long hair on her charlotte charlotte and he pitted the donkey and we jumped on and we rode for some actual donkey donkey they were donkeys all over the place anyhow he knew that was from the village and so we rode seven miles two of us on a donkey with no bridle no saddle nothing and uh we came to a little man plowing a little horse in a little ox there's both of them spotted and there's the ox was the yolk was across her back this way and he's plowing with a little plow amongst stumps it was like one of these people clearing a little piece of land and he had a little little house there and so we went into his house and his wife and his daughter they put like uh cloth over my wounds and on pedro's it was terrible was terrible and they poured diesel oil on it to keep the flies off so i'm covered in diesel so the man left and he was going all day and then about dark he showed up about 15 or 20 horses and mules showed up in the yard walking fast and the doctor got out he said i'm dr benjamin so-so with red cross and he worked on my foot and he worked on pedro he gave us a shot of morphine and tetanus shots and he said you got to get to hospital he said pedro will die if he don't get to hospital he said they're looking for american pilots been shot down they think he's dead there was a lot of blood in that airplane and so they rode i don't know how far we rode but we rode miles and we'd come to a road and there was a big truck and it was loaded with corn in the ear and they dug holes in that corn put us in it and covered us up and the road was rough and every time we'd hit a dirt road that corn would cover me up and they'd scratch my face out again and when it came to the highway we went into a house and they got me some clothes and mine was messed up and uh uh white basin and they must have brought 20 jugs of water different times i kept washing them washing my foot till all the blood and the crud got off of me and put on those clothes and somebody went to uh they said you can't go north the roads block they're looking for the pilot so you got to go south so they found a a taxi in mazatlan and it was a rather new taxi and the fellow would would take me to guadalajara which was i don't know seven eight hours south so we got in that taxi and they propped me up with sheets and blankets and pillows in the back seat and gave me these great big white pain pills and i was quite content then i was shot down and uh shot down in in columbia also what uh can you tell that story i sure can all right i was i went down for load um a little marijuana and we got to the place and we got there too early and the gorillas scream you got to get out of here got to get out of here and so we went back to the place where we staged from and refueled had a beautiful dc-3 carry 3 tons and uh so while i was waiting i uh i ate something for lunch and i went around behind the house we refueled the plane up i had to wait till late now they wanted me to come just at dark so the military planes couldn't see me on their strip so i'm laying in the hammock of sleep and i hear this terrible roar and i looked right up through the trees and the ascent of two military jets going straight up and they do a dive over and they came back down the strip in front of that airplane and they just tear it up with 50 caliber machine guns they just showing out yeah so i run for the airplane i just give that guy 80 000 and he ran for the truck and all the rest of them ran for the truck i should have ran with my money but i didn't i ran for the airplane yeah and uh the co-pilot got in the name was al he got in with me and two fellows got in the back we had drums of fuel in there to refuel when we got down to the gorillas so we took off and i couldn't get the gear up because i'd taken off in such a hurry these these pins in the struts of a dc3 and with big flags on them and you have to take them up so that the plant plane won't come up so these jets swarmed on me and they tried to get me to go they kept telling me which way to go and the pilot would be just as close as just right over there i could see him i just held up the old hippie piece i didn't think they would shoot i really didn't it nobody had shot before so i kept flying out and i kept getting slower and slower and they kept slowing down down down and the black smoke rolling and then they they started shooting up under me boom boom boom boom with them 20 millimeter counters and then and the tracer just going up they look like they're curving up from you know whoa and i pushed the nose over so they couldn't get under me and later on i heard they thought i tried to ram them so one of them went for fuel and i kept on going and the one just toward the left wing wing tip up with the 50 caliber and then they come back again and shot the tail up he's warning me and i tell that feller in there says you know if you bring me enough water i believe i can fly this thing my mouth got quite dry so i went on and i landed on a big pasture and it was huge pasture and it was rougher than it looked and the wings just flapped and i come to stop and jumped out and pull those tabs out and threw them on the ground so i could get my gear up and i understand that during the 1980 world series baseball game that it says american dc3 has just been shot down by american jets about columbian jets you know it's the first plane shot down on reagan's new war on drugs but he's up he's up and away ladies and gentlemen we'll keep you posted so i took off again and i went into a thunderstorm and they climbed close to the mountains so i spiraled up and every time i'd come out that jet was there boom boom boom and uh i'd go back into that that storm and boom boom boom in there and at 20 000 feet i started icing up so i went out one last time and he was right there waiting he had me on radar so i went back in and i kicked it over and put it into a spin and went straight down to 2000 feet and come out under it and i was flying along the guava river and there was a 20 feet above the water it looked like a pasture it was just grass and i made several runs to tear the grass down and it looked like it felt hard no dc3 weighs 30 000 pounds and i put it down on the fifth run and i said all right yeah we're going to land now and that's why he flew like close oh several times i put the wheels down oh you put the wheels down without landing miles and just so i'm making it weird so so you okay so you're you're you're being tracked by a jet he's trying to sh well before that i'm just like retelling the story how insane it is uh so he is he's trying to shoot you down and there's a thunderstorm that you're escaping into and then you do a spin down to what 2000 feet whatever you said like somehow escaping all of this and then you try to land on a pasture on a giant heavy plane that carries three tons uh by uh touching down five or six times to make a to make a landing strip for yourself yeah the the grass is three or four feet okay so i it was really good after about after a few times so then just before it stopped i said i'll take your feet off the brakes he said i don't have my feet on the brakes well i knew i had broken through the crust and i put full power on but it didn't that old big plane just come on down and it just did a head as it came to stop it did a headstand 90 degrees to the ground oh wow and the engines helped held it up and the nose and all just crushed in right on it we fell between the two seats to keep from getting killed and when it come to a stop all that fuel was pouring out on those hot engines and there was an escape hatch at the top i just stepped out took my suitcase with me did it uh was there fire no fire the plane left the plane there and the two guys it was in the back one and broke his thumb and it was with the barrels and they had to put a hoses tie gas hoses together to shimmy down to get out yeah so that's an incredible story well let me just tell you they had a little bit more to it i learned to fly with the idea of being a missionary aviation fellowship pilot fly the missionaries in and out of the jungle yes well i went 11 days through that jungle the rest of them went on down the road and got went to prison i said i i'll crawl on my belly six months in here a year eating snakes before i'm going down the road so i went in there and uh i was 11 days in the jungle and i finally came to his place and it had airplanes i kept asking the indian don just die evie owns i want to steal an airplane get out of there and when i came to the place i asked what is this place lovely place it looked like honolulu in world war ii was a runway there said you don't know this is loma linda headquarters for missionary aviation fellowship for the amazon and they flew me out wow you escaped from prison five times so what uh what stands out to you is the most difficult or miraculous escape in the bunch the most black miraculous was when i was in the courtroom in spain i think i was i was on the third floor of real high and i ran across a courtroom handcuffed kicked the window out and i looked down and it was above the palm trees i thought there might be a power line or something i could grab on as i went down there was nothing and there was a car parked a station wagon on the uh jumped out i jumped out from 31 feet and on top of that car and it exploded in the street the windshield went over three or four cars it looked like snow going up and i looked like donald duck with the thing in handcuffs and i got out and just kept running yeah i kept trying they ran me down and hit me in the back i still got a dead spot in my back where the policeman hit me with a shotgun and they brought me back mari was there they were saying your husband is crazy that was spectacular but i escaped from lubeck maximum security prison and i cut out of there and got out that was a miraculous nose in lubeck germany what was what was that escape like i was airing out whether it was going to uh extradite me back to the united states where i still had all these charges in 25 years special parole and uh i was cleaning the uh lawyer's visiting room and on it was uh bars that looked like a piano notes or this way to make it pretty but there was a little bit so i got a rope from a guy where they made boats in there and i uh i had 20 minutes so i went in there and i wrapped it around and i put a broom handle in it that was cut off and wrapped it around until it pulled the bars together on that side and then i pulled them together on the other side but that only put me in inside the prison yard where the uh soccer equipment was kept but they were putting new windows on one side of the prison and they had it scaffold up to the fourth floor so there was a little recess there and there was guard towers every 100 feet or so i mean they would shoot and kill you so i got behind that uh and climbed up holding to the bricks on one hand and the scaffolding on the other and went to the roof i lost my shirt and most of my clothes going through the window i got all the skin off of me i thought i was gonna die and i was trying to go sideways like this and finally i got a grip and the bars let me through and took all the skin off of me so i got up on that roof and i have asthma and i just lay there trying to catch my breath didn't bring my inhaler so with blood everywhere oh i was bloody yes and so i got down to the end and on the end the reason i did it they would put it they was putting a new wall again again around the prison to make it larger and they had taken all the wire off above the sally port where they could join the two walls together and i saw that when i came up and there was a guard a half of a like a dome sticking out of that brick building where there's a guard there with a gun and he'd kill you i mean he was made they were surely trained to kill you and we had some bad people in that place so i lay up a one one flew above it and i saw a guard and his wife come with a double umbrella it was just pouring down rain here i am without a shirt on bloody and he had a little boy she had a little boy with him under that double umbrella and i knew him and when he come and she started back from the sally port i hit the top of that guard tower bam with both feet and i jumped i guess it's three more floors i jumped there was a pile of sand like a cone where they were digging it there and i hit that and my feet buried up to the knees but i didn't fall and i ran straight towards her so he couldn't shoot me and then i went around some bushes and went downhill and then i heard bam bam bam blam behind me and i looked and that food woman was in a big old car and she was knocking down the parking meters behind me she was trying to run over me and i ran behind the car oh wow and she tore the fender off of her car trying and yelling yeah yeah yapping a terrible evil looking face at me screaming at me and the sirens going off into prison and there was a fence there a wall and i jumped up on it to jump over and it was had glass in bed and i cut my hands and my arms all up getting over that and i hit the ground on the other side and it was like it was that much milk where some farmer had dug it i dug in there and murray had slipped me 200 into prison and i had that in my shoe and i lost my shoes and that mush anyway i got out of there and got to holland really heck of a story hug did that what was uh what was prison like whether it's germany or whether it's australia what were the some of the darker moments in prison the united states prisons are awful awful evil places now and just really there's nothing nice about them there's the guards in l.a which they never went out everyone i went to it seemed like the further east i went to oklahoma and it was nicer but all of them on the west coast there was hatred there and they got really stupid people hired just incredibly hatred by the guards and and the inmates like i speak spanish and i walked in to the spanish tv room and it was saying no you can't come in here and i walk across to the black hey get out of here white boy it was just like what man i like all you people you know and so i walked down to the white people and said show us your paperwork you can't come in here until you show your paperwork we don't let snitches and homosexuals and all this sort of stuff in here so they have so it's just like man i don't want to be in here i mean it sounds absurd but you're saying like the basic humanity is gone completely completely into guards it was just like come here reeves and i walk up to him and get the [ __ ] out of my face he sticks his chin out like for me to break his jaw yeah like what in the world man i love people and it's just yeah you you got this joy to you yeah you have a joyful nature how and it didn't seem like that broke you not a bit how did you persevere did you know i didn't even think i persevered but i i tried to enjoy my life wherever i am every day i do i uh i ran every day and like i told you why do you run so roger i said to help me suffer these fools and uh i played a game of chess every day almost of my life in there and i read two books a week and i talked with people storytellers guys would come in and tell us another story roger give us a point tell us one they never told us before and so it was just nice a lot of them have original boys they they picked their country music and it was all right red morgan freeman's character in the shawshank redemption says the following these walls are funny first you hate them then you get used to them enough time passes you get so you depend on them that's institutionalized is there truth to that 100 i couldn't even see the walls except whenever i was planning on escaping in shawshank redemption he spent so many years in prison that he almost didn't know what to do with himself with himself once he left once once he was a free man that's the you get so used to the the system the the rituals having to follow orders even being treated poorly all those kinds of things that you become dependent on well uh down in australia i spent the first a little over a year in in the shoe it was like um did you see the movie the um silence of the lambs thank you and he's there i had five five or six guards looking at me with one-way mirror yeah and that's whenever i thought i might never get out i got a life sentence i had all this time waiting here in germany and so that's they had a uh they had a computer in there but it didn't have a program on it and i wrote so i just started writing these little stories of stuff that i did in my life and i wrote one line and i wrote a million words with them looking at me so it's after a year they let me out it wasn't long before they put me in a place called self-care and particularly i was in what they call the lifers pod there was 268 men in self-care there and uh it was it was unbelievably good that we were left alone basically they was there the guards were certainly there but they had their their shack and we had apartments for four apartments to the building and uh six men to the unit with your own door and a key to it in a kitchen dining room freezer refrigerator and they gave you allowed just 360 a week to buy groceries and i cooked for about 16 years and uh you learn to cook good and the people and other people make have their specialties and uh so that was that was quite uh it wasn't so like being in prison it was somewhat living with me and it was difficult man i had some good good fights and carry on but you don't get along with everybody but uh then whenever i came back to the united states i was laughing and talking and when i got off the plane in uh l.a i had three three marshals with me from australia i was slammed upside the wall i mean hard put ankle max on him and handcuffed so tight till he cut my vein off face forward face forward lands apart good gracious and walked me up 50 steps and he turned me over to the marshals and they took part of that off that was a border patrol that was there over my marijuana charge from 1977 yeah from america for i did 11 years for parole violation now they want me for more violation and they put me in down in los angeles they put me in the marshes put me in in there and they put me in isolation i thought what in the world he got me for isolation for i've done anything how long did you spend in isolation more than six months so i uh after three or four days as the little judas window slide open and a man a nice looking man in the suit coming hello reeves i want us just want to see what you look like i saw you a national geographic documentary and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation and he slammed the thing and i couldn't get out of there and by law the u.s parole commission is supposed to give you a a hearing within 90 days so murray paid a lawyer 7 500 and he never picked up the phone somebody got to him who's that somebody you think christopher cannon was his name and i don't know who got to him but some he didn't he didn't do anything to get me out of there yeah i got one 15-minute phone call a month and i couldn't get out so then after six months they shipped me to um put me on conair double shackled and black box on my hands and i went to went to oklahoma and they let me out on the the uh on the floor i couldn't imagine then i could call after a couple of days and they said there was a man here from washington give you a parole here and you only got here at 3 30. so he left he said he'd be back next year what i've been in now over six months so then there was a lovely little lady she was a case manager or something she said you can ask for parole on the record and i said please he said i sent him an email and the next day i got my parole 90 days later they sent me to terminal island put me in the place there with the infillet i guess since i'm as old as i am 78 years old so they put me in the people and they're dying in wheelchairs and legs off and arms off and cancer so i was in there and i pushed the fellas around and uh i went come out the chow hole there and i went to go to the right to get me a haircut and two mexican guys there lieutenant another one walked between us and he went like i could outrun you and they slammed me put me on the ground handcuffed me and put me in the shoe for a week i got out man they put me in the back in the place they treated me rough so i got in a little more trouble and they put me back in the in the shoe and i wouldn't come out they had that uh the virus was out killing people so they killed eight people in that unit i was in oh wow so i mean i wouldn't even come out to take a shower i had i had a little straw that i put in the in the sink and i'd i'd take a sock that i had and scrub myself with it with some smoke and glass water over my head and then cleaned the floor up and put it in the toilet so that was your time during the coronavirus pandemic i got out last april right in the middle every night and they were dying bad in there so i was treated worse for that last year in america than i was for the whole 20 years in australia 18 years in australia and then you were a free man at the end of that year they put me out and sent me home and and the parole officers couldn't even come they weren't working they were just doing everything by video better not have a drink the only condition the thing was i couldn't even have a drink of wine so uh after a year they uh i had i had to take psychiatric treatment every week i had to go talk to the psychiatrist psychologist and me and her got along great she was a good christian woman we just chatted and talked and i think they said so i had to pee in the bottle every week i said i've been in 33 years how many pissed you think i've had never been dirty the only thing if you don't want to clean when you come get me before i talk to you about love let me ask you a difficult question you write in your book i don't consider myself much of a criminal i don't lie cheat or steal and i always take up for the underdog violence makes me sick yet i know i'm an outlaw and those that break the law must be punished i think many people listening to this or some people listening to this will see you as a criminal as a bad man who increased the amount of suffering in this world what do you have to say to them i would like to tell them that they have been indoctrinated by the spin of news and politicians and they don't know the truth of the situation he lay the truth out there in an envelope let me open it besides something else that is false and it's staggering the truth is that i was a tobacco farmer and tobacco kills 500 000 people a year in america and 6 million have a debilitating diseases because of it drugs all drugs combined kill between 10 and 15 000 people a year by overdose and 60 of those are pharmaceutical now then when i was a tobacco farmer come sit on the front pew mr reeves come on up here you're a gentleman you just joined the masonic lodge and you joined our church and you just come on and sit down with the good people you grow two marijuana penalties get out of here you scumbag and marijuana doesn't hurt anybody it's just that's the truth of it and so in your career you were you walked amidst violence but you never participated in the violence i didn't even see it just didn't happen around me in prison it did i sewed people up they called me doc i had dental floss and uh one one time i had to get a blade and try to help keep them from my patient from getting again but i don't was just like if i shot at those people i shot them to keep them from killing me i did i certainly didn't mean to kill them so that's that's just some people are evil and they will kill you and hurt you and lie to you i just don't do any of that it's just it makes you sick i've seen it i was when i was in the shoe three guys tried to kill a guy and they stabbed him so many times but their stab went blinking the blood getting out of the room and actually gonna kill him you're gonna kill him and save his life drug him up there where the guards could see him there's stuff like that i'm just not of that nature of those people they're just evil there's people born evil i believe yeah it is heartbreaking to hear that the basic humanities gone in prison in the united states that's heartbreaking because that basic humanity is actually the light at the end of the tunnel it's the thing that saves us as opposed to uh when it's absent it's the thing that destroys us the prisoners are filled absolutely filled with people that have some mental problems now you see tent city all the way up and down here i guarantee you every one of those people have mental problems some degree however little it is but they're a little bit off now then you get a dea agent that wants to make a name for himself he goes down there and gets two of them one of them to sell a little two grams of methamphetamine to the other one and he gets a conviction and a young prosecutor he gets a conviction he wants to make a judge and we got to judge and where was it i'm going to give him a million what's his name gilbert i'm going to make i'm going to give him in a million years before i get off the judge you get fools like that in charge you're going to fill prisons up with pitiful humanity and those are the ones and then the other is people over drugs and drugs should be a uh a health issue you can't you cannot police it enough it's just they know like the only thing that overdoses is opioids the heroin and if they can give it to them it costs about a dollar a day to give the worst attic is his fix but they'll give it methadone which is from a pharmaceutical company which is just as bad why in the world we tried it all over the world in uh portugal and england and when they give the the girls cleanup no more stolen cars why who who wants to keep this forest going they just perpetuating it like oh every little police place is getting all these suits and armor and machine guns it's just like oh it's it's such a spin it's sad do you think all drugs should be legalized i don't know about that but they certainly should be controlled if a person is an addict he should be able to go down and get his fix with somebody there to help him with a clean needle and a glass of orange juice it's so much cheaper than prison so much cheaper than him stealing cars or prostitute having to go to work that's sad you've lived one heck of a life looking back there's a there's a lot of young people that listen to this high school college students what advice would you give them how to live how to have a successful career how to have a good life how to be a good man a woman to be a good man or woman if i had to do over with i'll just tell you what i'd have done i would have paid attention and studied my lesson and did the best i could um in school in school yes and went as far as i could have i would have liked to been a doctor i just didn't have the stick ability or anybody to tell me hey go there and do that and if you can do that at a very young age start in a trade learn to do something doesn't matter what it is if you learn to do something good there is a great demand for you and i would say that in prison the prison system should come in and you get a thief a young fan is a thief a robber and you say all right we need um we need carpenters we need plumbers we need electricians we need sheep sentence them to that trade and when you get an a plus in that where you can go out and make you thirty dollars and fifty dollars an hour you go home now you can you mess around ten years if you want to or you can do this in two i think that would uh that's just for the prism but anyway i would say that they find somebody and be true to them that we have um just be honest and true in your life you mean like relationships relationships yes i mean so many so many people particularly our children are from relationships where they not wanted their divorce their fathers left they don't know who their daddy is they dis in foster homes 500 000 children in foster homes in america today and and we have in our government inadvertently as in encouraging those people my daughter is a doctor and she delivered a couple years ago a baby from a 10 year old child that child and she said in the individual room is four generations all of them on welfare now we got one more and it reminds me of elvis presley's song in the ghetto so for an individual learn a trade become a craftsman of sorts yes and uh find somebody to love and who loves you that's right have have a family in in and uh and stick with it they just be surely you're gonna get angry you're gonna get disappointed you're gonna get all kinds of stuff but but come back and make up before before you go to sleep well i i did half of those things i got the first one and working on the second one so i appreciate the advice [Laughter] well mari thank you so much for joining us can you tell me the story of how you two met well um my parents every summer would go to the lake in in canada and the place was called turkey point which is on lake erie and just have a nice summer holiday there water skiing swimming you know sunbathing this was back in the 60s and i was sitting on the pier with a few girlfriends and telling them my story you know and then all of a sudden i looked up and i saw this figure in the distance coming onto the pier now we're all dressed in bathing suits and swimwear we're swimming and this that and the other and here he comes dark trousers in fact they were black white shirt and a tie and a straw kind of a panama hat and you know so he was very he stood out yeah and uh so i invited him to come and sit down and so he continued to talk and we just talked and talked and talked and then later moved to the beach and um i think the next time i saw him he was talking to another girl and i thought yeah you know yeah man i know i was okay okay next yeah well about six months later i receive a letter and it's a letter from roger and then we start this lovely correspondence and we just start writing you know in those days you just wrote everything and uh and then the next summer he was coming up again he was on his way to alaska and um he says i would like to come by and see you and i said well i'll be in the same place that i met you last year and so when we when he came up this time for some reason roger reached for my hand and i reached for his and man that was it it was like love and for first touch that was love it was just like a silence you know and oh my gosh and we didn't even look at each other it was just oh my goodness what happened here and i was the type of person i never wanted to get married not way way way down the road never have any children and i wanted to see the world first and then do all that you know and um but that was it that was love and you've been together ever since yeah well the thing is about the love the the two you have for each other is they had to persevere through quite a heck of a journey so how did uh rogers drug smuggling change the nature of your love and your relationship well lex that remained steadfast it uh it endured and since roger's been home i think we've rekindled the love that we had when we first met yeah what but but i think my faith um you know my faith my steadf fast faith and also the fact that roger and i communicated we wrote letters you know he he never complained i know there were the children there he never had mistreated me i love this guy and we had a lot of experiences it was just even though good looking charismatic he's pretty you know yeah and he's he was adventurous you know and would you say that again but um yes it was just i know i you know i missed him physically but he was just we were just so strong in spirit you know and um we could talk to one another yep well what was it like uh roger when you're a free man seeing mari for the first time in person again i uh i cried for three days everything i'd look at a picture of her i came home and uh there's she prepared a meal for me and uh there was the old oak table that i'd redone and the chairs the same one and the green placemats in the same china that we had and the same silverware and it just just all of it just brought back the same paintings on the wall it was like unbelievable after 35 years she had all my clothes cleaned and my shoes shining and i put the shoes on and i walked out on the strings on this and the soles came off but the shirts and all fit perfect and everything so it's just wonderful and just just to see her and then just to think about see her picture of her 50th birthday or her 60th birthday or her 70th birthday i wasn't there in the picture of her and with the children it just it was heartbreaking and about the third day i thought man up fella i mean you've got to so uh i got over and quick quit with the uh quit the tears but it was it was it was everything was just pulsating with life it was just unbelievable to get out of that place it really was is there uh do you regret the the the drug smuggling that took you away from the woman you love oh yes 100 just you know i wouldn't have done it again if you don't think you're going to get caught and uh it's just no was just i did it for money and i had everything in the world i wanted before i did that so the adventure i mean it was one heck of an adventure for the two of you for the both of you yes were you able to enjoy it or was it always danger was what is was it always something that threatened your relationship your love your family are we able to enjoy the adventure of it you know we all die life is short and to live that kind of adventure well whenever i did the first loot i'm about ten thousand dollars and that was just about that was just about two years pay on the fire department take home and i broke that home and i put my hand over my mouth i said shook let's go have dinner and so we went to the restaurant that we would norm we would go to you know and he said don't you dare look on the right hand side of the of the menu he said just order anything you want and it was just as we were in the restaurant you know it was just we were giddy about it yeah i was giddy about it and um were you afraid that i mean did you think about the fact that it's illegal and uh roger gonna end up in in prison oh yes did you guys talk about it well i just i kind of thought i was bulletproof i mean they didn't catch you i thought if they didn't catch you you was all right it was hard to get y'all hard to catch you in in the air yeah so you never thought to catch you in there i didn't know that if your friend told on you five years later you'd still go to right that was a problem i didn't know that did you did you guys ever talk about walking away i asked roger to walk to walk away and he says i can't marry just now you know and then of course the the uh amount of people that he began to support the family and the gifts and the use the deals yes the deals big ones yes and then you always want to do what do you do with the money you know so you want to i guess you clean it up or you want to invest in a in an enterprise or in a business well it just doesn't work they know the source of it and they take it and run every one of them yep yeah but he was very generous extremely generous and benevolent and and when i started i uh i would ask about it i went to a lawyer and a good good people a number of people in in california that time wanted to legalize marijuana back 1973 and i went to a lawyer and i said mr lawyer i put a hundred dollars on today what would they do if they caught me bringing marijuana across the board he said uh if you have a criminal record i said no i've never had a speeding ticket not nothing nothing not even a traffic ticket i said he said he worked for the fire department i didn't know saying i said yes sir he said you'll get probation the worst you'll do is you'll get one year and you spend four four months raking leaves on a military base so my mother my father died some years before and my brother mother and baby sister came out and i took him down to disneyland and she said what you doing boy i said i'm hauling pot mom she said how much you making us making forty thousand dollars any day i want to go and she said what they do if they catch and i told her what the lawyer said four months at the most with rick and leaves that's what do you think she said do you need a co-pilot son yeah money is money yeah is um so your relationship persevered through some some big challenges is there advice you can give about what makes for a successful relationship oh well you know i think the initial igniting meeting someone you know that that's the love that's it and that that that little fire just that fire just keeps burning and burning and burning you can't put it out no matter what it's the the love fire but it gets difficult as far as it's funny the love fire so you're saying the love fire is all it takes to to persevere through the difficulty well no i well that's a huge part of it and also i contribute my my individual situation to um in order to endure what the prison years is my faith faith in god yes and friends who were unconditionally still loved me no matter what yes so she had love around you i did and my children they you know and that was a real purpose to guide them and to love them and to help them become citizens what about you roger what advice would you give i just don't know how to do it but i i do know that you have to work on a relationship laura and i have had problems i mean we could really you guys get in fights oh yeah oh yes but not they don't let them laugh long yeah you know but certainly we are so we're we're the same and yet we're so different yeah yeah like little stuff little stuff yeah and uh it might be big but i usually winter over you know but it's but anyhow i just feel like mario was always there it was like she was in my anchor yeah i was coming home i was always coming home to her and the children and you can see throughout my life i'm working on getting there are you afraid for his life by the way oh yes oh yeah there are times yeah but you know i had some i had faith in him he was an excellent pilot for example i always said roger if the ship's going down i'm jumping in the lifeboat with you because i know we're going to get to shore you will save us and so i had that i have that faith in him you know i mean he's he's a man but yet he's the one you want to get into the lifeboat with definitely but then there is uh you know pablo escobar one of the most dangerous humans in history plus the us government uh very difficult uh very difficult to get away in terms of your faith how has your faith helped you to be the woman you are in this relationship in in in seeing love the way you see it well i think my faith gives me hope i have lots of hope it helps me to um dwell on the good side you know when i ever i meet someone and there's some negative i try to see why they are like that or what's the source of all that and i try to pull out the good i really do not that i'm a goody goody but that's what your faith does you know you see them as god sees us you know how has he changed over the years roger yeah he's still the same actually i like him better now he's a little calmer yeah he knows crazy oh yes and happy to be you know at home or he'll say murray i am just so happy to be with you here in this condominium i'm content because i used to call him my homing pigeon you know i just have to let him fly i couldn't you know he has to fly but he always came home [Laughter] do you think about the end of this ride our mortality do you think about your death i do oh particularly i'm going to have um a heart valve replacement in about seven days where i could could not make it you know it's a very serious operation and i think about that very much and um i asked for peace i just lost my brother about 10 days ago so unexpectedly and that really put you know makes you think of your mortality are you afraid um somewhat and some and and yet not yeah the party i want to live lex i want to live you know this life is fun yes do you think about your death roger i have visions i have visions and they often happen very very clear like what i have seen in the future scientists might call it wormholes or and the old testament they call it prophets but i i see sometimes in the future around the corner it's clear as we're sitting right here what's that look like i was on a porch and i believe i was in like central america place i was an old man with khaki pants and a white shirt and this it was a chair with a wide uh arms and it was straight and there's like the the beams coming out above my head and i'm on the porch spoken video and and i uh i come i i have out of the body experiences also and i came out of my body just i just floated out of my body and went into a veil and like into a mist and i believe that's probably why it happened you talk about you talk about like it's in your past this is you know this isn't my future but this is something he has seen you know in the passion yeah no i know but it's funny just yeah the tents you use it happened and yet it's something that will happen yeah both are true it's just unbelievable that and i i i don't know how many people have it but i have it i've walked out of my body just like just where i could come up to you and look and set up on the radio i used to be at work on the railroad and i had them there how do you explain that what the heck is going on in this universe that's that's possible oh i don't know but uh certainly it's certainly a phenomenal which it happened and uh there's a guy bill monroe that wrote the book on it out of the body he tells about it and who is the guy that writes uh the alchemist those things he has them also just like that and and he tells about how it happens on him might happen differently and but you certainly can come out of your body what do you think the meaning of this life is maybe from from from your faith but also from just the amazing adventure that you lived through how do you make sense of why the heck we're here i don't know i just it's just kind of like who you are even when i was a child i was like i'm different from other people you know and just as a boy i was like i uh i don't know could you put into words how you were different or was just the few yeah like my brother i mean he kept his hands clean and his shoes shining here i was barefooted catching a wild hog or a wrestling a a horse trying to get it down you know i saw pictures of you climbing a tree recently when i first got out of prison always something like that yeah i just so i don't know it's just that uh and i noticed that something about me is sometimes in prison there'd be a knife fight and people just you see them rough guys that turn white from it it i just kind of almost like smile i mean unless if they come at me i'll turn white and get away but it doesn't those things like sudden bother me i just prison didn't bother me so you don't know what the heck the meaning is you just know you're a bit different than the others and then maybe well um maybe the the whole point is you want to realize you want to let that madness flourish that uniqueness flourish that's the whole point of life we're all different in our in like very interesting little ways yes and the more different you are you want to let that you want to let that become you want to let it be it's full it's like a garden you know all the different flowers yeah you did mention um you weren't sure if there's a free will or not um do you think it's all predetermined or do you think would make no choice to make our decisions i just said if it is i hope that but i know that we make our decisions and i agree and i i know that we are spirits that are living in this in this flesh that's beyond a shadow of a doubt with me if you walk out of your body and have out of body experience you will know it so the body is just the temperature the spirit lives on eternally with no beginning and no end it just and that's hard to fathom yeah this is just a little [ __ ] this is a shell to contain that spirit you know this is the way we work on earth you know but yeah i know i'm an eternal being so are you do you think there's a why to it you know do you think there's a meaning to this life well i think the why is beyond my capability of understanding it's someone greater than me i don't understand it but it's awesome i just know that it's awesome and one day we will know the answers once we get to that cross over the other to the other side i think we will understand clearly it says you know now we see through a glass darkly but then when we are face to face with god we will understand and until we know let's just enjoy this beautiful life yes well we got it and we're meant that was my guilt i love everybody and everything i do and it's just and i'm sorry if i put a stumbling block in anybody's way i wouldn't want to but these are these things and i just think about oh what a hypocritical world we live in though like almost anybody out there listen okay he's a drug dealer and i would say most of them are committed to adultery that's a cardinal sin and yet they move through throw rocks at me for moving uh uh marijuana cocaine across the road yeah it's just if you saw the two different things you'd say what a terrible difference it is but we become conditioned with this mad society that we have you mentioned that your daughter miriam wrote you a poem you mind reading it i'd be glad to i was uh doing 11 years up in lombok penitentiary maximum security prison for parole violation for possession of marijuana in 1977. they should have given me six months but they gave me 11 years because they wanted me for what they call silent beef anyhow while i was in that dungeon i received a letter from my daughter miriam it's called daddy's poem a year ago i became a poet when i wrote your birthday prose and here i am today ready to give it another go first i would like to wish you a very happy birthday to be and to thank you so very much for without you i would not be me secondly i want to say that your support has been immense it has been true honest loving and free of all pretense thirdly it goes without saying your love has surpassed all my wrongs and you always made me smile with one of your country songs i can remember on cuervo daddy with you holding me in your arms as you sang jim reeve songs and talked about the farm i can see you walking through the door from one of your travels far and wide and the thought of you coming home daddy kept a twinkle in our eyes i can smell you as i did when i used to climb into your bed and you would talk to me again about one of the adventures that you led i can see me and mario asleep in one of your airplanes extraordinaire and remembering wondering to myself why there wasn't an available chair i remember having to meet you and worrying that you wouldn't be there but you would pop up from behind some counter and give us all a happy scare you gave us presents in kievis king and hotels pleasure galore and three dozen roses so we came through the airport door i can see your face in amsterdam with the luggage carousel and you look like a boy with a secret that you were just dying to tell you taught me mathematics in the sands of far away places and taught me to sail and we left without any traces we climbed glaciers in argentina and saw the blue of the beautiful caves and witnessed the majestic beauty of such a jaggling maze i learned how to change gears on the dirt roads of brazil we ate hot dogs in paraguay a memory we smile over still we talked about lions elephants and bears on a hacienda and uruguay but decided it was better if the europe we did fly over the old world and all its luxury what a good time it was from south america to the krasmapalski i think we fell in love the european jaunt well it is considered a book in itself but it's a story about beauty and knowledge suspense and worldly wealth we went from holland to sweden a woman from france to spain and i promise you i have no regrets i would definitely do it all again i would see the world with you anytime sir there's no doubt in my mind because being by your side daddy always ensures a wild good time so our past took a turn and we're back in the us of a but life here isn't so bad and i'm content to stay i'm happy to be near you although i'm not as close as i was before but because of your love and encouragement i've been able to open your doors i'm grateful to be in school and i'm generally happy where i am and i even like when you call and tell me to study for the next exam what a life you've given me daddy it's a tremendous and a magical gift we already have so many stories to tell there are far too many to list but i want to thank you again this day with a very big happy birthday to you and to tell you just a few more things that i knew in my heart to be true i love you daddy with all of your wrongs and your rights that you're ahead of our family and you've kept us all bound tight that you have a honest love in your heart for god and all mankind and you truly do believe in yourself when you say it will all be fine i know you will be there to catch me if ever i waver a slip and i know i'd want you as captain on any sinking ship i also know a new chapter is written it's almost time to move on it's time to sail another sea and to witness a brand new dawn it'll be good to see you at the helm again as you point out our destination to laugh and dance on the upper deck is while the boat glides through it'll be good to see you on the go because i know you like to be and to know you can open any door without any key but while we revel in our days together we will know better than to hurry because as you told me many times life is an incredible journey wow that's beautiful yeah roger i'm really honored that you would take the time to visit uh me in texas and to uh sit down and talk with me thank you so much roger thank you so much thank you it was a pleasure thanks it's been a real pleasure yes beautiful thanks for listening to this conversation with roger reeves and thank you to noom all form expressvpn four sigmatic and aidsleep check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from pablo escobar all empires are created of blood and fire thank you for listening i hope to see you next time you

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 571,747

Rating: 4.8953133 out of 5

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai, roger reaves

Id: Udh22kuLebg

Length: 129min 48sec (7788 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/iledeli]

I come for the science but today I was surprised with this historic, political, social, culture and entertaining gem of a show. Thank you Roger for telling your story.

[u/modaf2u]

Genuinely one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to. Lex is killing it lately

[u/ContentUnicorn]

So much fun. What a life!

[u/bonejohnson8]

Lex switching it up with this one! Can't wait to hear his advice for young people.

[u/ProtectorIQ]

I haven't listened yet, so I'm not sure if this unsolved mystery is covered, but it's an interesting connection to the drug smuggling in Arkansas during Governor Clinton's time in office.

[u/nonoose]

This is exciting. Can’t wait!

[u/Bastian14]

Great podcast episode Lex, one of those you don’t pause at all. I think listening more intently and following up on what is being said instead of segway-ing to a completely different question.

[u/GMOcorn]

Amazing. I was running while listening and if the wind got too loud, if a car honked, etc - I had to stop and rewind and catch every single word.

Lex is the more refined, thoughtful Rogan. His personality is always present but he puts the guest on a pedestal. The decision to let Roger read the poem at the end was awesome, I can't see a lot of other hosts going that long without having to add two cents. It inspired me to write something for my sons, they need to know I appreciate them just as much. It will embarrass the f out of them because I am nothing resembling a poet, but that's fine. Maybe they can read it on a podcast 20 years from now. Good work buddy, keep it up

[u/Jaondtet]

As a non-native english speaker, I can usually follow conversations without problems, but I'm really struggling to follow this guy. He speaks in a very pronounced dialect and uses lots of phrases that Lex also seems to struggle with following sometimes.