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  JACKPOT

  High Times, High Seas,

  and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs

  JASON RYAN

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  To Elizabeth, who provided love

  and encouragement from the start.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jason Ryan

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design by Sheryl Kober

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ryan, Jason.

  Jackpot : high times, high seas, and the sting that launched the war on drugs / Jason Ryan.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-59921-976-9

  1. Drug traffic—United States. 2. Marijuana—United States. 3. Drug control— United States. I. Title.

  HV5825.R93 2011

  363.450973—dc22

  2010054487

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART I: THE GENTLEMEN SMUGGLERS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART II: OPERATION JACKPOT

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Notes

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Charleston, South Carolina

  August 2008

  The wind whipping through downtown Charleston mattered little to the young girl throwing Pop-Its firecrackers on the sidewalk of Meeting Street, her arm flinging the paper-wrapped explosives to the bluestone. They snapped despite swift gusts that feathered their fall. Farther along, the wind tossed the hair of the family posing for a picture in front of a mansion, and gusted past the women selling sweetgrass baskets a block away on the steps of the city’s main post office, next to the Charleston Federal Courthouse. The craftswomen struggled to control the flapping blankets placed beneath their woven wares, and one wondered if they feared seeing their larger, and most expensive, baskets blown halfway across town—$400 tumbleweeds skipping down cobblestone streets and racing past the creaking wooden wheels of tourist-filled horse-drawn carriages.

  The blustery weather was a welcome reprieve from South Carolina’s crippling August heat—a gift from Tropical Storm Fay, which zigzagged across Florida. Perhaps especially grateful were the South Carolina lawyers spared from sweating in their suits that week, including the pair heading to the federal courthouse for a sentencing hearing in the case of United States of America v. Ashley Brunson.

  The federal courthouse and its annex stood with the post office on the southwest corner of Charleston’s storied Four Corners of Law. Sharing the intersection were City Hall, the Charleston County Courthouse, and St. Michael’s Episcopal Church. Inside the old buildings of granite, marble, stucco, and brick, one could conveniently seek resolution in matters within municipal, local, federal, and spiritual jurisdictions, should one have that many problems. Ashley Brunson, for his part, had just one problem, though it was a serious one: his guilty plea two months earlier to a federal felony charge of conspiring to import tons of marijuana and hashish into the United States. More remarkable than the substance of his crime was that it had occurred three decades earlier. Brunson had dodged the long arm of the law for more than twenty-five years, spending much of that time sailing across the world. He now sat in Courtroom 2, handcuffed, awaiting his punishment.

  Courtroom 2 was small, no bigger than a classroom, and its pews held only a few spectators the morning of August 21, 2008. Considering Brunson had spent a lifetime on the run, the tiny crowd and absence of news crews wasn’t surprising. The man had been forgotten.

  He had been arrested a year earlier at the southern border of the United States, trying to enter California from Mexico with a passport bearing the name of a deceased man from Chicago. For decades he had used the alias without a problem, obtaining the false identification in 1985 and renewing the passport without incident in Seattle in 1995 and in Hong Kong in 2005. For some reason his passport raised a red flag on his entry to the United States in June 2007, and his fingerprints rang a match with the National Crime Information Center, revealing him as a wanted man. The computer database didn’t forget that Robert Ashley Brunson had been wanted since 1983, a fugitive from the largest drug investigation in South Carolina history—Operation Jackpot. Brunson had outlasted more than a hundred other men and a handful of women who went to jail for smuggling-related crimes. He was the last of South Carolina’s gentlemen smugglers.

  The only other remaining fugitive was his wife, Kathy, who hunkered down at their home in Mexico. In exchange for her freedom, Brunson pleaded guilty to helping smuggle sixty thousand pounds of marijuana and hashish into the United States. He had been tempted to fight the charges, to force the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt his involvement in smuggling ventures that occurred nearly three decades ago. Brunson and his lawyer knew the government’s roster of witnesses had been depleted in recent years, with key smugglers and kingpins passing away. Other potential witnesses refused to talk, just as they had during related trials held decades earlier. But Brunson chose to spare his wife the chance of incarceration, pleading guilty so long as the government agreed to leave her alone and drop the charges against her.

  During a plea hearing two months earlier, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Jendron, a veteran federal prosecutor in South Carolina, outlined Brunson’s offenses, which included driving a car loaded with hashish on June 9, 1980. Working by faint moonlight that night, Brunson helped transfer thirty thousand pounds of hashish off the seventy-one-foot ketch Second Life, which had just arrived at an abandoned dock near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, after sailing for more than two months from war-torn Beirut, Lebanon.

  “As it turned out, they were short of drivers,” Brunson told Chief U.S. District Judge David C. Norton at his plea hearing. “And I mistakenly volunteered.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” the judge responded, wryly.

  Jendron continued detailing the smuggling that occurred that evening. The prosecutor had devoted much of his career to Operation Jackpot, including four busy years in the 1980s when the bulk of Brunson’s coconspirators were brought to justice, many hauled into courtrooms after dramatic captures across the country and world. Jendron was the only federal prosecutor remaining in the U.S. attorney’s office from the Jackpot years, his colleagues from that era all using the investigation’s success as a springboard to other prominent positions.

  Jendron noted Brunson’s position as a crewman on the Love Affair, a forty-one-foot sailboat stopped by the Coast Guard off the Bahamas in November 1978, its cabin stuffed with nearly eight thousand pounds of Colombian pot. The Coast Guard had decided to perform a safety check of the sailboat after spying it one evening forty miles west of the island Great Inagua, its running lights suspiciously turned off., The check for proper safety equipment
would oftentimes result in the discovery of more serious infractions, as it did this time, when the Coast Guard boarding party couldn’t help but notice the abundance of pot packed below deck.

  “It was another time they needed an extra crew member, and I volunteered,” Brunson said to Norton.

  Now, at the sentencing hearing, with the wind blowing outside, the sixty-year-old Brunson was again before Norton, calmly seated and wearing a striped prison jumpsuit and glasses, his gray hair neatly combed. Brunson’s lawyer, Diedreich von Lehe III, asked the judge to consider America’s changed attitudes and laws toward drugs since Brunson committed his crimes.

  “It’s a case that took place in a different world,” von Lehe said. “It was a time before there was any such thing as President Reagan’s War on Drugs. It was a time when cocaine had not yet entered the scene, not to mention crack and the other scourges that we face today … There was no violence associated with drugs, people didn’t carry guns when they brought this stuff in, and they didn’t have shootouts.”

  Von Lehe argued that Brunson had been punished enough by being imprisoned for the last fourteen months on false passport charges, and, more painfully, by having isolated himself from his family for a quarter of a century. In 1983 Brunson was sitting in the cockpit of his sailboat in Antigua when he spied a man coming to the edge of a nearby dock. Peering through a pair of binoculars, Brunson saw it was his wife’s brother. In his hand was an indictment. Among the forty names on the indictment, Brunson soon read, were his own and his wife’s. In response, he pulled up the anchor and set sail, not to be seen by friends, family, or the authorities for twenty-five years. Among those left behind, too, was a young daughter, Brooke, whom he had conceived with another woman a few years prior. She was six when he last laid eyes on her on the island of Bequia.

  During his time abroad Brunson delivered yachts for wealthy clients, living in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Mexico. It was after a sixty-day sailing trip from Mexico to the Philippines in 1987 that he and his wife found out they’d soon be parents to twin boys. They stayed in the Philippines to start their family, then discovered Hong Kong, where real money could be made moving corporate pleasure junks between the British colony and Borneo, Malaysia, and Singapore. Once Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, many boats in the region were sold, and Brunson found work sailing them to Okinawa for their new Japanese owners. In time Brunson moved his young family to Mexico. Such adventure sounds romantic, von Lehe conceded to the court, but Brunson lived uneasily.

  “He wondered when there would be a knock at the door, so to speak, and the feds would be there to take him away,” said von Lehe. “It hasn’t been carefree for him.”

  Throughout the years Brunson would send home the occasional Mother’s Day or Christmas card. His older sister remembers seeing a picture of the boys when they were about four years old. The sporadic correspondence hardly made up for her brother’s absence. In a letter to the judge, she spoke of his flight and the hardship it caused.

  “He could not share the birth of his sons with his family. We do not know his wife. Ashley’s mother and father grew old and died. He was not there for them,” she wrote. “Two of his brothers died, and he did not know about it. I sent him a picture of myself, so he could recognize me as I am now seventy-seven years old. He doesn’t know his nieces and nephews. Ashley cut himself off from all his family, the love and companionship of all of us. I think family is important for Ashley, and this was a great sacrifice.”

  Brunson’s recent arrest and forced homecoming caused more turmoil in the lives of his loved ones. At home in Mexico, von Lehe said, the twins were devastated by their father’s apprehension. They knew their father by his alias, Lyle, and never questioned why they were an American family living abroad.

  “I can’t imagine any greater price that this gentleman has had to endure already and pay than having to tell his sons, ‘Boys, your father is not who you think he is,’ ” said von Lehe. “There can be no overriding purpose for this gentleman to get any punishment other than time that he has already served on this offense.”

  Norton listened to von Lehe’s arguments, wondering aloud how he could justify a sentence considerably lighter than ones received by Brunson’s coconspirators.

  “Because he didn’t do what he’s supposed to do, you want me to give him less, a time served sentence, plus his wife gets a walk,” said Norton. “So how do I justify that in the light of the ten or fifteen or twenty other people who got sixty months? One got three hundred months, some of them are on lifetime, you know, special probation … Tell me how to get around that, besides the fact of mercy.”

  Von Lehe said they would take mercy, if that’s how the judge wanted to characterize it. Norton seemed irked by this response.

  “Oh, I understand, nobody wants justice, okay? Nobody whoever walks into that door wants justice,” said the judge. “Everybody wants mercy.”

  As to the men who earned stiffer sentences in Operation Jackpot, von Lehe argued they were more senior members of the drug smuggling conspiracy. Brunson was a minnow among marlins.

  In fact, Brunson’s sister said in her letter, it was these men—a group of deviants “more sophisticated” than her brother—who led him down the wrong path.

  “He went away to the University of South Carolina with Dockers pants, cashmere sweaters, and a London Fog jacket,” she wrote, “and he came home with sandals, long hair, and a mustache.”

  Her words had merit. The kingpins who controlled much of the East Coast marijuana trade in the 1970s were not unaware of their corrupting influence, and even cautioned their potential associates about joining their informal smuggling fraternity. Indeed the kingpins seemed to have crystal balls in the pockets of their designer clothing, and could see that their decisions, no matter how carefully considered, would one day guarantee their presence in a courtroom. But when life is fast and fun, it’s one thing to read the writing on the wall and another to actually heed it.

  Decades earlier, upon paying Brunson for the first time for his participation in a smuggling run, Bob “The Boss” Byers remarked to his fellow kingpin, Barry “Flash” Foy, about the significance of the payout.

  “Barry, here he goes,” said Byers. “Another good man bites the dust.”

  A young Barry Foy in the Florida Keys, just as his smuggling career is taking off in the early 1970s. Courtesy of Barry Foy

  Les Riley in his hippie days. Courtesy of Les Riley

  Smugglers and friends relaxing at the docks, including Ashley Brunson, center, Les Riley, far right, and Jesse the black lab. Courtesy of Les Riley

  Smuggler Ken Smith. Courtesy of Ken Smith

  Les Riley and Barry Foy compete in a South Carolina fishing tournament. Foy is holding a baggie.

  Barry Foy, Les Riley, and Wally Butler with a day’s worth of king mackerel. Courtesy of Les Riley

  Bob “The Boss” Byers’s luxury sail- boat, La Cautiva, moored off Antigua.

  Barry Foy’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Jan Liafsha, in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. Courtesy of Barry Foy

  Les Riley with his daughter, Leah. Courtesy of Les Riley

  Les Riley, daughter Leah, and friends enjoying a “hat party” on the beach of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Courtesy of Les Riley

  Ashley Brunson, Bruce MacDougall, and Les Riley celebrate Brunson catching an 1,100-pound black marlin off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in October 1980. Cour- tesy of Les Riley

  Bruce MacDougall and Les Riley enjoying a day on the water. Courtesy of Les Riley

  Barry Foy on St. Barts, walking on the beach along St. Jean Bay. Courtesy of Barry Foy

  Barry Foy, far left, and Tom Rhoad, third from right, standing on a tarmac after traveling by private plane to Nantucket, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Barry Foy

  The Operation Jackpot task force in front of the U.S. attorney’s office in Columbia, South Carolina. From left to right, Dewey Greager (DEA), Mark Goodwin (FBI), U.S. Attor- ney Henry Dargan M
cMaster, Mike Lemnah (U.S. Cus- toms Patrol), Brian Tim Wellesley (IRS), Claude McDonald (U.S. Customs), and David Forbes (IRS).

  IRS special agents Edward Skowyz and David Forbes listen to Assistant U.S. Attorney Bart Daniel in the U.S. Custom House in Charleston, South Carolina. Courtesy of The Citadel Alumni News

  U.S. District Court Judge Falcon B. Hawkins Jr. Courtesy of The Citadel Alumni News

  A. Wanted poster of Lee Harvey, a.k.a. “Smiley.”

  B. Wanted poster of Barry Toombs, a.k.a. “Ice Cream.”

  C. Wanted poster of Julian T. Pernell, a.k.a. “Doc.”

  PART I:

  THE GENTLEMEN SMUGGLERS

  Chapter One

  On any given day, the view from the top floor of the Coconut Grove Hotel was spectacular. One looked over an enchanting scene of colors rarely seen in everyday life. The water of Biscayne Bay was not blue, but turquoise. The Miami sunset was not gray and yellow, but instead a mesmerizing mélange of cream, ivory, gold, ochre, and magenta. Between the bay and burning sun was the Atlantic Ocean, stretching out toward Africa and Europe, its vastness interrupted by the assorted bits of unseen land that made up the Bahamas. From one of these Bahamian islands, Orange Cay, came something even more fabulous than the exotic water and sky. Its hue was comparatively unremarkable, nothing more than a dull white. Its size was minimal, just a speck in the distance, though it loomed larger as the day and evening wore on. But to the men gathered in the twenty-twostory hotel penthouse, the small and drab object was gorgeous, if only because it would make them very, very rich. Doing their best to speak soberly, they radioed to their friends on the horizon, advising them that the coast was clear, so hurry up and come on home.