Jackpot Read online

  Barry Foy and Les Riley, two men united by a hometown bond and a love of marijuana, received these transmissions. While their friends waited nervously ashore that afternoon in the fall of 1974, Foy and Riley cruised fifty miles from the westernmost Bahamas to Miami, destined for the canal-side community of Gables by the Sea, just past Key Biscayne. There, behind a vacant home, Foy had rented use of a dock. It was a straight shot, and their only concern was the Coast Guard, for whom they kept an alert watch, as did the men in the penthouse. They’d had enough hassles on this trip already. The deceivingly straightforward logistics of the smuggling operation—send a boat to Jamaica and bring it back loaded—had become exceedingly complicated.

  For starters, the sailboat Foy had sent to Jamaica, Beyond Time, had too deep a draft for the shallow canal behind the rented house, so its keel was in danger of getting stuck in mud. To remedy this, Foy ordered his hired crew to sail Beyond Time to the Bahamas, where they would transfer the pot to him aboard a powerboat. The problem was, he didn’t have a powerboat, and acquiring one large enough to hold six thousand pounds of pot was more difficult than he’d imagined. After some searching, Foy and Riley found a suitable sportfishing boat in Fort Lauderdale, although the owner was reluctant to lease his pleasure craft to two long-haired men who seemed to be up to no good. Before letting it go, he demanded references.

  Foy and Riley scratched their heads. The up-and-coming drug smugglers were flush with many things in their twenties, most notably confidence, sex appeal, and bravado. They were, however, critically short of references, and the assorted smuggling runs they’d made to Jamaica weren’t exactly the career accomplishments one listed to establish professional credibility, either. Desperate, they turned to Pogo Hartman, a wild South Carolina lawyer who was visiting the men in Florida and lending a hand with their venture. Happy to do them a favor, Hartman promptly tapped into South Carolina’s good ol’ boy network, putting the boat owner in touch with a South Carolina judge who vouched for the sterling characters of Foy and Riley.

  “Oh yeah, them boys are fine … Go ahead and give them that boat,” said the judge in a telephone conversation. “I just hope Pogo is a better boat driver than he is a lawyer in my courtroom.”

  The judge’s words seemed to satisfy the boat owner. After hanging up, he issued a stern warning to the men.

  “Listen, let me tell you all something. There’s a lot of guys out there that are hauling drugs. You gotta be on the lookout for them,” he said. “They might want to capture you, they might want to talk you into doing something. Just remember: It’s against the law. You all aren’t doing anything illegal, are you?”

  “Hell, nooooo,” Foy replied. “We’ve got girls down here. We’re on vacation.”

  “We’d never do anything like that,” added Riley, turning on the charm.

  Handing over the keys somewhat warily, the man asked who was driving. Foy and Riley pointed at each other, the awkwardness of the moment broken when Foy gave in and volunteered to captain the boat. He took the wheel, and he and Riley soon cruised away from Florida, doing their best to look like a pair of weekend warriors hoping to haul in a tuna, or, if they were lucky, something even bigger. Decades earlier, writer Ernest Hemingway had fished nearby waters as a resident of Key West and Cuba. He revered the water off Florida and in his books depicted it as a scene of constant struggle, whether between man and beast, as in Old Man and the Sea, or between man and man, as with the desperate characters of To Have and Have Not. In hard times, the plot of the latter novel showed, fishermen and smugglers could often be one and the same.

  It took considerable strength and skill to haul in sailfish, marlin, sharks, and swordfish from the water off Florida. In the 1970s there was a prize more easily reeled in from those seas—the so-called square grouper. A stray, floating bale of pot was a godsend for any hard-luck fisherman or hippie sailor. Tossed overboard by nervous or distressed smugglers, the bobbing bale could allow its finder to take a month’s vacation or pay off a heap of debt. Lucky beachcombers were ecstatic to find this special type of seaweed—sun dried and stale on top, soggy and sea soaked on the bottom, but still perfectly capable of getting you high.

  The frequent discoveries of stray bales were a testament to the incredible amounts of marijuana coming in each week to South Florida. Lucrative profits and the promise of a leisurely lifestyle lured many a hopeful smuggler to the Sunshine State. They were men, and occasionally women, whose eyes were as bloodshot from smoking joints as they were starry-eyed from dreams of striking it big.

  Another clue to the overwhelming amount of marijuana smuggling were the scraps of pot Riley found wedged between cushions in the sportfishing boat’s cabin. He and Foy had nearly died laughing when they pulled away from the marina, repeating the man’s warnings about smugglers. Now they laughed even harder upon discovering stray weed throughout the boat. They obviously weren’t the first to use his boat for illicit purposes, a fact that perhaps eased any guilt they may have felt as they cruised toward the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, clearing room in the cabin for their expected cargo.

  If the men had an easy rapport, they owed it in part to the similar trails they had blazed in their short lives. Each grew up in South Carolina’s capital city, Columbia, and wasted little time in leaving that hot and humorless hellhole just as fast as he could. Foy, twenty-three, and Riley, twenty-nine, dropped out of college in the Palmetto State in the early 1970s, independently striking out for South Florida, but embracing different means for making a living. In Key West, Riley cut grass. In greater Miami, Foy smuggled it. The income gap between their respective businesses was stark: What Riley could make in a decade, Foy could clear in a night. Riley wasn’t too strongly tied to his lawnmower business, however, and the rolling waves felt much better beneath his feet than thick sod. Should he strike out on his own, he knew, he’d never have to step in dog shit and fire ant mounds again.

  When Les Riley first moved to Key West in 1971 or so, money didn’t matter as much as freedom. Operating the Green Acres landscaping company with his friend Larry “Groovy” Gray, he mowed lawns for $5 a pop. On a good day Riley and Gray might make $20, which was enough to cover living expenses, including the $75 Riley owed each month for a downtown house he shared with his beautiful, blond hippie girlfriend, Suzanne. She had thumbed a ride down from Columbia, carrying little more than a backpack and a pet iguana in a box.

  Key West was a haven for drifters, malcontents, and assorted misfits. Many stayed in the town simply because they could go no farther, creating a population of artists, old salts, the occasional outlaw, and lots of hippies, most of whom seemed to drive Volkswagen vans. There were few tourists in town, and fewer rules. Locals felt comfortable sunbathing nude on beaches and cruising around town on bikes, dragging on the joints that dangled between their fingers. No one much cared, including the police. Riley felt the vibe on Key West was so cool he regarded it as the Haight-Ashbury of the East.

  Among Riley’s landscaping clients was playwright Tennessee Williams. Among his friends was aspiring songwriter and musician Jimmy Buffett. Many fellow South Carolinians landed in Key West, too. Some, like Riley and his girlfriend, came from the University of South Carolina, either as dropouts or recent graduates. Others were part-time residents of the Conch Republic, who came to fish, following the shrimp populations that migrated south from the Carolinas in the wintertime. Riley worked on shrimp boats from time to time, hopping on board for a week and, if things went well, making a few hundred dollars. With this cash in hand, he and Suzanne would take off for monthlong visits to Haiti, Jamaica, or islands off Nicaragua, where they lived with locals on the beach and subsisted on bread, honey, and peanut butter. They swam in the ocean and smoked lots of pot. One day, the couple dreamed, they would own their own sailboat and cruise the Caribbean, living an existence close to that of Adam Troy, the fictional sailor and adventurer Riley idolized from the shortlived television show Adventures in Paradise.

  Riley had firs
t visited Key West his senior year of high school with a classmate from the Bolles School, an all-male academy in Jacksonville, Florida, on the banks of the St. Johns River. At Bolles, Riley mingled with the scions of Florida’s wealthiest families, most of who headed off to Ivy League colleges. Riley was not destined for similar prestige. Bolles was his third high school in four years, and Riley, though bright, was not a model student. He was amazed Bolles let him in and even more amazed the boarding school let him out to graduate.

  Riley was born to straitlaced parents in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 11, 1945, the second of three sons. His family lived in one of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods, across from basketball courts in tiny Mays Park, and a few miles east of the University of South Carolina, the State House, and downtown. Riley’s upbringing was a traditional one for the South, with an emphasis on family, sports, hunting, fishing, and social graces. The family would sometimes retreat to their farm outside Columbia, and Sunday was filled with church activities. Riley’s father, who worked as an executive for the Havertys furniture chain, didn’t drink, and was fairly strict with his boys.

  Riley worked as a teenage lifeguard at Myrtle Beach and ran through the local girls. He escorted his fair share of debutantes and hunted with their fathers on family land. In Myrtle Beach he exhibited some of the first signs of his unique business instincts that would later flourish—instincts defined by considerable entrepreneurial ability and questionable ethics. Sitting on the beach with beautiful bronze skin, he hawked bottled concoctions of motor oil and English Leather aftershave to beachgoers, labeling his product Riley Tan. For best results, apply liberally.

  As he got older, Riley went through phases, most of them rebellious. First Les was a beach bum. Then he rode motorcycles. Then he became a hippie, growing his hair long. Sometimes, the teenaged Les would come home drunk, infuriating his parents. Les taught his younger brother Roy to play poker, and he gave him his first beer, when Les was fourteen years old and Roy just seven.

  In the fall of 1963, Les enrolled at the University of South Carolina, studying business. His education was frequently interrupted, once because he moved away to sell pot, and another time due to military service. He joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and became one of the university’s most popular students, frequently seen in Maxcy Gregg Park by the tennis courts or hanging out with cute girls. He was long on charm, laid-back, and low-key, known to take his dates up to the top of the nearby eighteen-story Cornell Arms apartment building to watch the sunset and smoke a joint.

  Riley’s good looks and mellow manners went a long way, enabling him to enjoy opportunities and good fortune that passed other people by. He also got away with things no one else could. When he was a kid, his family moved to Memphis for a brief time, and Riley met a young Elvis Presley, who lived nearby. In the military he earned promotions despite doing his best to skimp on his domestic service. At the University of South Carolina, the skinny athlete briefly joined the rugby team and fed everyone LSD before one match. They raged like lunatics across the field.

  During his final year of college, Riley began making regular road trips to Key West. From Columbia the drive was considerable, especially since Interstate 95 had not been completed. Riley enrolled in only one course his last semester, and he’d leave after class on Thursday in his 1964 Volkswagen Beetle, arriving early Friday morning to work the weekend as a doorman at the Anchor Inn. Monday afternoon he’d leave to drive back north, making it to class on Tuesday, although he’d sleep through it. Come Thursday, he’d do it all again, taking friends with him, among them Ashley Brunson.

  On this fall day in 1974, it was Brunson that Foy and Riley were going to meet in the sportfishing boat, due to rendezvous off Orange Cay in the Bahamas, a spot they described to him as the first rock south of Bimini. The men didn’t have to wait long before Brunson and Beyond Time arrived. He and his crew dropped the sailboat’s anchor and hopped aboard a dinghy, cruising over to see the rented boat and enjoy a few beers with Foy and Riley. As the time passed and darkness came, the tide slowly changed, subtly spinning their boats around and disorienting the men, though they failed to realize it. A few hours later, when they set out to find Beyond Time and transfer the pot, they headed in the wrong direction. The sailboat and the six thousand pounds of Jamaican marijuana inside it were nowhere to be found, sending the men into a mild panic. They cursed themselves for being so stupid, second-guessing whether they even dropped the anchor, imagining the sailboat drifting toward New England without a crew, their massive payday floating away in the dark. Only at dawn did they see the sailboat was just a few hundred yards away, on the opposite side of where they expected it. Making up for lost time, they quickly transferred the pot and parted ways.

  Cruising home, Foy and Riley entered Biscayne Bay through Stiltsville, the community of wooden homes built on pylons just south of Key Biscayne. Driving into the canals of nearby Gables by the Sea, they docked the sportfishing boat at the rented dock behind the vacant home, making sure to lock the boat’s cabin door to protect the pot. Seeing a party at the house next door, Riley warned Foy not to say anything to anyone. The warning was pointless. Minutes later, Riley heard Foy talking with a partygoer who had seen the fishing poles in the back of the boat.

  “Y’all have any luck?” asked the partygoer.

  “Oh yeah,” said Foy. “We caught some fish.”

  “Oh, we’ll be over in a few minutes to look at them,” came the reply.

  Riley and Foy did not wait around for the visit, making a hasty escape to the Coconut Grove Hotel to meet their friends and discuss plans for unloading that night.

  Foy, Riley, and the men in the hotel had already made significant preparations, clearing out a stash house up the road, shooting out a streetlight near the dock with a BB gun, and renting a Ryder truck. Some details, though, were unfinished, and Foy, Riley, and their cohorts disagreed on how to execute the operation. Everybody seemed to have an opinion on the best way to unload the pot and avoid attention from the neighbors. As they argued into the evening, Foy finally had enough. It was his load of marijuana, after all, and the only one giving orders would be him. He held up the large, long silver key that opened the sportfishing boat’s cabin.

  “I got the key,” said Foy to a hushed audience. “We’re gonna do it my way.”

  In the beginning things were always done Barry Foy’s way. The brash, upstart smuggler did not have colleagues or partners, but followers and employees. He was younger than almost all his smuggling peers, yet he had figured it all out much more quickly, finding a Jamaican connection and moving hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the Caribbean before any of his former classmates at Newberry College earned degrees. The secret of his success was a truth he divined through his remarkable criminal intuition: Nice guys finish last in the smuggling business. Accordingly, Foy muscled his way into as many deals as he could. While his perceived greed created a few enemies, his confidence inspired more admirers.

  “We thought he could do anything,” says one smuggler’s former girlfriend.

  “He could tell his crew to shit in a post office, and they’d shit in the post office,” says Tommy Liles, a smuggler who grew up with Foy in Columbia.

  Foy was tall and athletic, with a curly head of hair that added a few extra inches to his height. His massive ego and swagger made him intimidating, and when it came to striking deals, he was unapologetic about demanding the largest cut, unafraid of bruising feelings. Even friends who resented him for his avarice felt powerless to stop him. They rationalized his dominance, figuring they were making a lot of money, and Barry was just making a little more.

  “If you got one thousand pounds, Barry’s getting six hundred, you’re getting four hundred, just because Barry figures that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” explains Ken Smith, a smuggler who attended the University of South Carolina before moving to Florida. “Call it a character flaw—I don’t know what it is. It’s just Barry.”

  If m
en occasionally became angry with Foy, they were mollified by the fact that his aggressive actions weren’t malicious, but natural. It didn’t take a licensed psychologist to understand Foy couldn’t help his wicked ways.

  “He was destined to be huge,” says Smith. “There was nothing else Barry could do.”

  Foy, born March 31, 1951, grew up not far from Riley in a neighborhood of brick ranch homes and big yards surrounded by nearby golf courses and lakes. He worked often as a kid and teenager, channeling his abundant energy into paychecks. He delivered papers, as well as eggs. He worked construction jobs and pumped gas. He worked at the State newspaper’s printing press on the paper-cutting machines. In time, he’d be making the front page of the Columbia daily, although not for reasons of which his parents would be proud.

  Foy’s father was a banker and his mom a registered nurse who put aside her career to raise Foy and his four younger siblings. To Foy’s recollection, he committed his first crime in high school, when he was at a party and everyone was out of beer—and money.

  “We’ll be right back,” he told his friends, before driving off in his 1952 pea green Chevy to a local pool hall, which had already closed for the evening.

  Driving behind the building, Foy backed the heavy car into the pool hall’s rear door, smashing it open. He and two accomplices carted out all the cases of beer they could find and returned to the party as heroes. The next day, he returned to the scene of the crime, and while Foy was shooting pool, the theft was discovered. He suppressed a smile and continued his game.