The Highest Paid Drug Pilot in History | Roger Reaves

hello world today my guest is roger reeves roger is a former pilot and international drug smuggler who ended up in prison for 33 years in 26 different prisons in seven different countries spanning four continents his friends and associates spanned the globe from the medellin cartel kingpins george ochoa and pablo escobar to mr nice howard marks and the infamous barry seal who was roger's close friend and employee in his early 30s roger was making over a million dollars a day flying back and forth from columbia and he eventually hired barry seal and on the podcast roger gives vivid details to their relationship up to the very end of barry's life roger escaped from prison on five separate occasions was shot down in both mexico and colombia and tortured almost to death in a mexican prison it is with great honor i introduce to you the gripping tale of roger reeves all right good morning roger and good morning to you danny thank you for being here i really appreciate you traveling all the way from the west coast it's my pleasure so to open this up you served 33 years in prison 26 different country 26 different countries you know 26 different prisons okay seven countries on four continents 33 years 26 prisons seven countries on four continents that's right wow how did all of this happen how did you end up here why don't you give people who who uh who aren't familiar with who you are give people sort of a brief summary of your story and who you are all right i was uh i was born down to saint augustine florida in 1943 during the war uh my folks went down there in the water work and uh i was born there uh and then after the war we moved back to georgia on a three mule farm tobacco and cotton hard work and i stayed on that farm for 25 years my daddy died when i was young he was an alcoholic and uh seven little brothers and sisters just left doorsteps and i went to work at 14 years old in the grocery store paying the lunch money it started off three dollars a day and the lunch money was three dollars a day and i got a raise the next year it was four dollars a day so i never did have a quarter left over so i think it kind of made me appreciate some money so uh i got out of school and uh finished school and went up to canada i'd work in tobacco since we had a tobacco farm around ontario canada they had a lot of tobacco and the belgiums are growing it and i went up there and i i was working tobacco for 20 a day and i went to a carnival and i wrestled a bear in the carnival for a 500 reward that i didn't get and the bear beat me up so i went to the beach the next day and uh there's a pretty girl on the towel and i talked to her and that's mari i've been 60 years ago and that's your wife and my wife yes how old were you when you met her 18. 18 years old wow that's incredible we got married a couple years later and uh so we have three children and uh i got a job on the railroad and i started making whiskey and i borrowed money and uh finally she and i wound up with 36 000 chickens laying eggs and the price of the feed kept going up eggs kept going down until i had to do something so i started making moonshine whiskey and i made a thousand gallons a week and i had four big vats eighteen hundred gallons each and uh those things blew up i thought the revenuers had us anyhow i had quite a quite a run with them shooting at me in the bloodhounds and getting away from that and uh we decided we might ought to leave we were kind of ashamed to go to church and people pointed their fingers at us and the grit but the grand jury didn't indict me they voted 12 12. so we moved out to california where i went to work in construction and i was uh painting and working in concrete and framing and any other thing that had hard work to it then i got on the fire department in redondo beach and i drove the back of a 108 foot hook and ladder truck for several years and uh then we went up to alaska we went fishing had a salmon trawler up there and then we came back and went back to work on the fire department i just took a year's leave of absence and uh i was hauling antiques that was a i met a fella and i was buying antiques around los angeles like one of the first pickers i had my truck i'd go and get them and take them to antique row and sell them every day i'd make me a hundred dollars 200 and so this fellow says why don't you go to missouri there's more antiques there than you can see i said why is that he said well back in the settlers in the 1800s they would come on the train to the mississippi river and they'd take the ferry boat across and take all their pianos and their big sideboards and the tables and they couldn't get them in those studebaker wagons i didn't realize that the covered wagons was mostly studebakers scoot this thing up a little bit closer to your minute all right so we loaded up holding started hauling the antiques out of missouri back to california and putting them in auction and i was reading a national geographic book and it was talking about mercury in uh mexico was worth it was worth 13 times more in the united states and i said i should go get me a load of that stuff mercury mercury just an article in national geographic just something to talk about as we bumped along 45 miles an hour with a load of antiques and so he says oh that stuff is so heavy it knocked a hole in the bottom of your airplane i had a little cessna 182 by that time oh you already had an airplane i had an airplane yes at what point did you just at what point did you decide you wanted to learn how to fly and be a pilot oh when i was young i read the book jungle pilot and he's a man nate saint started missionary aviation fellowship and i read that book and my heart burned oh i would just love to do that and he started missionary aviation fellowship and so it spread all over the world these men flying missionaries in and out sick people in another jungle they fly medicine and he would he would just drop it with a cord in a bucket to him until they could cut out a little strip for him and i thought boy that would like to do that i'm not made to be a preacher but i could do something good like that yeah so that was my idea to learn to fly so i learned to fly at douglas georgia really yes how long did it take you to learn to get your license and everything oh i flew a long time before i got my license i've not wanted them sticklers for it but it took me about about eight hours before the instructor stepped out i bought a cessna 152 and i flew that thing all the way to normal alaska before i got my license wow and uh yeah i had a hairy experience up there chasing wolves chasing what wolves really taking a little instamatic camera taking pictures of wolves and i just got right down real slow and low and that thing stalled on me right above the wolves and just almost turned upside down right across the tundra i think that's just one of my lives got usually used up oh my god so anyway that's how that's why i learned to fly and that's when i went to flying and so i just kept getting a little bit bigger planes until i got assessment one that one did you ever think that you could make money being like a private pilot or anything or no why'd you just get you working with the fire department i had a little extra money i had a painting crew and buying and selling antiques and so i just was in the chips i bought me a little airplane and i think paid seventy five hundred dollars for 182. those things three hundred thousand now that's what you want to buy how much did you pay i paid 7 500 dollars for seventy five hundred dollars for a cessna 182. cessna 182. yes wow and now they're over three hundred thousand you want to buy a new one of course mine was used with that price but they still weren't much [Music] so he says uh i want you hold marijuana that's the hottest thing i don't know anything about it i've heard the kid smoking it i said what would he pay and he said i think they would pay ten thousand dollars for a trip down there i said i'm all for it i said what would he do if he catch he said nothing probation he said that thing's almost legal out here in california so he introduced me to a fellow said you've got an airplane you'd fly down and i said yeah i'm going down there fishing all the time anyway they don't ever bother me where were you going fishing in mexico were you really yeah i'd fly down there on some of my days off morning and i take the children down there the baby and uh so we just had a nice nice life that we weren't far from mexico and then southern california right so uh i went down and did a load and man i come back they give me ten thousand dollars in a paper bag that was two years pay on the fire department take home and i shook it on the bed and marty put her hand up over her mouth and oh my i don't believe it and the baby grabbed 100 bills and crawling around and we just laughed we didn't owe any money we knew nothing so we went out to dinner and then put it in a lock box so what was that like the first time you actually flew down to mexico to pick to to pick up marijuana oh i mean it was just picturesque it really was what i mean what kind of people did you did you meet with and what was it what you expected was it shady at all not at all i went to a place called halapa veracruz is the capital of the state of veracruzes up in the mountains and it was like bible times the people had like stone basins in the street and they were scrubbing their the clothes the women were and i went to church a catholic church and i walked around and and there was the stations of the cross i'd never seen those carved all the stations of the cross in the catholic church i understand now that they have to protect them because they're such valuable art pieces and i was impressed with that and then i went out early in the morning to the airport to load the marijuana and i had my fireman's badge in my wallet and so the old guard on judy he was kind of suspicious of it and i showed him my fireman's badge and he was all helpful really he said then i taxed it down to the end of the runway and they met me with a van and put the stuff in and i was coming back across and didn't have enough fuel i knew i wouldn't i'd have to land somewhere so i landed at a little a little abandoned strip with a little stone house at the end of it and the man that owned the marijuana got in with me so i put him out there and there was a little little boy herding goats and his name was lazarus so we put the marijuana in a stone house and i flew into i forgot one of the cities of mexico and refueled and came back out and sat there and had lunch with a little boy then paid back in there and flew on home were you worried were you nervous at all not a bit and you were flying and you flew down there alone yes uh-huh but the man that owned the marijuana flew back with me okay so we just we didn't have any trouble with it and then at what point did he pay you when you landed back in the u.s yes they came the next day unpaid and then the next load they cheated me out of it that was all they had so the second load they didn't have to pay me really yeah so i took it i i found him and how to send a detective after we found him in new york and i went up there and stuck a gun in his ribs and took him down to the wharf what and he was so nervous he couldn't even light a cigarette he thought i was going to kill him of course i won't hurt him at all but i was going to scare him in to pay him my money so i took his dog wow his dog was named leslie a beautiful long-haired setter and he was so upset about taking his dog he said take my wife take my wife i said no that's illegal i'll take your dog so i dog napped and i kept the dog and the children put bows in her hair because this guy didn't pay you for the second trip right so anyhow he never did pay me so he cost so much heat till our friend out there said give him his dog back roger you're gonna bring us all down how so how did you find it you hired a private investigator to like hunt him down he went up to a cabin where bill this guy's name was bill and where he lived in in the in the um fireplace with some burnt papers and he looked at it and there was where the dog was shipped to vancouver canada and from their transit ship back to new york so he he copied the numbers and all down before before he touched it and it's disintegrated and he found out where he addressed where bill was wow he wasn't really a private detector but he was better than private detector he was the guy that first introduced me to these people oh he was the guy who introduced you okay we weren't riding across country right so then what happened did you did you have an itch to keep doing this stuff or oh yeah without that well this is just easy i went to see a j i wouldn't see and you had absolutely zero fear of being caught or getting in any kind of trouble no well of course i would flew just at the treetop level sagebrush would sometimes be in my wheel wells and i was afraid of hitting a power line at night or something more so than i was getting caught what was the reason for flying so low keep uh keep over radar they had they had radar on the hills around there and so they were trying to catch people they catch pilots every once in a while okay what year was this 1973 73 wow so i went to the lawyer and i said oh yeah what like what will happen if i get called with a load of marijuana bring it in he says you work on the fire department yeah and they said yeah you ever been convicted i said never had a traffic ticket in my life no no not never a moving violation he said you'll get probation at the most you get a year and serve four months raking leaves on a military base oh i kind of like that story so i went and bought me a bigger airplane of cessna 207. that thing would carry 1100 pounds and i could make 40 000 in a day how much was i playing 35 000 cessna 207 right it's a stretch 206 but it's the same engine just it's nice 150 mile an hour carries 1100 pounds and go a thousand miles so great big old tires so uh i started hauling so i bought me a new cadillac i didn't i didn't know about all this about making people look at you and i had my mother and my baby sister come out from georgia and i took them to disneyland in my new cadillac and mother said what are you doing boy i said i'm hauling pot ma she says how much you making i said i'm making forty thousand dollars any day i want to go down there he said what did you do if he catch you so i told her about what the lawyer said about four months at the most i said what do you think ma she said do you need a co-pilot son wow my mother was this boy that's amazing so did you ever bring a co-pilot with you or did you always know myself yeah okay and at this point you're how old 30 30 years old flying down to mexico every day making 40 000 yeah you got word to do about once a week and then you had six months or something there was no pot okay so you had to you had to work while are you still dealing with the guy who you had to hunt down and steal his dog i just i just got in touch with him a few weeks ago he he got in touch with me on facebook i mean i mean at this point when you're when you're routinely flying to mexico and back are you still dealing with the same guy no i i we we separate waited a little bit ways okay yeah but no hard feelings i think he just didn't want to get very involved in it so you found somebody else you could do business with i didn't even i didn't have anybody i just did it myself so what did you do you just flew down to the same location and said hey who's got pot oh he had it this guy joaquin is uh uh there's a little a little river come there just north of mazatlan in the state of sinaloa and it came through a cliff in the rivers and had a like a waterfall and then there was a poor poor village called peachylinky starving donkeys look like starving people and that on the bend of the river in the sand was a 900 foot runway if you could call it a runway you rut it yeah that's real short but the tesla 207 wouldn't make it so but it wouldn't take off with a load so this young because the runway was too short too heavy you need longer you're right so i would i would take enough fuel down with me and mari and i would go to the grocery store and get little goodies and apples and toys for the children and i'd pass out the boxes of those and they just loved them so every day more and more children were showing up for that runway they had heard of the american santa claus that was coming the american santa claus so yeah we so i hold many loads out of there and one time i do it um i did it uh 13 days in a row i'd hold a load every day and so on day 13 i had that little thing in my stomach i have a warning we all do like watch out watch out don't do it so i asked this guy walk in it hair lip guy just ugly man i said joaquin are you sure this place yes i'm paying the federalists off no problem no problem this is i mean this is the same routine you're taking every day yeah you're you're you're used to it 13 times on the final day yeah what no final i was i was on a roll they had marijuana stacked up by tons okay so i'm just holding all i can hold out of there right but this guy uh pedro would get in the plane with me and joaquin would tell him where he was going to block a highway sometime it'd be 20 30 40 miles away and i would uh pedro get in a plane with me he was light and we'd take off and go over and there would be a two-ton truck blocking the highway with a rifle or machine gun on it and about a mile down the road would be another one blocking the highway so i was on a major freeway well why now why did they block the highway that was my runway holy [ __ ] so no so no cars could come and so i'd land they'd put 1100 pounds in that plane and all like a bucket brigade off the truck i'd shake hands with all the mexicans with their sombreros and i'd get back in the plane take off over the next flood without oh my god every day we did it in a different place on different highways so uh on day 13 i had the bad feeling all night long it was just like ooh i i have that i just have a gift of it it was just like oh my and the next morning went down and brushed my teeth just at daylight and uh 10 or 12 men walked down with me and i got an airplane pedro got in and i fired it up and it went pow i thought a tire busted i just looked over leisurely did i have a busted tire and pedro's yelling police see a police seal police seal and i'm not at the end of the strip i'm up part way about halfway it's only got about four 500 feet in front of me i usually just go there and taxi back down and turn around so i just put put the power to right to the firewall cold engine and on just went tearing off down down the end of that strip and when it got to the end of it i was doing about 40 50 miles an hour and i rotated and when i did there was four of them two on each side and they just shredded that airplane with machine guns there was 80 bullet holes in there and they shot me down and uh all the windows were shot out i was shot across the top of my head my knee and my toes shut off the nail up and uh what were they shooting you from both sides of the runway from the ground from the ground you see i just run between them right as i went to lift off your spray they just riddled it it looked like one in bonnie and clyde cars so uh i i went into shock i reckon because the world just turned yellow and time slowed down and the gasoline was just pouring in on me where the bullets had gone up into the tanks above my head and the windshield was out and a bullet had hit the strut right in front of me and pieces of splinters that was all in my face and my chest and i just saw ahead of me in the river the cliff was coming quick and it looked like in the river it was on here knee-deep or less was stones and it was big as this table looked like great turtles just in the daylight was in there and i thought i'll i'll crash on top of those and maybe i can live in the water so i just pulled the power and i didn't have no control over the yoke whatsoever over the elevators and uh it went went straight in and when it did on the first hit the wings came off and the second hit the nose came and went underneath the airplane and i'm sitting there i guess i was knocked unconscious from the joke and pedro was shaking like come on roger come on roger come on roger and i just stepped out over the nose of the plane right onto the into the water of the river and those feather rallies was coming they were still shooting it so a couple of them hit the plane and there was a pistol in there later on i used to carry a pistol to start with and i found it more trouble than it was worth but anyhow that morning i had one and a nine millimeter browning and i just reached and pulled it out of his holster because now the radio where it was taped to is upside down so it's just right there and i popped a few caps at those guys and they ran into rocks and so we took off and i saw that pedro's foot was nearly shot off it was just and it wasn't bleeding all that bad it was just like white and so i took my t-shirt off and tied it we went on up the up the mountain and there was an old donkey looked like she was 30 years old she's way back and he knew her charlotte charlotte and he read and we jumped on that donkey without a bridle or saddle and we rode i understand now it was seven miles and we came to a little house in a clearing and there was a small man and he was plowing and he had a a little horse hooked to a little cow and the two of them with a wooden yolk across their back was pulling a little plow in some among some stumps and he was trying to make a living out of a burn place like this the natives do that sometimes and we went in his house and his wife and his daughter put some cloth on my wounds and poured diesel all over it to keep the flies off diesel fuel diesel fuel yes wow and so he took off and he was gone all day and late that afternoon a bunch of horses and mules come trotting up into the yard and there was a doctor there dr benjamin soso a red dog a red cross doctor and he gives a shot of morphine and tetanus shots and he tried to find the bullet i still have one in my foot and he looked for it and he said we had to get to hospital and that pedro would die if he didn't get to hospital they had killed one person on the ground they tried to run away that morning so they took us to a road we rode a long way on on them mules and we got to a truck it was a two-ton ten-wheeler loaded with corn in the ear so they dug holes on one side for me and holes on the other side for him and buried us down in that corn and covered us up and they kept a little place for my face but that was a real rough road and every time that truck would roll one side the other the corner rolled in on me and they had laughed and take it back off my face and we went through three road blocks and they said they had platoon of soldiers and over 100 of them looking for an american shot down believed dead and so we got to the highway after some miles and went into a house and had a white pan and they just kept changing the water i think i changed it 20 times before i got the blood and all the crud off of me from that episode and they got a taxi and they got a new taxi to take me to guadalajara because they said the roads on north was blocked so the man was a little dwarf of a man and i love this story i was hounding morphine pills in the shot that i had and i laid back on a big blanket and that little fella talked all night long i said senor do you have a family oh yes i have a beautiful wife dora and three sons let me tell you how i got my beautiful wife dora says i i live with my mother my witted mother and you can see no girl would look at me but i had my eye on dora across the way and uh so one day she's playing the flute in the back of a band that's coming by and i open the gate and pull her into the yard my mother helped me get her in the house and she sits in the chair and she sits there stiff all night and i tell her i love her and i want to marry her but she won't even look at me and so senor the next morning we have to let her go what could i do so she went home and just at daylight she knocked on her door and her hard-hearted father says get away from me you prostitute you spend the night with some man you're not my daughter anymore go away so she hung her head down and walked away and that's when i went up and told her dora let's talk to the padre and senor that's how i got my beautiful wife dora and said you won't believe it but one year later we had a beautiful boy and i was driving a ford dog ford taxi that's new so we named him ford and senor the next year we had another boy and that year i'm driving a dodge so we called him dodge and senor i know you won't believe this but the third year we have another beautiful boy and at that time i'm driving chevrolet and the priest will not christen him chevrolet so i had to teach that son of a gun to drive before he would christen him chevrolet and senor that's how i got my three boys four dodge and chevrolet that's incredible wow yes stories one after the other my book i have um i believe 41 chapters and many of them are just like two pages or 10 pages long so on that last on that last story you told where you got shot down by the by the federales and you got you you got shot in the toe and the knee and then the top of the foot and across the top of the head and top of the head um after you went and got all fixed up and you were getting transported through with the corn and where did you eventually end up after all that i went to grow a lot and got on an airplane and flew back to los angeles okay and murray took me to wilmington where i got medical care in the hospital there okay how old were you at that point was that when then was that your first time actually being shot at i know the revenue was shot at me back in georgia before the who the federal revenue was back in georgia when i was making whiskey they shot him eight of them shot emptied their bullets at their pistols at me in your plane no i was on the ground running oh from a whiskey liquor still holy [ __ ] [Music] yeah they meant they mean to kill you they don't care if they got a badge and a gun and you you don't do what they say they'll just kill you right it's like all right we got a license to kill him but it was your first time actually in the trans when you when you got into the transporting business flying drugs back and forth it was the first time that you encountered any kind of resistance yes and so after you get back home to la and and uh you're with mari you get fixed up at the hospital and i'm sure your wife's trying to convince you to stop doing this right no particularly i was pretty cool about it we we went to hawaii and i had to put my foot up in a on a crutch so i had to keep it higher in my head for a month or two that thing throbbed and so the children bring me pina coladas at the hotel in hawaii and then we went to uh how bad did your foot get messed up in that shot that wasn't that bad it just took took the toenail off of the top of the big toe and uh one slug got into the foot and went right back at the joint a part of a bullet okay so i wouldn't hurt bad i mean to be nick to be she could have been killed and one scraped right across the top of your head yeah i got scar right across where it went across the top of my head wow and so uh so we then we went to dubrovnik yugoslavia and we rented a rented a little volkswagen thing my foot was stuck out the window so it was above my head and a military boot all tied up and i had my chevis regal between me on ice and mari's driving and she's going fast in that little volkswagen convertible and he's almost on two wheels going down towards albania and the russian troops come out or the eastern block troops halt so they explained that we passed a certain path up the way 10 kilometers and we got here too fast so you're speeding and it's going to cost you 500 dinars and mars laughing trying to take their pictures and i said 500 dinars you have to take her to jail well she straightened up right quick over there and uh so then i i paid it was five dollars a hundred to one oh okay so that's that's what we did and then i came back and i bought a twin engine the twin beach that belonged to the beach boys it was a famous plane you know it's a twin engine what when it a twin engine beechcraft they're called twin beaches or beach 18s okay and i bought 12 of those in my life is that one of those seaplanes that lands in the water no it's not just a big uh it's like oh it's a big it's a big twin engine plane with radial engines great big round engines on front up with a like motorcycle okay so they're a wonderful point is that the biggest play that you had owned so far yeah oh yeah i felt like i was really really into big times murray was in atlanta and i bought it in uh i bought the plane in uh wisconsin so i flew down to atlanta to pick her up and they were saying i remember the neighbor november 797 juliet foxtrot keep your speed up 180 747 over to your right on runway such and such wow boy i'm in here and i landed in taxiway and you're flying with the big dogs i'm how bad now i was just kind of had a smile on my face and so i taxed it a long way and went up to hangar one and they rolled out the red carpet and mari walked out there and we'd come out with a surrey and got in the plane and we flew away so that was that was a that was a step up like i should have been flying a 747 from wow that's incredible so what happens next well i flew that thing every every year i just keep i tear them up one bog down another one i hit the end of a ditch in the night landing not to run away so you immediately start taking that new big plane to make did you keep going now i'm making uh what was i making about 80 000 a trip okay going to the same spot no do different places okay i even went to colombia and panama and you know jamaica i like i liked the one in jamaica uh i had the firemen down they would load me oh really yeah i'd get at night and uh after midnight or something and i would uh i would tax it the taxi was almost two miles long there at kingston and i'd go to the end of it and i'd say kingston tower whatever my number was i have a fire a cabin fire lights up and boy all of a sudden the fire trucks would come out of the station and come down they throw a ton of pot right in the fireman wood wow we got it fixed now thank you kingston tower not take off wow that's awful creative i think they was all in on it but it covered everything so you weren't always landing on highways no highway no no that well that was the only time i did it to that spot okay yeah sometime i landed at military bases all kinds of stuff right so so you continue doing this day in day out making 80 000 a day no problems no no i'll probably during the season i'd probably get over two weeks because i'd wait on my money and it had it wasn't just automatic right right yeah so how long does this last before 10 years this lasts for 10 years yeah with no hiccups oh i had lots of hiccups i wrote a whole book of them i mean how long does this last before before the police got on to me or something before something else happened not like necessarily before you're arrested but like the story of i remember there's a story where you're flying and you have to make a landing and your your your tires get stuck in the mud and then you end up getting stranded out in the jungle that's that's one of my favorite stories let me tell that story how did that happen this episode of the podcast is brought to you by raid shadow legends it's been brought to my attention that a lot of people like to hate on their ads but guess what they got a lot of money they got a cool ass game and i don't see y'all paying for this state-of-the-art podcast studio shadow legends has millions of players and dozens of sick ass characters when i first opened up this game i was truly stunned by the graphics and the artistry and they've just introduced an entirely new playable faction called shadowkin as you can see the shadowkin are heavily inspired by the mythos of medieval japan along with a load of eastern asian influences they got ninjas samurai and a whole host of mythical badasses they've only just arrived so get ready to meet new members as they arrive in game i would highly recommend yoshi the drunkard rage just passed their two-year anniversary and this month they're releasing a new batch of epic and legendary champions which look pretty amazing they're also releasing their second version of the doom tower but also two brutal looking bosses the celestial griffin and the eternal dragon if you want to get a huge head start in raid all you got to do is hit the link below and you'll get a free epic champion jotun 100k silver 50 gems and three agent shards all this treasure will be waiting for you here these rewards will only be available for the next 30 days and only for new players so hit the link below and i'll see you in the game brother um i went down and was this and what plane i mean i'm sure how many planes did you go through over this 20 25 different points 25 different planes yes that i can remember and out of these out of the 25 planes like what happened to most of the planes were they crashed or were they were they shot at most of my cell and buy something different okay so you're just moving around but i guess i must have tore up i think four that i tore completely up for yeah and one of pilots had tore up another one for me so i was five i can think when you say tore up what do you mean by that did you crash them just crashed them yeah wow finished oh one of them was bogged down in the sand and the runway and here comes the helicopters you run off and leave it so you just you just abandon the plane after you ain't nothing else to do jesus okay so we're talking about the the story where you're you're playing you're trying to land it and i had bought a beautiful beautiful dc3 i mean museum piece i believe union oil had owned it and it was lovely the the pieces were in front of the seat let down with exotic wood carved in different colors for the countries i hated to take that interior out but i did and i went down to columbia and i had to wait wait on a strip for time to go because i was over in the gorilla country and while i was waiting i was i went over and i went to sleep under a under a tree there was four of us i had a co-pilot and the man that was hooking me up to it and he had some other fella supposed to be nowhere to go and i was in a hammock asleep after lunch and i was under a tree and i just heard a terrible roar and i woke up rolled out of that hammock and i looked up into the ass end of two military jets going straight up with afterburners going then they turned around just like they would on an air show and they come up the air strip and just tore it up with 50 caliber bullets and i said whoa whoa whoa and i jumped out of that and i ran for the airplane and i just gave the guy 80 000 and he took off in the truck the other way i should have went with him but i was thinking about getting out of here so i got in a plane and i uh i took off and co-pilot got in with me and uh the two fellas and we had about 10 or 12 barrels of gasoline in their back in the baggage area or where the seats used to be on in the cabin and there's 55 gallon drums of aviation fuel so i took off and the two jets got right beside me and the pilots were so close almost like you and i just and they kept telling me to go to via vincenzia military base were they telling how are they telling you on the radio or no they was pointing towards you they didn't no idea you could see them not close oh yeah we were just they had their wing chips over my wingtips they'd want me to go to the military base they're pointing at it and i just put up the old hippie sign oh and shook my hand at them i didn't think they would shoot me so they just kept swarming on me and i kept slowing that dc3 down until they were just standing on their tails burning all kinds of fuel black smoke coming out of their tails oh those planes aren't meant to go that slow no so anyhow they kind of went under me and started shooting them 20 millimeter cannons just shake the airplane so i pushed the nose over so they couldn't get under me i'd fly a tree top level and later on they said that i tried to crash into one of them but i really didn't i didn't know it so later on they come and they they uh shot holes in the tail with 50 caliber just with a sweet zip let me just put a few and uh oh boy that got my attention and then they then they shot up the left wingtip and i said oh my and there was a there was a one of them left i guess for fuel so there was a black rolling clouds ahead well wait first off i understood first off i couldn't get my wheels up i didn't take on a dc-3 they have uh pins that you stick in the struts so that if the hydraulic collapses the plane won't go down all the way on the ground okay so it's just like a strut goes up down and i left those pins in i got into go so fast so i uh it was a big pasture up ahead so i landed and it was rougher than it looked and the and the uh fuel caps popped off all over the place and uh so on the world series baseball game it interrupted this baseball game to tell you that american dc-3 has just been shot down by colombian jets this is the first plane that's been shot down on reagan new war on drugs and then then in a minute it says up he's up up and away we'll keep you posted i took off again this was in the middle of the world series that you were getting chased by these colombian fighter jets yes we have copies of that transmission yeah there's actually like a recording of it yes during the world series wow so uh that would be a cool thing to find if you can i would i think i got my friend jerry's got a copy of that really yeah okay so uh we um went on and i went into these took off and i went into these boiling clouds and the clouds stick close to the mountains in the tropics and those mountains go up 20 000 feet there in that part of colombia in the andes and i was afraid to go in much further so i i went on up to about 20 000 feet and i started getting some ice so i came back out again and there was that jet right there boom boom got your plane that's it wow was it all metal like that too also like shiny metal like uh one of those uh those airstream bands yes that one was but they uh uh that one i think it's beautiful was the blue and white one so uh um where was i oh yeah so i mean boom boom boom he's shooting at me again the pins the pins are in the struts you forgot i already got them popped off again with no no fuel caps on top oh you oh oh you let you crash landed no i just landed on a pasture just straight up just a big cow pasture okay those things got huge tires as big as a semi truck so okay and stuff like that okay that was rough i mean it was up and down and i got out and took those pins out and took off again holy [ __ ] but i was afraid that he was going to hit one of them tracer shoot through the fuselage and right you got fuel or hit the grass tanks i'd just go up in a ball of flames so yeah i was i was serious about it so when i went back in i thought okay i can't get away in the place plane was icing up real bad at that altitude so i just kicked it over into a stall into a spin spin right down to about 2 000 feet and i just came out under it it was just beautiful down on there so okay explain that again for people who aren't familiar with uh with flying in aviation so you took off again from the cow pasture yes and you flew up to how hot twenty thousand feet twenty thousand i suppose about that and that plane wasn't made to fly that high would go that high but you need oxygen yeah but you can stand you're not supposed to go 15 000 feet without oxygen but you can stand for a while without it for sure you can right you lose your um you get fuzzy okay and so what was the reason that you you purposely stalled the airplane vertically oh to get away from that to get away from a jet i was going to leave him up there so i just stalled it and when you stall one you you put it up into a stall and put let it fall over one wing and it's like a falling leaf it'll just spiral and it'll spiral and it's just almost go down as fast as you if if you dropped it i mean it really goes fast it's like it's falling on one wing is this something that you had done before like i mean this seems like a crazy maneuver to try no people don't do that so you learn this when you're yeah i think a lot of people aren't just being and and the reason that you stalled the airplane was to get off of his radar or just to get away from him just do some maneuver real quick just so like i don't know where you stop and then drop and then he would lose you well i didn't know that he would but he did right so i got away from him and now i feel bulletproof all right your adrenaline's pumping i want i'm gonna go get that load of marijuana three tons waiting on us down there but we can't go back to the gorillas because they don't run us off right we gotta wait till about dark to get there right so i'm uh flying along the guaviri river it's way on down in columbia closer to brazil and uh it's on the same flight yeah this is right after that's where i'm supposed to go to start with okay we're waiting at that other farm right until we could go in the evening to the gorillas right so i see a long grassy strip it looks like it's 20 feet above the river and i said i got to find a spot we won't have enough fuel to fly all afternoon and then and then fly home [Music] and so on this grass i guess it was about waist deep and i just i just touched the wheels down lightly and i made a half a mile strip the wheels are 18 inches wide i guess the first rate it looked good in the second row it looked bigger in the third row and i went four or five times and put a little more weight on the tires each time and it was hard as a rock and so i told you so you kept circling and going down and touching down and going to make you're making your own runway right so wow so i did it and uh where did you did you learn how to do this is this something that you learned like you know but on the farm and a tractor you do all kinds of stuff to get there didn't you know it would look like it was smooth but what i didn't know and so i had the co-pilot's name al and so when was almost coming to a stop i said get your feet off that breaks out i don't have my feet on the brakes and what has happened is that thing weighs 30 tons and on those two tires they were breaking through the crust it was like oh i guess about eight inch it's deep a real hard clay like and beneath beneath that was soup where the water had stayed so the wheels went through and it just started slowly doing a handstand until it went right straight up and the nose and all just came in slowly on us and we fell in between the seats to save our lives because it was collapsing on you the nose was just in the plane was coming up on his tail just like this [ __ ] just like that and it stopped right straight up and down 90 degrees you couldn't have put a a ruler on it and the two big engines you see those big engines they held it up yeah and uh so i just undid the uh emergency uh hatch and stepped down in the grass owl came behind me and we reached in and got our suitcases now the two guys back up in the in the fuselage they got kind of banged up with all them drum cases and it's 100 feet not 100 feet but it's high up into that door i mean high so they tie a couple of fuel hoses and they shimmy down and we set out walking unbelievable man and that was uh that's when i they went down the road and i went through the jungle so you're in the middle of nowhere in colombia yeah and i said listen i'll eat snakes in this jungle for a year before i go down the road after the jets had done what they did and what we did and so i went through the jungle and after 11 days i came to a place i kept asking the indians don diaz diabions where are airplanes loma linda loma linda where is it leo it's far and i kept going where are airplanes where where can i find an airplane okay in the spanish donde esta avions avionis so i speak into the indians and i eat brown sugar and drink water and i had a saint paul bag from the cleaner plastic and i'd put the brown and bought a block of brown sugar and i'd put that water in it and i get along pretty good on that huh just brown sugar and water and brown sugar and water for some days when i didn't have anything to eat so i uh finally i came to a place and wow what is this place like hawaii world war ii green roofs a pasture nice long runway several airplanes a tower and i knocked on the door i said what is this place what how did you kids hear my name katie sue that a lovely voice he said i'm touring we don't get tourists here so what is this place you don't know this is loma linda headquarters for missionary missionary aviation fellowship for the amazon so god just tapped me on the shoulder the same people that had learned to fly these are the people that went to their place and one in one of their pilots with an old missionary from canada flew me out the next morning and we flew to the same military base where they tried to get me to go and the policeman reached in and got my bag out of the out of the airplane and put it in a taxi wow and the other fellows went on to prison for some years downing they went to their day with the president oh yeah and i knew they were going for sure i knew they were going i said come with me please wow and that was the part where i remember in the book there's a there's a specific part where you guys are in a jeep and you're riding through the jungle and you see there's a checkpoint and they all went through the checkpoint they thought they could pay them off yeah and you got out of the jeep and you walked the other way we went some ways to start with that first first day or the second day we got a jeep to take us and so we went i don't know 20 30 miles so it was at that checkpoint where they got there yeah i'm sure it was i never talked to them yeah i saw one of the guys in prison he got real mad with me trying to beat me up really because i left him down now did you fool so at what point at what point in your life there's a chapter about the the creation of the medellin cartel yes now was that the party that you went to yeah off the airstrip that was supposedly all of the drug gangs around colombia coming together and forming the cartel what happened was the way i understand it was it there was um 10 000 people killed down in colombia killing each other the price of cocaine was ten thousand dollars a kilo in columbia at that time at fifty thousand dollars in the united states and one fellow have 10 or 20 kilos and he'd give it to another person to take to say i got a pilot or i got a way to get it there and they would look in the paper and oh in new jersey i see 40 kilos is busted oh i'm so sorry senor's years was busted bang bang bang of course she was being ripped off and he knew it so he was killing them right so um the ochoa brothers and pablo escobar and a guy named gaucho and the mexican several other ones they got together and says all right we will we will form they didn't call it the cartel they're just like an insurance if if we we will send it to the mexican to miami for you for five ten thousand dollars a kilo if it gets busted anywhere between here and your man in miami we will replace it in columbia so you can't lose but it's gonna cost you ten thousand dollars ten thousand dollars just to get it to miami safety that's right so they was so they got inundated with a hundred tons of cocaine so they were they were like uh an insured transportation company exactly and i'm their pilot all right there at the beginning of it i was there so you were there at that party that the purpose of the creating this alliance well i don't know that was the purpose of it they they reached some kind of agreement at that time but you had no idea when you were going there i didn't know i was just down there trying to get some work did you did you meet any of these guys any of these like big time oh yeah i met all of them you met escobar was there no i didn't see escobar at that party but i saw a lot of the other ones down there and i got a job the ochoa brothers no they weren't there either but they were behind it okay there's police chiefs they were stand-up comedians there was actresses they was all kind of uh all the people these were all lower level i don't know they're pretty big there's one guy that i did the first load he had got caught with a ton of cocaine and colombian and 16 judges were murdered and he was rather nervous wow and i did a load for him and i didn't like it the man i gave it to we got shot in the stomach it took a while to get paid and i just thought i don't want food with those so then okay all right so what i'm okay let me just tell you i'll tell you how it happened okay so i back up and tell it a little bit i i had sold an airplane to a woman from bolivia a sonia de attila she was like a black widow i understand she had a lot of people killed and um i sold her an airplane and she wanted me to fly base from columbia up but i didn't deal with her but through this i met a a man named jaime i'm a correa brilliant man kind of like churchill um beautiful apartment overlooking metagena 20 floors up and he was a drunk but he had cocaine and lots of it he had a lovely wife they were older people and he says yes i pay five thousand dollars a kilo i get you all you want so in sachets this woman from bolivia and she kisses him on both cheeks and she has fur rabbit first coats and boots and so i have this lawyer with me uh that's introducing me robert roberto devil davila from bogota and she says she's going to united states to buy a plane so he winks at me and he said rogers over here has got some planes for sale and so she looked yes and said yes and so he's doing his fingers like this so i tell her yes i have a queen there oh queen there she likes the name queen hair for her anyway i have the flame broke down and i have to go to colombia to get my dear to bolivia to take her into her entourage to to get my money and this is a gruesome story anyway we uh landed the queen air the plane that you guys fly there uh yeah okay i had you i terrible queen so you take her there to get the money so she could pay you for it so uh it's just a interest story so uh we land and oh they just bow tour the police and all and they get a limousine with flags on it from bolivia we get into cars and we go through town and we go out to the water tank and there's something a marble house that looks like a mausoleum with a with a razor wire fence all around it wow like it's a prism with itself and they opened the gate and the helpers are all crying and red eyed and and what is what's the matter with you people she's just really nasty your lying ate the baby what do you mean leaving a baby on the floor in front of a lion she had a cougar in the house i went in behind her and there's that cougar with blood on his mouth and diapering [ __ ] and blood all in the room what yes oh my god she hugs the line and runs all the people off you idiot you idiots i never want to see your stupid faces again and the lions just ate the mage baby the maids baby the mage baby holy child [ __ ] so i got my money and got on you [ __ ] kidding me and uh james clavell wrote the book um deep cover he also wrote the the big white lie the cia and the crack cocaine epidemic and it's got a a couple of i got a couple of mentions in it one of them says that i was in more more more dea files in noriega and uh who was who wrote the book uh james clavell james clavell the same one that wrote deep cover he was a dea high up and the cia tried to kill him for exposing him about the crack cocaine okay so he wrote the big white lie the ci and the crack cocaine epidemic they developed and put in every every city in the united states on one weekend the cia yes what's the story behind that i don't know that they just wanted to sell their stuff i suppose wow i mean so he said that you were on more dea reports than noriega yes and then he's asking her if she can find me and says uh we've been looking for five years he's on the 10 most wanted list and if if you can tell us of anywhere to find roger reeves we'll give you anything you want that's that's in the book the big white lie wow so you sold this lady your plane and then this [ __ ] lion eats a baby and and then so at this point what at what point do you become aware that emit the america's looking for you oh they weren't the dea or the cia yeah this was years later that just happened i'd uh okay so i hold and how much money are you making at this point after you sold her your plane i'm not making much money at all and i'm in fact losing some i'm losing pretty good bunch of airplanes and different different reasons i'm not i'm not doing very well during those few years okay about early 80s it was uh kind of a dry time mexico had got so hot and i'd been shot up down there and tortured in a mexican prison until i i didn't want to go to mexico anymore well you you when did this happen you were you were tortured in a mexican prison i was tortured almost to death would you let me tell you about that i'd like to tell i'd like you to tell me about that yeah please roger oh and this and is this before or after uh the medellin cartel was formed oh before before this is why i didn't go back to mexico anymore the couple of episodes happened down there that i that was not healthy okay yeah please tell me about that anyhow i was arrested in mexico and uh my seven agents and i won't get into that long story where i knocked one ahead and got away from all of them with the bullets flying and got away but i had a pilot coming down an older gentleman and he landed at hermacillo at the international airport he was supposed to land five miles beyond a cattle ranch a feedlot and he just i don't know why he did it but anyhow he had my phony name and my room number in his pocket and he had five thousand dollars in the federal he tried to take it from him and he wrestled with him no no roger said give it to snow and soul see anyhow they arrested me and put me in prison down in mazatlan and they've done a number on him up in hermessy and he told so they want me to confess so i just can't believe it i haven't done anything i'm just in a swimming pool and i'm in my swimming shorts and i get handcuffed in the pool when the guy shakes hands with me where like a house or something they're in a real nice hotel realization so they take me to the prison and i sit there and i sit there and i mean it was miserable and it was so hot and after about three days in that little in that cell which is where all the drug addicts and drunks are thrown they take me back there to the torture chamber and they decide i'm gonna tell and they hold my head under a gaseous water until i can't stand it any longer and then you just fight like crazy to come up and it burns your daylight held your head under the underwater yeah it's like a tub and it's got some kind of uh bubbly it's if you inhale it it will make you nearly explode your head okay it goes up your nose any after one time without you it'd take for them to hold you down wow so anyhow they had that and then i was beating all over until i was just yellow and black what were they asking you or were they trying to get anything out or they were they just signed the papers and they'll all be over signing it'll be over they'll grab your hair and shove it up sign the papers so what were the papers for just to confess that you were marijuana smuggler you're gonna get six years in prison okay i thought well if you don't sign it i knew they can keep you two years for nothing right but so they give the uh they they uh the room was about five foot square and 14 feet high and it was hot there's a little spot on the door about that big and they brought a man in he's a black man and he was wrapped in uh he was frozen and he was wrapped in newspaper about inch strips around just like you'd wrap something like a mummy and you're completely frozen and they stuck the ice hook in his rib he must have been used over and over again and they hung him on the wall and as he thawed out his eyes the water run down his face and it looked like he was crying and then of course the water the formaldehyde ran out of his orphans his other ones too and the old paper come running off of him and later on you could see his liver where it's pulled apart and it opened the door you next son of a [ __ ] you next and so anyway that didn't scare me so bad i'd butchered large animals all my life but i didn't the smell was awful with that formaldehyde puddling on the floor and the floor didn't bother you that much well as far as liver and dead man it just that that didn't scare me okay all right it's i don't like it but it was no more than if you had a whatever yeah so i had to sleep that floor was filthy and on the wall with dried blood where they that was just one of the room that they hurt people in they killed you back there so i went to sleep and i put my head down at the bottom of that door to breathe like that and i'm breathing the fresh air from that side but i'm getting a formaldehyde over close to me and i went to sleep and i had i know where walt disney got some of his cartoons from i had pink flying for pigs and horses and all kind of colorful animals flying around in my in that state of mind from from breathing the formaldehyde i was hiding something and so then when i woke up and i saw that dead man hanging there it took a minute to figure out which was a nightmare and which was real i had to kind of pinch myself to see which where the reality was right and then they took me out and they bent me over naked and buttered my rum bum and packed it full of hot chili a ground chili and i'm talking about screaming and talking ugly i did some of it and i looked at their faces if i can find you i will kill you if i get out of here oh my god and then uh so just one day uh uh after after that they put me back in general population for a few days and i didn't sign anything obviously of course i didn't sign it i would have died for it signed up six years for nothing unless they didn't do it so back there i got a word out and tamari and some other people and then one morning they just come said come come quick and they took me out the back door of the prison and they put me in a pickup truck brand new and it had a horse's head on the door and they sped through the streets of mazatlan and they went to a bank and uh i went into banker spoke english and he said listen joaquin that's where i got shot down that morning and i salute i went back after uh has given roberto the fifth seventeen thousand dollars that you paid for the loan and he has paid it for the to get you out of this prison are you satisfied with that don't ask man so i went to the hotel where mari was and we got on the 747 and i didn't believe i was out of there i looked terrible how many days were you there about three months three months and so i got out of that place and uh when the when the uh tires of that 720s it was a brand new plane i just couldn't believe they're not going to come get me again i was and the wheels went up to plump next stop log angles i was like wow that was on the 4th of july 1970 after that i i got to say man i would have been like ready to call it quits i didn't i didn't want to go back to mexico anymore that's one reason i kind of quit i had another encounter that was bad there too so uh after after several of those encounters okay i uh i decided to go to columbia columbia they don't they don't treat you as bad if you go to prison there they're more professional more professional you didn't go to prison you just had professional people loading and had good gasoline and okay we had a better operation goal they were these other people were peasants that you know someone maybe couldn't even read and write it had something going on oh man so at what point did you meet barry seal i've been flying uh flying cocaine and uh maury and i decided we'd or i decided we'd look for a place i believe it was in honduras uh so we flew down and looked for a place a place a ranch a place of kind of a hideaway a beautiful place in the mountains so we could just sort of have a place and i had all this money you're going to purchase a of a ranch a ranch okay so we flew down to honduras and oh we did go to a beautiful place and uh but we decided not to buy it it's just too too remote but it was just beautiful so we came back to san pedro sula and our clothes was all muddy and dirty from a week up there on that ranch and fooling around by lakers zoo and uh so we took them to the cleaners and he said i'll have them ready tomorrow afternoon of course they weren't ready well okay first thing tomorrow morning so murray had the the children with her with us we had the three children and uh i said well you going to the airport because it's easier for me to get out to new orleans on a just one of us if if all of us miss it's going to be hard to get out so she went on to the airport and i went after the clothes of course it was slow getting i got on an old taxi and i had a wad of them and plastic bags and i give the guy a hundred dollars and to go faster and he just blew the horn more oh he didn't go so i got there and the plane's taxiing out on the tarmac and so i run and i got the clothes on my back and i waved to the pilot nicely and fell and he waved back then i see mari's face in the cockpit yeah and then i see the nose wheel go down and he stops and he laughs and he lets the stairwell out for me and then he pulls it back and takes off again a little bit like a hitchhiker going to stop not going to pick you up she had some fun so finally he put it out and i go on with that load of clothes and the whole 180 passengers are clapping for me when i get on that's so funny so i go down and i sit down and my daughter's sitting in the middle and she saved me a seat about halfway down on the airplane and i sit there and we take off and the wheels come up i guess she's about nine years old and then they're going up about five thousand feet away she said what was that daddy i said he just turned his autopilot on oh so a fellow leaned over i don't look at him he had nice clear blue eyes he just looked too sharp i said he's t-e-a-r-f-b-i-c-i or something really that big fella sitting there he looked like rex tillerson where did you guys take off from again san pedro sula honduras san pedro sula okay it's over on the caribbean side okay death capital of the world for some years the what the death capital the murder council murder capital of the world for a good remember years later some years back but at that time it was laid back and wonderful but a nice halfway stop coming up so when i said that he leaned over said you fly these things i said i got a few hours mister my name barry seal how you doing and so then he got to talking to me and we talked to airplanes and so forth he said i just got out of prison this morning in honduras i got caught down here i didn't believe him one bit and he said that he had been a trans world airline captain and that it was i don't believe he told me he was xca but commercial yeah he was flue 747s i believe he was the youngest 747 pilot that the twa ever had and he took a load of explosives down to the cuban contras and got caught with a dc6 loaded with 10 tons of explosives and he lost his job with a twa so then he's working doing whatever he can like this freelance and he got in trouble so i didn't believe him bit but we chatted about airplanes all the way out in new york he straight up just told you this on the airplane that i just got out of prison this morning you know blind explosives to the contrast that was before i believe he had he got caught with 100 kilos in a little piper okay down there and he served a year okay i didn't believe it a bit i thought he's just trying to pull me out so when we landed in new orleans i shook hands with him a nice fella and got out there and here's 20 or 30 people women and children hanging on him crying and begging hugging his neck and i thought that guy's telling the truth ain't no way he could stay sat wow so i went over to him and had mari to write our name and address and the phone number on it i said barry i might have some work for you if you're interested come up see me in santa barbara all right i'll do it so a week or two later he comes out and i had a didn't learn his lesson huh well he's ready to make some money oh yeah so i said i i'm i'm hauling cocaine out of columbia and would you be interested oh yeah let's see what you can do with flying i didn't know what kind of pilot people all kind of policy people get a license still can't fly i don't right so i had uh what was your biggest concern with him when uh he came out to meet you in santa barbara and you were talking to and you were talking about hiring him what were you worried were you worried about anything like like obviously his flying skills or like were you did you have any sort of suspicion that he could have been cia or undercover or anything or not after that not happening i found out he was already in prison all that sort of just okay don't do that too i was comfortable with him okay i really like barry he was my friend we you know he'd eat it all for some people all right we were just like you guys got a longer you get along good really i liked him and uh so i had a 690 aero turbojet arrow commander that thing was nearly new what's it called again uh uh arrow commander or 6690 that's uh six six ninety six ninety b b arrow commander yeah and who had he said little jet engines that turned propellers that thing was fast he'd go 300 something miles an hour and he'd go right on up there wrap with the jets for a while anyhow he got in that thing and i said show me what you got he said sure enough i said yeah and it was a little while i said you don't have to show me no more he was like bob hoover he just did i mean he was aerobatic like the blue really oh yeah i fly all right but that guy was like the blue angels i mean it was just like like a god and then he cut the engine in he just let it fly sideways to sideways until it comes hit the ground the only person i've ever seen that was in this air show with bob hoover the world champion so he was that good he was good he had a thousand parachute jumps and in that movie they made about america made about him it was so wrong he was such a gentleman they had him coming out of [ __ ] houses and women hanging all over him and yeah that was just i never heard him say damn he didn't smoke he didn't drink he didn't do drugs he was a businessman he was a pilot and a gentleman so after you were so impressed with his acrobatics and his flying skills then what'd you do i should uh bury that i got a point this plane needs tanking you know somebody he said yep need tanking i need it won't go the range oh and these tanks in it so he said yeah i got a mechanic in uh meena arkansas that keeps his mouth shut and so i gave him ten thousand dollars and he flew away in my new airplane a few days later he called and said come to my house i went to this house and it was all tanked up and that's when i told him you know i've been stopping it i'll hire you to fly and i'll give you two thousand dollars a kilo i was getting five and so he was happy with it and i said but now we don't need this plane tanked well first off we did a few loads and he would fly down and meet me in police at a ranch i had an orange walk and we would change the load over but then it got dangerous i figured you know we got 15 20 million dollars of cocaine changing planes here and i would go into jamaica uh because i didn't mind flying out of flying that southern end but i was scared across the u.s border i'm not scared but i'd rather not fly hire it done so uh but then i told him we can refuel in in the military base in nicaragua well he just couldn't believe it so that that's the only time i really ever impressed him i said yeah and come out of bolivia out of columbia anywhere that military base no words just come right in they'll fuel you up give you steak and eggs and polish your airplane you'll be on your way really yeah so barry flew and i mean he would fly but he wouldn't fly another until i paid him so he did 500 kilos at the load and so it was a million dollars he made and uh a million dollars for one flight right and uh he hired this guy emile camp i had to give the twenty thousand dollars for him to go down get a meal out of the honduran jail and emile wasn't much of a pilot or he could fly but he wasn't he'd just get them around right so uh the two of them flew together they were great big fellas that's good and it's gracious two of y'all you can put 400 kilos in here where y'all sit but anyway he wouldn't fly without it so uh he might like this little story he uh he wouldn't moan and groan until i paid him well i didn't get paid until they got paid so i had a pipeline coming and sometimes they'd owe me six or seven million dollars it'd take three or four weeks to for them to get money and then i'd get get what they did so i was paying him before i got paid so i was like a loss i'm i'm back right you're in front you're fronting that money exactly yeah so he wanted so you were you were paying barry how much would you pay him on one trip oh two thousand dollars kilo i paid million dollars a trip so you'd give barry a million dollars cash yes he would fly where he would fly we'd we he'd fly out of um where he wanted to up in arkansas or louisiana and he would come over to a little radio station like where would he go where would he fly like to he'd fly to colombia yeah but but we didn't know where we were going a lot of the times uh we would uh we would come over el banco it said the forts of the magdalena river there and behind baron kia and there's a radio station i believe it's still 7 20 a.m on your aisle and we come at ten thousand feet circle and pretty soon there'll be a plane you'd see it it might be already there it'd be like usually a cessna 180. and he'd be circling and you'd get right behind him and you'd wiggle your wings and you might go 100 200 miles and you'd get land in the jungle oh and they would tell you where to land they wouldn't say a word we didn't speak we just followed that until they followed the plan followed him where we were going and there was a signal they would do with the with the wings well we just knew it was him it just yeah okay and uh so follow that plane did that sometimes somehow we go to the same place but if there was a new place we'd follow that plane okay that was pretty neat and then uh you come back stop it uh nicaragua refuel and come all the way on he'd go and he went to maina and this is uh what so so he had the million dollars in cash yeah i'd give him a million dollars yeah what would he do with that million once he landed there i don't know so that was just his that wasn't for his cost to buy the cocaine or anything no we just i got paid five thousand dollars a kilo so i got paid two and a half million dollars and i gave him one million okay but wouldn't they have to give him the all of the cash though no they didn't give him anything okay okay he'd just give he all right he would land in mina arkansas okay and then he would put it in three different cars okay and every day i i had a fellow buying me six cars a week great big ones so he went okay okay that was where i was confused uh none of the transaction revenue is going through the pilot at all the pilot is just the delivery person he's your truck driver okay got it so but anyway he would i had he had the driver so i didn't even want to meet his drivers that's how i was afraid to meet people right they get caught they're going to tell them they all did so exactly i had somebody buying cars and they buy these ltd's or the ford uh ford or mercury marquis and they had big trunks we put air shocks on tires it wouldn't go flat new hoses boom boom and then i gave those to the columbians and they would be a trunk full of cocaine and duffel bags they'd have rattlesnakes on it some of them would have cow horns that meant this one went to this one that went to that one oh wow so i had to just point the cars out to my friend lito and give him the key bam and i never want to see that car again i said it's going to your staff house i don't want it back right it's five thousand dollars to you buddy oh i said you take it to new york county where you want to it's it's as good as you can do so they liked it after a while wow so anyway one time barry was bellyaching a little bit about might be being slow on pace so i was in the store and i saw these stay free mini pads a pretty package stay free mini pads cam packs oh tampons damn yeah australia tampa and uh so i i got a million dollars and put it in a box and i put those tampons on top of it stay free and wrap that thing up put a bow on it that's great barry loved it he made a place on his mantelpiece for those for the stay freeze that's amazing yeah that is absolutely amazing so how long did your and barry's relationship last about two years two years and a half two years uh-huh and what when did it go south what happened when it went off i got arrested in august 1982. okay so that's that was the end of it and then he was still and then he went straight out full on working and he bought the planes from me he he gave mario the money for all of them and what was owed and all that he took care of 100 but he cut me out of the deal he would have given me a little percentage after that but he didn't right so you how did you get end up getting arrested oh i just flew down the load i had 15 million dollars in a in a jet and i charged it out of san antonio and i flew down to uh what kind of a jet just like a private jet falcon i believe it was and i and there's two pilots and i was laying on top of the money and i took it to the bank and put it in the bank and the pilot said they wanted to stay for the weekend oh man it's holiday i said all right i'll catch a jet back to miami okay which and so when i land in miami i was arrested and they charged me with all kinds of stuff but marijuana all marijuana stuff all marijuana didn't get you any cocaine charges nothing they didn't know anything about it so i did two years and i got out and by that time i found barry was had been working with him and he'd been working with oliver north and he'd been paying off how did you find out who he'd been informant and working with these guys i'd heard it already okay so i was scared of them so when you were in prison but i will just tell you now barry had it paid off he's whenever i i wanted to land in louisiana i had a sheriff sheriff there in a place that could for ten thousand dollars or i landed on the interstate 10 there was building it was beautiful i followed that thing all the way across texas landing on as they was building interstate 10. the best wrong way you could ever find wow put a truck there and turn the light on that's it mile long 10 mile long runway jeez and we go out there the next morning rubbed the black marks off where i'd landed oh my goodness so so after you got out did you try to get reach back out to him or you you were done with him you didn't even try you wanted i couldn't think that barry i didn't know what the deal was so i was uh watching i was having breakfast and there was ronald reagan blue eyes right there on television he said we have absolute proof that the communist san denista government is in the cocaine running business and there was that old fat lady the c-126 on the runway in nicaragua bella diana oh [ __ ] you saw the plane too no that was the one that barry on uh he bought that after me but i knew what he was doing and i knew that they was into it so uh but barry i'm gonna back up now he wouldn't land anywhere else he says i got paid off to the governor i got paid off just as high as you can get this but it's going to cost you 50 thousand dollars every time my wheels touch the ground in amino arkansas so every time he landed i had to pay fifty thousand dollars wait wait wait wait yeah well what part of the story is this you're backing up now you're backing up but this is before you gotta i'm talking about you talking about barry wanting to land at mina arkansas instead of louisiana he when i started flying with him he said i will not land anywhere else except mina i got it paid off i cannot be arrested i cannot get caught in maine arkansas okay so he claimed he had some sort of a deal in mina arkansas where he could not get he wouldn't get caught he was protected exactly so later on we know that it was a cia and they were shipping guns back down with him but he also said he was having dinner with the governor so mr clinton was not far away he was a strong man or the governor in his his home in mina and then the movie that tom cruise made yeah was written and played out as mina the name of the movie and the democratic party got so hard behind them until they couldn't come out with a movie until after the election with hillary clinton because it shed bad light wow so the director quit and that movie was changed all around and changed into america made in a very poor movie right but so they was hitting too close to home so what did barry did what kind of details did he tell you about about mina arkansas and his source that's a cloak of invisibility he just said listen it's going to cost you 50 000 every time my planes hit touch her down i cannot get caught listen plain out i cannot get caught in me in arkansas it's 100 protected immunity he said from the highest to the right on out and then time or two he said i'm having dinner with the governor tonight now i don't know where he was or not but uh that was what he mentioned to you casually i'm having done it with the governor wow so and then later on we know that the cia was putting some small arms on his planes to take back to the contra so they could load it up with cocaine can you imagine what they thought they was going to do with a piper full of ak-47s in the war that was just a front what do you mean it was a front the cia some outlaw cia agents are saying okay we're going to supply the war congress won't supply the arms that we need to fight the uh the communists in nicaragua so we're going to have barry and he's going to take these guns down for us in his piper right like a bb there wasn't enough guns to really make a difference on anything for anything absolutely but we're going to bring tons of cocaine back to pay for them oh my gosh so what uh i mean i'm not super familiar with the story but what were they doing so if if barry was bringing back tons of cocaine to arkansas yeah who was buying it they were spending it all over they're putting it into that crack cocaine business i was smoke suppose so anyway they they they had to hammer down yeah now so you're you're saying that actual like politicians and stuff and and cia officials were purchasing this cocaine and spreading it out and selling it to people they were having it they were buying it in columbia shipping it up by barry and of course they was distributing it well they had their people distribute it that mean that's what the whole story is about there's no secret this is what i'm telling you it's just real wow and you and you kept in touch with barry so after you got out of prison you kept in did you keep in touch with barry at all no i didn't keep in touch with him mari did somewhat martial because mari sold planes to him after he went he just came and bought her the money for the planes and said mario this is this is straight so i didn't i didn't think too much about it anymore i was all right so when i got out of prison i am now just a short while and some days when i saw ronald reagan blue eyes on the television saying that the communist sending easter government was in the cocaine business and my guts turned to ice water i said oh barry has done it so then it was later on that afternoon i got a call from him he said i'm coming out tonight roger i'll meet you at this little um french restaurant town i don't even know what was there so i'll be there at nine o'clock where was this in for santa barbara okay so um i came in the door at seven at nine o'clock and he was leaning at the back of the thing and he'd gain weight and he was leaning back and i walked up to him i said are you wired barry and he said no i'm not i said well i'm not going to say anything just tell me so he just started talking and i looked around and i said son de agents he said every one of them there's about 20 people in the room blue jeans ladies with leather skirts and all alone and so the room was full of dea agents and i'm i'm on this hot seat so he started telling me and he just said roger they they wrapped me up and they um left me hole in the bag i couldn't do anything but testify i couldn't do three live sentence and he put his hands up over his eyes and the tears ran down between his cheek between his fingers he said i just couldn't do it i just couldn't do it he said so i've gone to congress [ __ ] he said i went to see edwin miese i was attorney general at the time i flew my jet up there and i knocked on the door and told them that they were bringing tons of cocaine out of colombia and he wouldn't believe me kicked me out and the next day i went back and i said i can prove to you that they're doing it so get the guy jake jacobson he put him with him he was a dea agent and we went down and did one and a half tons and i bullied the plane in at nicaragua took a thousand pictures and i testified before congress and i've told them all your part but you're under my umbrella as long as you testify with me exactly what i say when you use my lawyer you can have your passport have your money and live anywhere in the world you want to i said barry they're going to kill you friend oh no ochoa brothers this another he's in spain another one dead and this and that another and uh so i so the dea agent came over and he sat down and we had chevis regal and ice and we had a nice time i liked him he's a i think crop duster from alabama we'd have been on the same team i'd have been all right i really did like the man yeah and he just said listen you can you can come to miami tomorrow in chains or you can come first class with mari it doesn't matter to me but you're going to testify before a federal grand jury and if you do you can keep your money your passport you live anywhere in the world you want to live but if you don't the only place you're going to ever see your family again is in a federal prison visiting room and he said and you got to have your pilot from santa barbara you got to give him up barry knew that i was flying had another airline going same as him did more than he did but he didn't know who columbians told him i didn't ever tell him right right they trying to give a little competition i think so i just my guts turned to ice water and i went to see my friend my friend jerry i'll say his name and he had been been friend 50 years there wasn't no way i could tell on him just couldn't do it i mean i was just sick so i went told him i said jerry i don't know what they're going to do but they cut my tongue out i won't tell them you it's not going to do it so i thought well i better go down to miami and see what i can do so i went into a fancy lawyer's office and he was on the treadmill and he got off and i talked a little bit and he said well being a snitch is like being pregnant you either are you're not it's an interesting way to put it no no no it ain't that man i've got to say something i'm in a mess i got he said well if you say something you've got to tell them everything you leave anything out they'll use everything you did you're going to get several life sentences i went to see another lawyer and he was just kinder but he said the same thing you you fool with them you've got to tell them everything if you leave anything out you work with them you got to go all the way you got to tell them it's all or nothing so i couldn't do it not even in my life so i went to the festival restaurant that night it was on my birthday january 26 1985. and uh barry knew that was i like that restaurant lovely restaurant no name on the door in miami yeah and carl gables so i went in and him and his wife came in debbie she was looking real pretty and very was and we had dessert together and i just told him barry i just just can't do it so they gonna kill you friend he said oh no da da da da i hugged his neck who who are you telling him was going to kill him the columbia's going to kill him surely certainly they're going to kill him of course they're going to kill him if he testifies against all you're just gonna die man you ain't got no choice right i mean you can go now but you guys are ruthless doesn't matter where you are they'll find you right it's almost anybody you tell like that most of these people kill you you're destroying their lives and their families and children and all that sort of stuff and you did it and you did it with your eyes wide open and you made a deal you just you just can't tell so most people don't live by that honor so a lot of them get killed and uh so anyway i hugged his neck i may have kissed him and anyhow mari and i and the children fled to brazil and the next day or wha oh yeah right away i think went back to the house and got some things and we were gone and uh so we're living in brazil and i got word i was up in somewhere in brazil and i was calling to colombian they owed me a bunch of money it would be three and a half million dollars so i was trying to collect some of that and as long as barry was alive and this thing was going they was going to pay me but when barry died oh have good news good news they killed barry seal last night or yesterday or sometime and i cried and i told murray and my daughter cried so how long after this how long after you moved to colombia did they tell you this six months six months after you've been yeah i'm sorry after you went to brazil i think that it was january of 26 1985 that i was would barry yes at the restaurant yeah and then i think he was killed july of 86 just there about about six months later he was killed wow so now they have no case against me see he was the only thing they had against me and uh on the first load that i flew so how so what is the how did he die do you know exactly how he died i mean i know there's the story i mean what what is that the official story of how he died well of course he was assassinated by a guy um yeah there's still three of them still alive and doing life in louisiana prison uh the guy ronaldo was a trigger man i know him quite well i'll tell you a little story about ronaldo on the first load i did for somebody i don't know where it was i think it was this guy jaime this guy's just is a hit man an ugly fella anyhow landed at a banana plantation there somewhere in jungle and uh my uh had a turbo prop and it was small wheels a large wheel well and they put 300 kilos of cocaine in there and this guy got in with me with a mac 10 shot pistol and he's to make sure i go to louisiana i could have went to argentina he wouldn't know which way it was so anyway we took off in the wheels uh it was muddy and the wheel wheels filled up with mud and we and the gear wouldn't come up so here i am doing 200 miles an hour instead of 300 i'm not going to get home 2500 miles i'm just not going to make it so in belize where i used to land and refuel planes with marijuana is a really nice fellow mr carter there for ten thousand dollars i could stop and refuel so i told this fellow we got to stop no no no louisiana and he put the gun right to my head and mack ten i said well shoot me fool you're gonna die too you know so i wasn't worried about it so we landed this cattle farm in belize and oh he was a terrible beside himself he didn't know where he was but anyway mr carter sent a boy out to wash the plane clean the wheel wheels out we went and had chicken and potato stew and he was all happy with it and we flew home we flew on up to louisiana wow that's when he met barry so he's the guy that actually shot and killed barry okay so his name was ronaldo wow now what is it what's the story with with how bush was involved with barry i don't know anything about that barry has two pictures of george and uh jib bush walking away from his plane in opelocka airport where they just bought two kilos of cocaine that's all what he said that's what barry said and they got a package and she snapped their picture as they going away from the plane so i don't know and i think that's been on the internet some too is it possible that the um i mean isn't it true that the american government or the cia or the whoever it was the dea made it extremely easy for the colombians to kill him and to find him debary yeah i don't know i don't think so i think yeah well i tell you i don't know who did it but uh do you do you think that they wanted him dead do you think the u.s government wanted him to have the dea and not particularly i think i think that the police in louisiana wanted him dead the dea in that area right where they've been chasing me just say you guys ain't got sense enough to catch me mm-hmm or i'm not doing anything today going to be burning that government gas up you know he just bait him a little bit yeah they wanted to go and take his picture make sure he was dead but i don't think he did anything to make people really hate him that bad but anyway he was flaunting it in front of him right and uh and the judge is the one now who who influenced the judge the judge killed him because he has already testified against all these colombians and the judge gives him six months uh in a halfway house every night at six o'clock he's gonna come in so the judge said him so that's his death sentence that yes hundred percent and he's attached to that [ __ ] halfway house and they're definitely gonna find him there he got to go every night at six o'clock and the dea stood up in court and said your honor this is a death sentence they will kill him he said he should have thought of that before he did this wow and he said well he gonna have bodyguards no a guy in prisoner can't have bodyguards he can't have arms he can't have nothing he got to drive right up into that halfway house every night at six o'clock and he was waiting on him just riddled him you see the pictures on the internet he just they said he put his hands over his ears he shot him like 50 times in that in the car when he came oh my god it was sad how did you feel where were you what were you doing do you remember what it was the moment when they came to tell you oh we got a great news barry mario in colombia and that's when he told me oh great news great news they killed barry seal you know well i cried i went to omari and miriam they cried he was our friend right even though he had he testified he put me in there he did the best he could they the cia had left him holding the back 100 percent they set him up and whenever all that oliver north stuff come about arms for cocaine and an iran contra deal they just they just split everything was in his name everything he was a one what's he going to do right his own people see he was a c.i.a man did you know that barry was with the c.i.a prior to all this prior to the airlines right and he had over a thousand parachute jumps and he was george bush's real good friend the old man he was his protege and when he died george bush's personal phone number was in his wallet and the lawyer called and he said hey barry how you doing nobody and they said they just killed barry last night and clicked and he hung right up and right up yeah jesus christ man wow what a [ __ ] story i'm glad to be out i thought one time i'd never get out of prison so you're in when you got the phone call about barry where were you in brazil yeah i was in brazil and what was your next move after all this what were you thinking where where were you in your life at this point what did you want to do next like what did you have any sort of plans from you guys wanted to just like to stay in brazil and just lay low there for the rest of your life well me and murray had different plans okay i kind of liked brazil i would not like it but it was opportunity for me to go into into the interior and grow soybeans i'm a farmer and uh i i mean the land was six dollars an acre and it was just like easy to clean all you got you don't know no fertilizer nothing just plant the seeds right need combines so i took mario sears 30 000 let's see 30 thousand hectares of 75 000 acres and she just cried and said roger if i die in this godforsaken country please don't leave my bones here so i just felt sorry if it didn't matter to me forever when i had a lot of money and just go where i wanted to so and was all was all your money in cash or did you keep in bank accounts or what had you you obviously had you had tens of millions of dollars right yes but uh i i i invested it with crooks with crooks everybody's just about to crook if you give them your money yeah that's that's it just don't come back i don't know why that's the way it works no matter what business you're in exactly just you let somebody else hold you money and it's gone yeah so i i invested with a lot of people on huge real estate deals and one thing i did buy i bought the world's most expensive coin it's called a brasher de bloom really yeah i paid 350 000 for it and mari needs some money so she sold it for 7.50 and the guy turned around the next day and sold it for a million four and it's worth 10 million dollars now what a coin a coin how do you say it brasher de bloom brasher de bloom i'd love to get a picture of this on the screen that would be the bloom is um the pieces of eight you've heard of those oh yeah well that's a an eighth of a de bloom is this that right here oh yeah that's it right there there you go there's five of them i had the unique one there they are i don't know that that's it that no that don't look like it no i haven't seen it's got a wheelbarrow on one side and look up brasher de bloom yep that's what he typed in okay well that's what it would be then so that thing is worth over 10 million dollars now today yes and you paid 300 000 for it 350 to be exact in it and a little story to go with that they uh it was in i can't pronounce it with the the coin newspaper need new mystic a paper and uh the bank of miami read about it so they went to sam the coin dealer and says and it says mystery buyers buys the most expensive coin on earth you know really so that was just one thing that brought a little light to me so i uh they said we would give you a million dollar insurance policy against it if you will own it for us to put in our bank so they built a pedestal in the bank of miami and all marble down there and they put that coin in it with lights on it and they give me the the insurance policy sam did so if anything happened to it you get a million bucks well i had that unlocked box in grand cayman island and guess what it was on the judge's desk oh my god oh they don't they was unmerciful did you have bank accounts set up in cayman islands oh yeah really yeah and it's got that money got stolen too the guys out in bakersfield living large who the banker he took the money out of the bank and just closed the bank down and now he lives when i got arrested now he's out in bakersfield and if i even say boot to him i'll go to prison for extortion or something wow so after he finds out you're in prison he just says [ __ ] it i'm taking his money he just shut the bank down and took my money oh my god that is wild that is just that is just wild his name is stephen what's his name marty mctaggart you guys remember his name i called him how much money did he steal from you oh i'm not saying that you don't want to say oh three and a half million dollars at that time okay yeah good lord good lord so mari doesn't want to be in brazil anymore but you guys are still in brazil you guys you should so we went on we went all the way to the tip of argentina right down to the the right to the bottom of it almost to the straights in usual and then we we visited argentina and looked at all the glaciers and the ranches and things and we just couldn't find it so we got first class tickets to amsterdam maurice where she's from her eye was just sparkling she got on that plane with the dutch people and speaking her language and we went to holland and they went live in france for a year and then we went down to my orca spain oh mallorca that's a hot spot where i met mr howard marks the uh author of new york is the big island right yes not very big but it's an island it's like you can take a ferry there yeah right yeah and so i met howard marks the infamous howard marx who was howard marks he wrote mr nice a famous book one of the first ones about marijuana smuggling ever come out oh really yeah he was a he was sleazy what do you mean by the sleeves oh we did some deals and and whenever he knew he was his time was up he hired me to haul a load out of morocco for two million dollars and he turned me in instead of paying me wow bastard that's a nice word for him and i was and i escaped from police three times and i still couldn't believe he did it to me i couldn't believe it so you were in spain you're still doing deals you're still running [ __ ] and i was i bought a ship i was holding hashish on a ship now you're giving up the planes and you're taking ships taking ships yeah 20 ton loads out of pakistan and 20 ton loads out of thailand how did you get where did pakistan come into the picture here we just buy hashish there you go over there in the camels and rides the camels around with the fellas up towards afghanistan so this guy this guy said hey we got hashish in pakistan we can do if you move it we can do it so we did and he had all these connections he had connections from a friend a real nice fellow they all did now but anyhow i was a good fellow so you bought a ship and you sailed to pakistan what was that like nothing nothing just nothing you know was the well you know the experience wasn't anything not particularly it was in malton taxi drivers uh the they had some guys from north africa that they killed the taxi drivers and they gouged their eyes out and reached in there to get the little bullet out and and throw them in behind the ship and they came up all around the taxi drivers did around the turn of the ship that was the most exciting thing would have all this policemen all over me jeez 20 tons of hashis from pakistan to where to canada to canada how long did that take i don't remember i really don't more than a couple days oh six weeks something like that six weeks i didn't do that part of the trip but i met the trip with a float plane and then i flew them so you didn't stay on the ship the whole way no i took it over there okay and then i uh uh i bought a cessna 206 on floats from catch catch them and uh on floats i love the way you say it it's basically it just means you could land it on this on the ocean right yeah on the water and you could tackle that to the side of the ship no we they unloaded it and piled it up and then i hauled it down across the san juan fuga straits between canada and the united states and i landed on a lake in washington state and a whole load after loading that snotty weather you couldn't see nothing just pull the power and come in land on the lake and hope you didn't hit nothing jeez that's insane man that's just so such a crazy story just like it's amazing that you're sitting here alive right now after all that you've been through like it's just like yeah i almost got killed on the first load of that uh i across the uh it was a moonlight night full moon and i'd been to that lake lakos set i believe is how it's pronounced washington washington state just over on the in the olympic mountains just on the coast it's a pretty big lake got some islands in there it's got a radio station at the end of the lake and you can make your approach right over that radio station and land on the lake and uh so i'm coming and i think oh i'm a little early i must have a tailwind it's clear and i see the lake and i see a white white sand around it i don't remember a beach on the lake but okay it must be nice so i pull the power to land and i get right down almost the land and i see that it's not a lake it's a burnt over area where it's been clear-cut and been set on fire and it's black like the lake and i see stags sticking up 10 15 feet high everywhere and i'm down in them and i just pull the power and just go out the jaws of death just trying to pull that thing straight back out of there what i didn't realize is that what i thought was a beach was a logging road going around this cut over area oh my gosh so you can just sometimes your mind can just fool you something terrible how much are you making when you're starting to run the stuff from pakistan up to we didn't make much i i don't remember how much we paid for but we should have made a lot but it had too much yak fat in it and it wouldn't stay lit and i think we found too much water yak fat they take the fat they take the fat from the yak and take the marijuana um the glue or the the the juice from the marijuana and uh in rub it with their hands like this till it gets hot and they make cashe and if they put the yak fat in it to make it stick together and if you put too much on it won't stay lit on their cigarette uh so it just broke the price way down so just wasn't that it's what no no more cocaine deals once you went over to europe no i stayed away from that okay um so yeah i did i did another i did a load of cocaine to australia the biggest ever in the history of australia i got caught with 400 million dollars worth down there when was this after you moved to europe yeah how did this how did this deal come about and who are you doing business with was it the same guy that you met in mallorca no we don't we don't split it now he's done he doesn't rip me off real bad okay i got to prison i escaped from the uh i they arrested me in spain i i skated three times and the third time they put me in jail there in mallorca and so were in jail and so in prison in my your country um i was they took me to court for extradition i had double extradition germany's asking for my extradition for this ashish a guy to haul the load and the united states is asking because i owe them 25 years special parole and they're asking for that and they say that they got me from moving several million dollars with the gold coins that they said they could have before money laundering they said he moved these gold coins at the united states government would have seized had they named it known they belonged to reeves that was the indictment wow carried five years and i got five years for it but uh germany wanted me because they just made up some [ __ ] oh just it's anything to get you to extradite me so now because now barry was gone they really had nothing else on you so they just made something up so uh i paid the german captain of my ship four hundred thousand dollars to haul a load of hashish he uh bought and he bought him a long cigar and a long bmw and uh the police arrested him they found the money and they said if you'll tell us who it is you'll be home by christmas but they didn't tell him which christmas he got seven years up in germany so now they've arrested me in spain after i got away from so much they handcuffed me this way like over my hands this way everywhere i go and it's very painful if you left that way overnight oh yeah i can imagine you can't get out of them that way so uh let me see so anyway they take me to court and uh mari's there and my son and there for the extradition hearing and i have four guards guarding me all my paperwork says use maximum restraints so because you had already escaped so and they got my history from uh interpol so i'm sitting and i talked to the lawyer i said i wonder i'm above the palm trees how high is this place i'm on the third floor he said you killed yourself and i said i'm dead anyway i've got this thing three and a half tons of hashish charge in germany and 25 years parole in america plus the coins right so i bound across it when two of them leave to go smoke i bound across the room and jumped up on the desk of the sonographer which is nine months pregnant and i kicked the window out of the courtroom and i jump up on the ledge i'm handcuffed like not like this no i'm in front of me oh you're in front of me in court and uh so i look down and it's an awful awful long way i thought there might be some power lines or telephone wires i could grab on the way down and break it but they wasn't and there was a car parked a little bit up on it it looked like it was a station wagon and i worked on the los angeles fire department practice jumping in the net from four floors so i'd bailed out and hit the top of that car wham and uh the room what was that what was your strategy when you were falling from the uh i hit right on my heels and my butt right in and the roof caved in and saved my life and but it went down and destroyed that car and they were in the uh like in a sitting position you landed yeah okay but more on my feet and i still have a dead spot in my back from that jump it gets hot if i get upside or something i have to get it off so uh i i mean it was like donald duck i jumped out of the car and ran anyhow the next day the newspaper said spider-man escapes anyhow they caught me and they asked that i'd come to germany and germany gave me eight years for using a german citizen in an international crime they didn't have any hashish or nothing but because i'd hired a german citizen and he told if he'd kept his mouth shut there'd been nothing so i got eight years up there so you let so you spent the next eight years of your life in germany no after one year i escaped from lubeck maximum security prison what yeah i don't think anybody ever escaped so i went out to the bars and got all cut up real bad and hurt and and lost my clothes and got my shoes and this wasn't this wasn't some sort of like tunneling escape right oh no i cut through the went through the bars and went and went up got on the roof and went above the guard towers and then i jumped down on one guard tower by the sally port and bailed over the fence into a pile of dirt a sand pile and got away and a woman was there i watched her and it was raining real hard and i'd lost my clothes most of them and i had my blue jeans on and i watched her and a little boy come and she brought her husband to the door and when she went back i jumped on top of the the guard tower which was one floor below me and the guy went hey it was a tin roof and they're trained to kill you i mean they got oh he said the moves out there and then i went across and i went straight towards her so so he couldn't shoot me and then i went around behind the cars and was running downhill i mean striding and here her bam bam she's up on the sidewalk knocking the parking meters over trying to kill me and i jump behind some car and she just yeah yeah yeah yeah at me and the little boy standing in the seat she she tore the fender off of her car on another car trying to get me really i jumped over a fence and they cut my hands all up they had glass on top of it and i had shoes on with two hundred dollars that mario had slipped me in the prison and my shoes went down i went almost half my knees in the mud and the blood and cut my chest all up oh man and uh so i took off running and lost my shoes and my 200 now i'm barefooted and just a pair of blue jeans no top on and i get away and get to holland and you got to holla you crossed the border across the border i had a heck of a time at what point did you meet up with mari i didn't she was mad with me told me to go back [Laughter] ouch why was she mad because you escaped you're destroying my life what do you mean oh my god that police gonna be here anytime i can't get the papers out of the house what do i do with them right bury them under a rock i don't care so i think she was about she was tired of it at that time how old were you at this point when you escaped that prison in germany it was 1990 so i was uh 47 years old 47 years old wow and what did you do when you got to holland i uh i met up with mari's cousin and she had buried a hundred thousand dollars for me on the on the place there in case i did get out and she told me you go to the linden linden tree you go to the haystack and you go to the linden tree and you turn right and you go ten steps but she didn't tell me there's 20 linden trees we have we had fun so they were messing with you huh no no i mean mari just just remembered how she got to where she buried it so i got an iron rod and just i finally found it okay got some money and then i got me some clothes i stayed there for a while got a passport and i went back to south america and then i went back to see the colombians and the people that i knew and stayed there for a while and then i got a job to take a boat to australia with a ton of cocaine on it so i took a boat down there and i got caught took a boat from from columbia i bought the boat in homer louisiana and i took it to australia from there what kind of boat was it it was a oil supply vessel when it goes out to the oil wells okay and when they get old they can't get insurance on them so they sold this scrap but that's something you could eat off the engine room floor oh really like a museum piece how long how big was it how long was it like 100 footer 100 footer yeah and how did you um where did the cocaine come from it came they loaded me in the middle of the atlantic ocean just above the equator oh really a tuna boat came out old wooden tuna boat and came to me in rough weather and throwed it over just they threw it over they threw it over the deck they swarmed over and stole everything they could they wanted my food my extra fuel oh really oh where's here's a bunch of savages and who how many people how many people are on your crew on that ship three of us just three of you me by myself really i had my brother-in-law with me and the columbian that got on him both of them were seasick and couldn't stand up and didn't know how to do anything i had to cook and wash the dishes oh my gosh and how long so tell me talk to me tell me about this trip from from the caribbean where they loaded up your ship to australia what was that like well that was that was interesting i um i left home of louisiana i never never run the ship before and i mean it was a learning curve for me and somebody left the um water on down in one of the bathrooms we only had 600 gallons of fresh water because we'd change it all to fuel so we ran out of water before we got to key west so i had to go into key west and get water and then i took off and went across the tongue of the ocean through the bahamas and i went to um senegal what's the islands off of the the anyhow some island 600 miles off of senegal and uh i can't think of the name of them right now i mean i stayed there weak the colombians told me they'd load me there like uh barbados no no this is a this is uh what canary no south of the canary is about a thousand miles i can't think of it i know what is good is my own name i know that prayer is the name of the town oh it's anyhow senegal okay and uh so i stayed there and then the colombians said no come back towards columbia a thousand miles now what because i just got enough money just the fuel just barely to make it to australia so i have to go back a thousand miles and then they're not there and i have to go three or four days cruising around up and down below the radar of the other satellites and finally they show up and throw the stuff on and [Music] then i go down and i go follow the center of the atlantic ocean down because the current goes counterclockwise in the southern ocean clockwise in the northern oceans and i went far south of cape town and went down went down about 50 degrees in the great southern ocean near antarctica and i came with it and uh i woke up one morning and the waves was i fished in alaska remember yeah these waves was just in un indescribably tall it wasn't rough but they were just mountains giant swells just swells and it was sharp i mean almost straight up and down and the boat would come and it would just come up and it would stop and go and then the propellers would come out of the water and it'd be surf down it and then surf down it and the nose would stick in the ground in the water it come back over well i was real uncomfortable i said i was supposed to go under towards melbourne so i i got out of it and i turned north north to get out of that sharp latitude and i went unloaded um i went unloaded up about the middle of the west australian coast in a real desert area and was arrested there but i i have visions and two weeks before i was arrested i had a crystal clear vision of me being arrested how it was in my feelings i uh i was they was on my back with the hands and putting the handcuffs on me and i was in the sand with the down there and i was crying and i was just laying poor poor poor mari i knew our life was over together and it happened exactly like i saw it in that vision so i turned my ship from it went 500 miles from where i want boat to go but the snitch was waiting on me so i didn't have any choice who was the snitch a guy named eduardo the uh the owner's brother uh friend and he had been working with him from day one so they knew all we were coming from before we left so your vision of this all this happening and everything falling apart came came to fruition yes so what happened after they arrested you well they put us in a bullet-proof vans one of those things like armored trucks and took us to prison wow and how many and you ended up obviously so you didn't escape that prison right you stayed away no i didn't i i could have one time and mari wouldn't send the little money and needed to have some help tomorrow was pissed at you she ain't gonna help me get out were you were you guys in communication at all did you guys communicate every day australia prisons is so much nicer than the american prisons really yeah oh they give you a long time it's hard but they treat you good the food's good the officers seem to go to school to have a little more intelligence than just the scumbags that they have the officers are way different oh yeah i feel like i've always i've always thought with all the people that i've talked to that i've been in and out of prison especially on this podcast is that the people that end up in the united states that end up being prison guards are like the people who couldn't even make it as cops they couldn't make it as security guards they are the lowest lie scum on the face of the earth and it seems like that the people that are the security guards or prison guards in this country they're they're not people that are there because that's what they wanted to be it's because they failed at something else and they just they got a job and they got a badge and they got authority and they just strut right you woke up and went on you get talked to ugly too they kill people in there they hurt you and the prison guards in australia was it like they were they were paid better they were educated more they actually all of that was there like more of like a a sense of like a mission to get something done there like we gotta oh it wasn't good but it was just not it wasn't such hatred as these fools here have for you it just didn't really ring for it oh you had some nasty ones once in a while right they'd be black one out of 20 or 30 might be nasty okay but here you get every other one that's nasty right good 50 of them there's some nice ones here too but it's rare so how many years did you stay in that prison in australia 18 years 18 years and it was the most maximum security prison that there is in that country the most most secure prison in the southern hemisphere the most secure prison in the southern hemisphere which no one has yet wow and what was your experience like there for 18 years when i first went in i'd been in a week or two and when they've got my paperwork that i escaped from five different prisons they came and arrested me right where i was having supper and they took me to that prison i was in the haycare prison they took me to a kazarina prison and they put me in a shoe and i was in there for over a year and uh and that's it this shoe is basically just an isolated box just by yourself well there was five of us in this okay and it was uh it had room for 12 prisoners in there and they had uh it was like kind of like the silence of the lambs that was a big cage and they had uh six guards on the other side looking at you through a one-way mirror and they come in the morning with all of them had uh big clubs and they opened the door and they brought food in we cooked it ourselves and then they come in at six o'clock and locked our doors and that was it that's all we had in them you had a little you could talk to them through a through a speaker and that was all it wasn't bad but it's just like how long am i gonna be in here and that's when i had the uh i wondered okay i've got 25 years in america and i escaped from the german prison i've done this got life here i might never see my children and my grandchildren they might ever know me i believe i'll write about when i my grandma bought me the little horse and they had a computer room in there you so you were you were there for life you thought you were there for life i was hoping i'd get out i certainly behaved myself i had to go 18 years before i could ask for parole so um i'd write it down okay when i got the mexican pinto i'm gonna write that story tomorrow so they had the little computer room there and uh i didn't know how to turn the thing on and it had a thing called uh paintbrush it didn't have a program on it so i could type so i could type one line and then the next day i think about when my daddy was robbed in chattanooga and i write that little story and then i got where i'd write two or three of them a day and in the end of about three or four months i had over a million words written in one line wow so when i got out of the shoe they gave it to me on on disk and i went and uh got out and they they let me buy a computer they let p let you buy a computer oh really yeah it wasn't hooked up to anything but you could do all the you could put a lot of programs on it like encyclopedias and like a laptop or something it was a full-on computer and where did you keep it in your in your cell yeah really had a sale with a door and a lock to it and yeah a little while it's pretty nice they know why about it now compared to america it's quite no internet though no okay nothing like that but you had telephones and it wasn't expensive i call mario every day for 20 minutes so anyway i took that thing out and it took me two years to straighten out what all i had written saw what it was all different colors where i'd misspelled and just i just put what my thoughts so you went through and edited it and revised it so i had to write it really because i was just writing my thoughts as fast as i could just put them so that's how i did it so i took it out and i i got uh uh i i took two thirds of it out so there's only 520 pages they'd have been 1500 pages if i'd put it all in there wow and you have it published into a book now which is called what's it called smuggler the smuggler yo just smoke just smuggler no smuggler roger reeves a memoir a memoir and it's on the amazon best-selling list and uh it's just done good i enjoyed it it's a it's fascinating and you have the audio going to be done soon it's already done i'm just waiting for amazon approval right right yeah so what did you take away from from all of this from this crazy amazing life that you've had and after after all the time well well actually let's go back because you were you were in australian prison for 18 years but once you got out of prison there you went to another prison right horrible i was treated something terrible when i there was three marshall three australian marshals with me i come back handcuffed because there's a warrant from the united states from parole from 1977 43 years ago for possession of marijuana i got off the airplane laughing and chatting with the australian guards i was slammed upside the wall by border protruding eyes forward hours forward kicking my legs apart putting handcuffs on me so hard to cut the blood off leg irons iron as far as and they want me about a hundred yards turned me over to the marshals the marshals took some of the leg irons and stuff off chained me to the wall and left me there all day then they took me to the metropolitan detention center on conair no i was just in a van there was los angeles they took me to metropolitan detention center in los angeles and put me into isolation i said what in the world am i in isolation for i've done nothing and i said three or four days and i talked to a lieutenant when he come by in the morning he said nothing i can do for you reeves so there's a guy came there and he was in a suit nice-looking fella he opened it up he said hello reeves i just want to see what you look like my name is uh associates warden short and i saw your national geographic documentary me and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation and he shut the little judas window and that's the last i saw i never could get out of there so i stayed in nine months without a hearing which the parole board has to give you one within three months they never did give me one i paid the lawyer 7 500 his name was canon up in san francisco uh he never once made a phone call never and somebody got to him what was his name marty christopher cannon christopher christopher cannon a lawyer in san francisco that the pro board said don't touch it and he stole my 7 500 and never made one phone call that bastard i mean thoroughbred thoroughbred yeah wow so what was the documentary he was talking about national geographic come down to australia and they did one on me called australia's hardest prison and they did one i got some some action in that one because i was looking for that online i couldn't find i saw something on that on a history channel they take it off after a while i understand national geographic doesn't then they put it back on it was real big at one time okay yeah so i remember searching for it and i couldn't find it i got a copy of it okay and i got several copies of i could see him when he won it so how long did you end up staying in los angeles metropolitan they sent me to um they sent me on the con air to oklahoma and there i got put on the floor but i had to report to the officer every two hours or they was going to go back in the shoe so i was i couldn't believe it and uh i just saw the corruption of the conair and whoever whatever congressman senator jones at i bet oh yeah explain that i met people from wake rose georgia albany georgia jacksonville florida and they got caught with two grams of something three grams five grams they facing five years and they mentally probably little problems with mental a lot of prisoners do and they were being sent to los angeles for psychiatric evaluation and it takes about three months to go and a month or two to come back and they stay in oklahoma and they go from one place to another on conair until they finally get to some doctor in los angeles it says that they have a problem or not and then i met the ones from los angeles and san francisco and they were going to atlanta georgia to have psychiatric evaluation so no matter where you got busted for these small-time drug offenses they would find a psychic or a psychiatric uh psychologist on the opposite end of the country so they could shuffle you back and forth so they had a reason to fly con air all around the country it's just blatant ripping off the government that's as bad as obviously who owns conarry i might be back in prison that's interesting who can you find out maybe on google like who owns conair you would think that would just be part of the bop right no what if somebody owns it the other bop wouldn't be doing that how many how many uh airplanes do they have does is i saw three big jets there's three jets and then they got a lot of that's all i know but that that tower in uh oklahoma which is center it's got 1800 rooms and those planes are landing and coming in there day and night it's just like grand central station of federal prisoners why are they moving them like that i don't know somebody's making big big money whoa that is kind of wild i had no idea about that yeah he's trying to inch it over you just double click the top yeah it probably won't tell you the truth fit fleet size 59 parent company con air group inc headquarters abbotsford british columbia canada they have 59 planes conair group inc so it's a corporation yep whoa they own some politicians i guarantee you oh yeah they're uh wow man wow that's [ __ ] that's what a world we live in roger we live in i'm telling you that is incredible incredibly corrupt the whole system is yeah let me just tell you about the drug war today i'm not talking about but done a policeman gets a job here in any town there's a 10 or 15 of them going this year and one of them he's a go-getter and he lets his hair grow and he gets some tattoos and some dirty clothes and he goes under the bridge and he gets one of those poor mental mentally ill people bombs hobos and they sell two or three or five grams to their neighbor over there and he arrests both of them federally now he's got two and next month he does it and he's got two more in the end of the year he's got 15 or 20 major drug busts and he does that for two or three years and uh the other fellow he's he's at a desk somewhere and his this guy mates captain this guy's a captain that got the desk one no the one the one that makes all these little tiny busts all these insignificant nothing he's just putting four people in prison right now he's captain now he's lieutenant now he's captain now he's he goes up the ladder rocket now the prosecutor the one that can say i got him i got him he has two grams of methamphetamine two grams ladies and gentlemen of the jury he has five give him five years in prison no matter about his poor wife and children crying give him put him in prison we need we need father for this for these private prisons and for the federal system oh boy we got him and if i'm a prosecutor and i get enough convictions i got a 98 conviction rate i'm going to make judge and i'll never lose my job at 500 000 a year it's all about climbing the ladder just climbing the ladder and making money wow yeah exactly how it works that judicial system is just so so corrupt are you familiar with the story of um uh ross albrecht no he's a uh he was a kid he was in his early 30s when he got busted he got like two life sentences for uh he started this website it's like a it was it's called silk road it was basically like this dark web um place where people can go buy any kind of drugs they want so it's like an online marketplace for people to buy anything they want as long as it didn't like the only rules were you can't harm people or you can't like you can't order people to get murdered or you can't there's no human trafficking allowed but it was mainly used for drugs so you could buy any kind of drugs that you wanted online and it was kept anonymous like each all the buyers and sellers were protected because they used this form of currency called bitcoin which is a cryptocurrency and it's it's easily you can easily keep the uh people making the transactions anonymous and he was just created a website basically that anyone could go on there and make a transaction and he took a small fee and he ended up getting two life sentences because he didn't take the deal the office they obviously offered him a really big um a really big plea deal and he didn't take it they thought he could beat it and there was a bunch of corrupt corrupt agents involved in his case and the kid got the kid got basically he got double the sentence that el chapo got and he was just some 20 year old kid that made a website an ecommerce website that's i mean that story really hit home for me as far as exposing like the real issues of the judicial system in this country and they made a documentary about it and it's just disgusting it's sick it's disgusting vomiting sick on the floor i mean here i am i served 33 years mostly for marijuana and i walk out and big billboards relax we deliver your marijuana to your house it's just like in the prohibition those guys got 12 years in alcatraz for making whiskey they went when they got out and the law was passed the next year yes but you broke the law then right you got to stay and after 12 years they walk out of alcatraz and walk across the street and get them a drink out of the bar right that's the insane things happening it's insane man it's stupid i mean president jimmy carter had it all most of the prison a great portion of the prison is from mentally incapacitated or people that are somewhat have some problems they had problems from probably their early childhood they were unwanted unloved orphanaged foster home beaten abused men and women and they come to prisons and they treat other people that way we need help for these people it's a selfish it's a it's a social issue it's an issue that society owes to the people that we have here is there any country that's doing it right like obviously we're doing it worse than anybody we have more people locked up per capita than any other country in the world right is that is there anybody who who's doing this right uh same thing we could take from another country and learn from them i understand portugal oh holland holland holland absolutely holland's great at it and oh didn't holland legalize like uh heroin or something i don't know exactly what they did where you can you can go i heard that you that if you uh if you're addicted to heroin or you want to if you want to use heroin you can actually go to a doctor and they'll give you like a clean needle and they'll give you like an oh yes that's been a long time there and even birmingham england does it and they got proof listen the people clean up the prostitutes clean up the people get a job but america goes into birmingham and says you can't do that you can't set a precedent like this we must have our prisons full so they fight so hard the american judicial system the dea they won't they want this stuff to go on it's wrong i mean it's wrong in the eyes of man and god it's just wrong they take these people and you take them away from their children their families and they take their homes i mean they work for forever inherited from their grandmother they just you better believe if they some money in it they're there to get it so it's just wrong do you think it'll ever change what do you think there's a course is going to change it can't be that's already swung hard the other way now you just got to it's just just what what's the answer like how like what kind of what sort of steps do you think it's it's gonna we're gonna have to take to make this be a health issue if a guy's got a heroin addict let's just say heroin egg they know right now that this craton if they will take those tablets they have no withdrawal whatsoever but the uh federal drug administration tried them correctly they fight it hard they don't want it right it's just like the marijuana oil relieving all these pains they don't want it they fight it hard and they pay their politicians they got lobbyists walking the halls of congress you get trips and you get money and you can do anything for you we've got big pharmaceutical companies that produce pills but we got oxycontin we got we got vicodin you got to go get go to the doctor and get a prescription to some opiates yeah that's the answer yeah not this unregulated stuff exactly so they it but it's coming to light it's slowly slowly slowly coming to light this is this is wrong it is it's it's it's terrifying and then another thing is is parenting i feel like parenting is is so important and a lot of the people that end up in prisons a lot of people that end up in the streets homeless addicted to drugs it seems like the the catalyst the one thing the most the one common denominator across all these people is is messed up childhoods and absolutely and parents that weren't prepared for children my mantra is that a couple should have a permit before they have a baby that might be mean but a little sparrow builds her nest before she lays an egg the problem is how the problem is you can't stop them from having babies though right stop them but you you have to perm have to have a permit to ride a moped on the streets of america right how much more important is to bring a child into it my daughter who's a doctor she delivered a baby to an 11 year old child your daughter delivered a baby from 11 year old child four generations in the waiting room all on welfare wow 12 14 youngins that's the problem is even if you put in a law like that people are still going to breed people are still going to have babies i don't say they wouldn't but i'm just saying that's the answer to it to educate people to encourage people to have a mother and a father have a home have a living have some get babies we want instead of babies that we're just going to get for the welfare check that's awful to encourage the wrong people to have babies should it encourage the right people to have babies i don't know the answers roger i don't think we have them but anyhow that's the question now and that gets the answer it is a question that's a very hard question it's a very dicey it's a very dicey subject and it's it's i don't know i don't know what the answer is but yeah i totally agree that having you know having a child is definitely one of the most important like serious decisions that you could possibly make i mean you're you're creating another life i mean that is going to set up depending on how you raise that small baby child [Music] depending on on how conscientious you are how prepared you are how willing you are to be committed to doing that i mean that's going to send that human being into a spiral one way or the other whether it be good or bad and the effects the consequences the repercussions of of it going wrong of it going the bad way are exponential so it's just yeah i don't know the answers it's it's a definitely a dicey topic because you can't take away people's human rights to reproduce but at the same time you know i can you know it's the logic is is obviously there like you can't just have people reproducing just because there's a financial gain or just for the hell of it you know let's have a kid and then you know it's on its own exactly um i don't know what to say about it but there is an answer i know that if the government would take this as a health issue and part of it is being family planning and spend a tenth of the money that they did on eradicating the marijuana from the country right what a world we would live in right it's all about money right it's all about money allocated education is huge right what was it uh victor hugo says no one hears uh close the school open to prison right yeah because i mean there's so many stories of people who who had abusive childhoods who had parents that that weren't there they were neglected all their lives you there's so many stories of like the biggest success stories they're people that had messed up childhoods right and but it shouldn't be obviously it's rare it's rare not all kids that have messed up childhoods end up end up successful but if they had the access like if they i i think it puts like if you're if you come up from an early stage in your life with lots of obstacles in your way and you've and you over you're able to overcome a lot and you have to deal with this you don't have a very difficult life it puts something in you i think that it makes you hungry right so i think if those people are hungry and they have access to get educated or to go learn or say hey it's not going to cost me you know i have to go out and figure out a way to make a hundred dollars this week am i either gonna spend my hundred dollars on food or drugs or am i gonna spend 100 on getting an education they're obviously going to choose survival over education so but if those kids had access to some sort of a free education and we took care of people who didn't have money who actually wanted to learn and wanted to get better that would be better for society right because we would have in the country we'd have we would have less losers we would have less people that are just that are just leeching off the system does that make sense it makes sense but also you want to have people that are educated you don't have you you want that that's the goal like in our community as a country like if you want to take care of we want to think of the country as one community as unfortunate as it is we think of people as right and left democrat republican whatever we wanted so polarized we if we thought about it as one community and we want to educate our community to make it better you want people to be you want people to have the access to the education to get better i'll tell you what what for a son maybe a daughter too if they had a father to put their arm around him and said son you should study this or you should do this i encourage you to do that that's needs that indeed in in addition to the choice of where you're going to do that or another you need good parents to make make recommendations and also you shouldn't put such high standards for college and that sort of stuff to everybody right they should put i mean you know you know by seventh grade eighth grade whether a child is going to be a certain university material or not start them in trade school right and our our prison system should be only trade schools yeah you get a young thief comes in there and the judge says oh they gave him a run said okay you could be an electrician we need electricians we need plumbers we need okay your sentence is to become an electrician when you get a class a license to be electrician you walk out the door boy you see them straighten up and stop taking the drugs and uh and right and that way when they get out they actually have a path you go to work thirty dollars fifty dollars an hour whatever and i mean it's not fair to the people out there but if if they do a crime why just set them there just in a cell right you can have one teacher to 20 30 guys and when they pass the test and they can do it let them loose that's their sentence and we'd have workers and the hardest thing also about about the whole the whole prison system is that i've talked about this before but once you're once you're in the system it's almost like even once you're out once you once you get released it's almost like you have those shackles on you for life because there's things like probation there's things like uh restitution you know you're always checking in there's only certain things you can do certain things you can't do if you do accidentally slip up once bam you're done i had 30 years of that they gave me 25 years special parole anytime you violate it you would conserve all apart and on top of that sir i'm giving you 5 000 hours community service you can do it shoveling horse [ __ ] in the zoo and on top of that you're going to pay all the cost of prosecution and on top of that i'm giving you 30 years for this five more years for that it's just ridiculous how what year did you get out i got it last year last year you got out 14 months right now wow man wow i stayed in another nine months it was harder than the 18 years in australia in isolation here for parole violation from 1977 for possession of marijuana that somebody was after me they wouldn't let the lawyer talk and they wouldn't let me out of isolation so what happened after you were in that nine months isolation in los angeles they let me out and i went home and you're a free man no i was on parole and i didn't know how long i'd be on parole but you were at least you were able to go home my wife and and the covid was out and the parole officers didn't come and so after a year they said we dropped the parole you're free i got my passport i got my driver's license i got my pilot's license wow i'm ready to go wow man what an incredible fascinating story so he went back and got my pilot uh polish license and went and went went down and rented a plane for a day i had a good time so what's your goals now what's uh what's what's next for roger reeves what's next on the in the uh what's the next chapter for you i just don't know what's going on i'm gonna take it one day at the time i'm just happy to be home tomorrow no more plane loads of marijuana no that's over over the horizon radar oh that's incredible you and your wife uh the bond that you guys were able to form and the the the way you guys were able to stay together for that long period of time even though you were gone for 30 33 yes years is this is so amazing i never heard of it i've never heard of it i've never heard of that i mean it's rare you hear of that with people that don't didn't go to prison yeah let alone did have to be isolated for 33 years it's just it's just unbelievable she waited that long what is the key what's the what's the secret what's the secret tell me the secret she's just a she's a christian person she's lovely i mean she's just like too good for this earth i said what did you tell amari you're beautiful she said i told him i'm not available and said that worked yeah so bless your heart it waited on me all that time i tell y'all when i came home there was the same table a round oak table that i'd sanded in and there was the same place mats that i had left 35 years ago last season there was the same silverware in the same place i just sit there and cried just like oh just just it took me three days i couldn't even look at pictures of her when she was 40 and when she was 50 and when she was 60 i wasn't there yeah so how did it make you feel made me feel sick still i don't like to look at the pictures and i was going that many years half of my life i was in those prison cells it just was oh maybe i certainly i broke the law of my outlaw but i'm not much of a criminal i don't i don't hurt nobody i'm i'm for good in this world just uh just got caught up in this and did it yeah and there were so many people like you too that got caught up in that in that part of history you could you can pull up almost any port in the world and you just saved rio and say i'm going to pay all of you a million dollars to hold this load of cocaine we might get caught you could sync the ship with young men and women to get on it so true man it would it's so true [Music] well roger i think uh i think we did it i think we covered pretty much everything is there anything that we missed that's uh important that we left out i can't thank you enough for coming down about um a baby deer in alaska mari wants to bring up a baby deer oh what happened with the baby deer in alaska we can wrap it up with that story oh that's just a whole nother story in itself we went to might not fit right in now will you it's okay we can still tell that all right i'll just tell her about the baby let's tell let's we're gonna wrap it up with the baby deer story all right maury and i went to alaska in 1972 and bought a salmon trawler it was an old sailboat it was a bristol day gill netter and somebody put a little gasoline engine in it i think 38 feet and we went salmon fishing with our little daughter at five years old and uh oh we catch those great king salmon put them in on the ice and uh we come into goddard hot springs and anchor the boat in the evening sometimes to go for the hot spring and shower oh it was nice and sharks would cut the salmon in two on the way up sometimes and we'd hang the head up and get several stakes behind and then one day a little boy was crying on the radio that his boat was on fire that he's blowing up his daddy's legs was crooked and blood was coming out of his ears and help help help him so pretty soon the coast guard was flying and i said what strong where i was here and so they told us to be watching for an overturned boat or float burn boat yeah and i had the little boys cries on my mind all day and i was cleaning shaman back on the back and i turned and looked and there was a bow of a boat coming up i was almost to hit it so i ran up out of the fish hole and knocked the boat out of gear and then i saw my mistake it was not a it was not an overturned boat it was a giant blue whale that was surfacing under my boat and he blew his stuff all over me i could have gapped him from where i was everything was huge anyway i had four cables out there six thousand pound chest each and he wrapped himself in those things or they got around him and he went down and that back of that boat went backwards faster like a cork going backwards faster and it never went forward they took all the gear off and all the stuff just bent down my lifeboat and all that just splintered so we was out of business so we said let's take a vacation so we did all of southeast alaska just putting from one place to the other and we'd go into some of these bays it was just very seldom visited and we were looking for glass balls the orientals used to have glass blowers on their boats and they didn't have corks so they put these glass balls some of them that big some this big most of them about that big and they would put floaters on the on the nets and in the storms and the rot and they lost a lot of them in the the pacific ocean is 70 million square miles and those things are drifting round and round out there and in the storms of alaska in the wintertime some of them get caught up behind this the brush on the on the beaches so mario walked one way and i'd walk there's always a bunch of bears and i'd take a 44 and she'd take the uh the rifle and we walked different places looking for those glass balls and i came up to a big granite boulder at the end and a doe ran out and behind her was a was a grizzly and the grizzly she turned around because she was kind of caught and he knocked her down in the surf and i just thought oh you rascal and i took my pistol and shot a bow and he stopped and looked at me and then he looked and he loped going off you shot the grizzly bear no i just shot you shot at him just shot in the air and scouted get out of here right so i walked on up there and there was a doe laying there and the little waves lapping up and i looked oh i saw why she was giving birth and the little nose was sticking out oh no so i drugged her out on the beach and i took out a razor sharp salmon knife with a spoon on the back and i cut her open and took the little fawn out i dried him off and put it down my coat sleeve i had a red and white flat cut how big was he he was about big as a cat and long legs though and i put him down my coat sleeve and i went down murray what did you shoot i said i shot a grizzly and she laughed i said put your hand down here i'm not about to put my hand down your sleeve anyway she did the little deer was just just beautiful and we took him and put him on the boat in a box on the boat but he wouldn't eat anything and wouldn't drink any milk so we said he gonna die well we had left our daughter a couple of days with some friends in sitka alaska and we went back and she met us down at the beach on the dock and when she saw the little deer she held him oh she was five years old and he took her by the ear and started sucking just like it was his mama so we got a little baby doll bottle and put some milk in it put it behind it and it was running all down her ear and the milk and he got to it so we we filled him up on milk anyway that we took him on we had to put burlap on the boat so he could walk around and we raised him for the next month or so that was on the boat and going on vacation and uh so when we got ready to go back uh i was still in the fire department and los angeles taking a leave of absence we had to go back and what we do we named him flag after the little flag on his tail after marjory walters walton's a book the yearling and so i bought a big shopping bag with a zipper and i put flag inside now then he's about knee-high and he's rather spunky so mario has two bottles and i put him on walked on the plane and put him in the seat under the seat my feet over him and halfway down to seattle he gets to crying for his bottle so the stewardess comes by and marty said would you heat these please and she said where's the baby so i said shall we show him he said yes so he zipped it up and flagged popped his head up and oh all of them had to come look at him captain he says i smuggled everything on my plane but never over here well you let my wife see this when you get so we did so we took him on to redondo beach with us and he got too big he got where he could just jump six or eight feet high and he was afraid he'd hurt our little girl so we gave him some people up in the apple valley that had a horse ranch and he stayed up there and we went to visit him he had a huge rack of antlers on him an unusual deer because none none in california like that so we got a call one day and he said some dog scared flag and he jumped that eight-foot fence and he got away we said all right so the next year we saw an article in the newspaper that a strange deer and they had picture of flag was nuzzling some tourists in angelese national park and they took him and the rangers took him and they took him to santa claus village where he spent the rest of his life in a petting zoo oh my god one of santa's reindeer yeah wow what a story that is unbelievable roger thank you again thank you i appreciate you doing this uh tell people listening and watching where they can find your book find it on amazon or kindle smuggler by roger reeves that's right and i'll put a link in the uh in the show notes below okay good it's been a real pleasure my pleasure too roger [Music] you

Channel: KONCRETE

Views: 219,636

Keywords: Koncrete, podcast, underground, exclusive, independent, interview, interviews, koncrete podcast, documentary, american made, medellin cartel, barry seal, pablo escobar, barry seal and pablo escobar, roger reaves, smuggler, drug pilot

Id: EO25tusPIbM

Length: 159min 50sec (9590 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021