Jackpot Read online

  “Started me down the road to bigger and better things,” he says of the burglary.

  After graduating from Dentsville High in 1969, he went to study and play basketball at nearby Newberry College. He lasted just one semester. Returning to Columbia, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina, but soon dropped out there, too.

  “Some people are blessed and know exactly what they want to do in high school and they get out and go to college and know exactly what to major in, exactly what direction they’re going in,” says Foy. “Shit, I was all over the place. I had not a clue.

  “Shortly thereafter, though, I started to find what might work,” Foy says. “Drugs were everywhere, all over the place. Everybody had them. Everybody was doing them. Everybody wanted to buy them. Weed was the least, probably the least harmful for lack of a better word. That’s the kind of direction I went.”

  The best market for Foy was Columbia’s Five Points neighborhood beside the university. Foy sold pot out of his truck and in front of a Five Points head shop, acquiring his merchandise from a local hippie. He made additional money dealing at a bar called the Campus Club South, just two blocks south of the steps of the South Carolina State House. Soldiers from nearby Fort Jackson would flock to the bars, clubs, and restaurants in downtown Columbia, eager to spend their monthly Army paychecks. Foy waited for them with a leather satchel, reaching in and grabbing a bagged ounce at a time. On a good day, he’d sell up to forty ounces.

  Eventually Foy’s reputation around town caught up with him, and he was arrested in 1973 after police found pot in his trunk. He escaped significant punishment, although the authorities did not forget him. Years later, while checking in for a flight to New York from Columbia’s Metropolitan Airport, an airline employee matched Foy’s name to a watch list. While processing Foy’s ticket, the employee quietly called security. Minutes later, as Foy walked toward the airport gate, he was approached by a policeman who called him by name and asked to speak with him for a moment.

  “Right then,” says Foy, “I knew this is not the right time to have any conversation with this guy.”

  Handing the officer a piece of luggage to distract him, Foy bolted for the terminal doors, a briefcase full of “party favors” in his hand. Foy raced across the parking lot outside as the overweight policeman chased him, his belt jingling with assorted equipment.

  “Halt, I’m going to shoot! Halt, I’m going to shoot!” shouted the policeman, losing ground to the thin, athletic Foy.

  “Nah, you can’t shoot because I ain’t done nothing!” Foy shouted back, turning around to face the cop as he ran backward.

  Turning forward, Foy sprinted harder, crossing a field and a road, and then running into the woods. He paused to catch his breath, convinced he was safe for the time being. To his dismay, he watched a vehicle pull to a stop on a nearby road. The big letters on its side read SLED, the acronym for South Carolina’s State Law Enforcement Division. Foy could see there were hounds inside the car.

  Foy started running again, crossing another road and through more woods before reaching a cornfield. By now it had become dark, so Foy laid down between the rows of corn to let the night pass. As soon as dawn broke, he walked to a nearby store, picked up a pay phone, and called his sister to come pick him up.

  Eager to straighten his legal troubles out, Foy turned to two Columbia lawyers who suggested a bribe might help clean up his record, which included the 1973 arrest for being in a car loaded with pot, as well as parole violations from a 1971 conviction for possession of methamphetamines in a coastal South Carolina county. Foy says he gave the lawyers $30,000 or so and was instructed to plead guilty and meet with narcotics officers to supply them with a certain amount of false information about a drug transaction. In exchange, the lawyers said, Foy would be given probation.

  “Some name they gave me and some date and some fictitious bunch of bullshit,” Foy says he told the narcotics officer. “It was just to cover everybody’s ass. Sure enough, that’s how it went down.”

  The favorable treatment did not escape notice. The State newspaper of Columbia reported how Foy received six months probation and a $250 fine after allegedly cooperating with Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents. The problem, the newspaper noted, was that no members of the DEA could confirm such cooperation, and prosecutors and defense attorneys could not get their story straight, offering varying accounts of what information Foy provided, with one saying he tipped police off about a deal in Mexico or Texas, another saying it was Florida, and yet another attorney mentioning Jamaica. A note in Foy’s case file mentioned him giving information about a drug deal in Columbia, South Carolina.

  The chief of police at the Columbia airport later wrote to a prosecutor with concerns about Foy’s prosecution, noting “this case was postponed so Foy could deliver evidence to federal agents. I have checked with all federal agencies and no one is working with the subject Foy. It is my belief that this is just another way to stall prosecution on this subject.”

  As the case against Foy fizzled in Columbia, he was making a name for himself in the underworld of South Florida. In 1971, Foy had moved to a beachside hotel in the Sunshine State’s city of Hollywood, eager to get in on the ground level of drug trafficking. A number of gangsters frequented the same hotel—men who gambled, sold guns, stole jewels, and dealt drugs. Naturally, Foy gravitated to them, and he soon learned the gangsters had a connection in Jamaica. They offered to pay Foy and another hotel guest named Jimmy to take Jimmy’s twenty-six-foot sailboat down to the island and load it with pot.

  “We said, ‘Well fuck, let’s go,’ ” says Foy.

  It was Foy’s first time sailing offshore, and, after departing Fort Lauderdale, it took days for him to find his sea legs. Rough seas tossed the small sailboat, and he became seasick. While Jimmy cooked, sang, and sailed, Foy lay on the floor of the cabin, vomiting and sleeping.

  “He’s all happy because we on some big-time adventure,” says Foy. “I’m just dying thinking, ‘What in the hell am I doing down here?’ ”

  When Foy recovered enough to assume his watch, he found the sailing slow going. There was little wind, and the sailboat was equipped with an underwhelming ten horsepower motor. They ran the motor often, to little effect, reaching Jamaica in ten days. By comparison, that same year, a racing boat set a record by sailing from Miami to Montego Bay, Jamaica, in less than three days and four hours.

  On the island things went much more smoothly, as men loaded their boat with about four hundred pounds of pot. The modest load filled much of the cabin, owing to the bulky size of the hand-pressed bales of marijuana. Jimmy and Foy slept atop the pot and carved out a niche near the sailboat’s stove to cook up canned food. On the return voyage they stopped to refuel in the Bahamas. It was critical to have the motor available when they brought the boat into Florida; they would be foolish to rely on sail power alone when they were most vulnerable to being spotted and intercepted. The last thing they wanted was to be dead in the water and stuffed full of bales.

  Despite the importance of gasoline, Jimmy did not want to risk refueling with drugs on board. He beached the sailboat on a cay about ten miles from a Bahamian fuel dock on another island, and he and Foy tossed the fifteen or so bales onto the beach, moving them behind a rock. Then Jimmy left for fuel while Foy stayed behind on the cay, surrounded by ocean and not much else. In the distance he could see another cay. It was also uninhabited.

  “I hope to God he comes back,” thought Foy, “because I’ll starve to death.”

  Hours passed. Darkness came. Mosquitoes began their feast of Barry Foy. Soon it was pitch-black, but the mosquitoes still found him with ease. He waded into the water to escape, submerging his body up to his neck. The insects were relentless, buzzing around his head and tormenting him. About midnight, Foy heard the familiar whine of the ten-horsepower motor. For so much of the journey the sound of the engine—nyaaaaaaaaaah—had been a grating noise. Now it was music to his ears. Jimmy returned to
the cay and helped Foy toss the marijuana back on the boat. Foy was elated and angry at the same time.

  “You left me here, man,” Foy yelled at Jimmy, once the joy of his rescue faded. “We ain’t doing this again. Not this way.”

  The amateur smugglers made it back to Fort Lauderdale and pulled into an anchorage beside the Intracoastal Waterway. At about 2 o’clock in the morning, each bale of marijuana was ferried to shore and placed in a black plastic bag before being thrown in the back of a vehicle brought by the gangsters.

  “It looked like loading bodies into a truck,” recalls Foy, an activity in which the gangsters might have had considerable practice.

  In recognition of their success, the gangsters asked them to return to Jamaica, this time to pick up one thousand pounds of pot. Foy, Jimmy, and a third crewman sailed down to Jamaica in a forty-foot trimaran. Foy was not particularly pleased with this vessel, either.

  “It was fiberglass and it was plywood and it was a piece of shit,” says Foy.

  What’s worse, it leaked.

  On the return voyage, sailing through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, the trimaran took a beating from rough seas stirred up by wind passing between the mountainous islands. Foy and his crew were constantly bailing water out of one of the boat’s three hulls. The trimaran, which lacked a keel by design, was not sailing into the wind well, either, and the crew took four days to sail a distance normally traveled in one. After sitting off the coast of Cuba for days, they decided to turn the leaky mess around.

  “I was afraid it was going to fall apart. We didn’t have a dinghy aboard, we didn’t have a life raft, nothing,” says Foy.

  The irony of the moment was not lost on the young smuggler.

  “As far as I know,” he says, “I’m one of the few guys that’s ever taken pot back to Jamaica.”

  Such hardships might have driven the less determined away. Not Foy. With some of the proceeds he earned from his first venture, he purchased a sixty-five-foot fireboat he had found for sale on the Miami River. It had been used by the Coast Guard in the 1940s and closely resembled a tugboat, though with a nozzle on top to spray water and douse flames. Foy found two crewmen and set off for Jamaica again, glad to have a more substantial vessel and its diesel engine taking him south. Yet this trip, too, would have its share of hiccups.

  As they rounded Cuba, Foy was lying on a bench in the pilothouse. Suddenly, he heard a loud scraping sound as he was thrown to the floor

  “Stopped dead in the water,” says Foy. “Ten knots to nothing. Oh my fucking God.”

  Looking over the side of the boat, Foy saw they had run aground on a coral reef. He and the crew used a rowboat to set an anchor astern of the boat, and then winched themselves off the reef with the help of a rising tide and engines running full throttle in reverse. Set loose, they discovered the hull’s wooden planking had been split. They were taking on water so quickly the bilge pump was overwhelmed, unable to expel the incoming sea. Foy did not abandon hope. For the next two days to Jamaica, he and his crewmen used milk cartons to toss seawater out of portholes. Upon reaching Jamaica, they had the boat dry-docked and repaired.

  Coming back home, disaster loomed again, this time when the crew ran out of drinking water. The men gazed with hope at the occasional rain clouds on the horizon, hoping they’d pass over and release a shower. When they did receive a burst of rain, the men gathered with open mouths under the tugboat’s scuppers. These channels along the edge of the deck and pilothouse normally diverted spray and rain off the boat, back into the ocean, much like a gutter does for a roof of a house. This time, the scuppers routed water into parched mouths, nourishing the sailors who waited below the pilothouse’s dripping spouts.

  Nearing Florida, Foy and his crew stopped in Bimini to transfer the drugs to a faster boat. No one showed up to meet them. Riled, but now with drinking water, they sailed to Florida and anchored off a pier in Hollywood, then rowed to shore and rounded up the gang.

  “It looked so out of place. There was this ugly-ass tugboat-looking thing anchored out by the pier,” says Foy. “Back then it didn’t matter. Nothing was going on enough for anyone to pay much attention to it.”

  Jan Liafsha, Foy’s girlfriend at the time and his eventual wife, remembers getting a call from him when he returned, instructing her to walk down to the beach and look for the boat. To her surprise, she saw it anchored offshore in plain view. That night the men unloaded the pot in a state park. In celebration, someone danced on top of a picnic bench. Despite all the miscalculations, misfortune, and near calamity, Foy had landed his first major load.

  The trips put Foy on the map, earning him instant stardom among the pot smokers of South Carolina, which, in the 1970s, was a considerable portion of the state’s youth. Foy’s feats were nothing short of astonishing to a crowd used to obtaining no more than a few pounds of marijuana at a time. It didn’t hurt, either, that Foy was a talented salesman who touted his hard-earned marijuana as superior, even if others begged to differ. One friend recalls complaining to Foy about the prevalence of sticks in the pounds of pot he purchased.

  “Sticks?” said Foy, incredulously. “You gotta take the good with the bad.”

  “The good with the bad?” replied the friend. “There is no good.”

  No matter if the highs were mild and the buds few and far between, people wanted to buy Foy’s pot. They also wanted to smuggle with him, eager for a bit of adventure. What could be better than leaving the stultifying South behind for days on the deck of a sailboat, headed for Caribbean isles, with return trips spent getting high and sleeping on a mattress of marijuana? Sweet dreams, indeed.

  Among those eager to cash in was Ken Smith, who was selling small amounts of pot around Columbia and helping smugglers in St. Petersburg, Florida, unload shrimp boats full of marijuana. He was astounded at how much marijuana could be put on a boat, and more impressed by the money that could be made on each deal. He was determined to find a connection in Jamaica, even if it meant working with Foy, whom he held a grudge against. Though Foy disputes this happening, Smith says Foy gave up his name after getting arrested in Columbia as part of the deal to save his own skin. Regardless, if it happened, nothing much came of it. They did a deal anyway.

  “I was upset with him, but I mean, I was so desperate to get this deal,” says Smith. “Barry was at the cutting edge of this stuf… there ain’t no doubt. And I wanted to do it. And the only way for me to do it was with Barry. So I even actually put that aside.”

  The men agreed Smith would sail to Jamaica, where Foy would load the boat. Upon its return, Foy would arrange for its unloading and distribution. As for the other crew members, they turned to Les Riley and Larry “Groovy” Gray, persuading them to put away the lawnmowers in 1973 and hop aboard a boat. Foy and Riley had mutual friends in their hometown, and Foy had paid a visit to Riley with one of those buddies, impressed by how his fellow South Carolinian thrived in Key West. When Riley wasn’t working a shrimp boat or tidying yards, it seemed he was smoking joints and engrossing himself in the newspaper, taking the occasional break for a jaunt on his bicycle through the streets of the sleepy town. It was hard to get him and the rest of the Key West crew to do just about anything, says Foy, but when the prospect of taking a trip came up, Riley conceded marijuana smuggling would pay him much better than his landscaping business ever could, no matter how many million lawns he mowed. He agreed to help crew the boat, and so did Gray. A Jamaican joined the crew, too.

  The trip had inauspicious beginnings. They traveled to Miami and purchased a thirty-six-foot Gulfstar sailboat, Merry Chase, which Smith promptly crashed into another boat while trying to dock. Coming into a slip under power, Gray, sitting on the bow, instructed Smith to “cut it back,” or slow the boat’s brisk forward momentum by reversing the engine. Instead Smith, a novice boater, turned off the engine. The boat continued to cruise and plowed into another vessel, requiring repairs for the Merry Chase. It was of little consequence, as Gray, Riley,
and Smith intended to make considerable preparations and repairs anyway for the upcoming voyage. Since Smith had a background in construction, he created a punch list for the boat, having his crewmates cross off tasks and equipment as they were completed and purchased. Such work did not sit well with the impetuous Foy, who was eager to get the boat to Jamaica.

  Inspecting their progress one day, he expressed his impatience by snatching the punch list out of Smith’s hands.

  “You and your fucking lists,” said Foy. “Every time I turn around you’re making fucking lists.”

  “Barry, my ass is on the line here,” said Smith, taken aback by Foy’s perceived disregard for their safety. “You’re gonna get your pot.”

  “Fuck that, let’s go,” said Foy, hustling them along. “We’re going, we’re going.”

  The Merry Chase set sail for Jamaica on Thanksgiving, and the four men aboard soon learned why Foy was eager to outsource this part of the smuggling operation. Tall seas, fierce winds, and bad storms tossed the boat unmercifully. The crew discovered that the placid-seeming Caribbean could blow quite hard and that their Gulfstar sailboat was not the ideal blue-water boat.

  “That’s the time of the year in South Florida where you get your first backdoor northwesters. You start getting cold fronts kicking down here, and they kicked our ass … We didn’t really know that the Caribbean Sea … blew a steady fifteen to twenty (knots). We were used to ten to fifteen sailing in the Florida Straits,” says Riley. “It was a little bit rougher than we thought, and the boat really wasn’t built well enough to handle those conditions.”

  After eleven days of atrocious weather, they finally spied the Blue Mountains of Jamaica in the distance. Smith suddenly dashed down into the cabin. Twenty minutes later, he emerged freshly showered, shaved, and sporting clean pants and a shirt. Eager to make a good impression on the Jamaicans, Smith fastened on a fancy wristwatch and put a big smile on his face. Riley says that if Smith could have blow-dried his hair, he would have. The problem with such grooming and a snazzy outfit was that they were still more than a day away from docking. Gray and Riley ribbed Smith, explaining that at their speed of four knots, and with their port of call on the opposite side of the island, they wouldn’t be stepping off the sailboat anytime soon.