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  As they neared Jamaica, they were supposed to radio Foy, who had flown to Jamaica to meet with his suppliers. Foy preferred that the sailboat stay out at sea and receive the drugs offshore, and that Smith and his crew never meet any Jamaicans. Otherwise, the next time Gray, Riley, or Smith sailed down, they wouldn’t need Foy to broker the sale and could cut him out of the deal. An engine problem, however, forced the men to dock in Montego Bay for repairs. It was just the excuse Smith was looking for, and he exploited the landfall and made his highly sought connection.

  “Barry kept holding everybody at arm’s length with Jamaica, and rightfully so, ’cause that’s all I wanted—that guy in Jamaica,” says Smith. “Everybody in this business makes a career out of jumping you.”

  Still, for the remainder of this trip, it was Foy’s deal. Days later he signaled the Merry Chase with a fire on the beach. Boats came out with bales of marijuana, and the sailboat was soon headed back toward Florida, rounding the western edge of Cuba through the Yucatan Pass. The return trip was not much better than the first leg. A Cuban patrol boat fired on them when they strayed close to the Cuban shore, and vicious storms threw them off course and made life miserable. The sailboat handled even worse with all the marijuana stuffed inside, and they were without reliable navigation equipment. At one point an exhausted Smith said he didn’t care if they were caught so long as they made it back to land.

  “We basically relied on a compass and dead reckoning,” says Riley. “By the grace of God, we made it back.”

  Arriving home two days before Christmas, they anchored off a Girl Scout camp near Big Pine Key, Florida. The crew, who had been sleeping on wet pot for a week and stunk to high heaven, then went to shore, entered an inn, and called down to Key West, advising Foy and his hired hands the boat had made it. That night, Foy and these men drove motorboats and trucks up from Key West to unload the sailboat, but they were thwarted halfway through the job when they discovered a canal was not fully dredged to the ocean, preventing the pot-laden motorboats from reaching the waiting trucks parked along the canal’s edge. Adjusting plans, they piloted the motorboats and trucks thirty miles south to Key West, deciding to bring the pot straight into the town shrimp docks. It was now approaching dawn and raining as the smugglers cruised toward Key West with bales stacked to their noses. Approaching the docks, one of the motorboats nudged a sailboat, prompting a man aboard to wake from slumber, pop out of the hatch, and ask in an irritated tone as to what the hell was going on. Foy bounded aboard his sailboat and silenced the man by seizing him by the collar.

  “We smuggling reefer motherfucker, and you better shut the fuck up,” growled Foy. “Now help us unload this pot.”

  “Far out!” answered the man, helping hoist bales into the waiting trucks. Afterward, as the trucks left for Foy’s and Smith’s houses, the smugglers let him keep the scraps that fell to the ground. He was ecstatic.

  Despite the hiccups, hassles, and slapdash nature of these early trips by Foy and Riley, smuggling was undeniably thrilling work, and the men’s adventures did not go unnoticed by their peers. When it came time to assemble boat crews and drivers, Foy and Riley suffered from no shortage of volunteers. Friends from South Carolina joined them in Florida to participate in the intoxicating work, eager to transport pot and have their pockets stuffed full of cash. These neophytes, at least one of whom was still in high school, had never seen so much marijuana and money.

  Foy took charge of some of these eager hands, who just hours earlier had watched from the hotel penthouse as Foy and Riley motored into Miami from the Bahamas. Assembling in Gables by the Sea under the cover of darkness, he ordered the men to take up stations outside the vacant home and docked sportfishing boat. Foy himself squeezed deep inside the boat’s cabin, pulling out bales and throwing them to a man standing on the deck. This man passed them to others on shore who ran the pot to the rented truck. They moved quickly, spurred by fear and the adrenaline coursing through their bodies. There were scores of bales tucked inside the boat, and, despite the exhilaration, it seemed to take forever to pull them all out.

  “We got a little bit more,” Foy repeatedly intoned to the off-load crew. “We got a little bit more.”

  When they finally finished, the men piled into cars and the rental truck and headed for a nearby stash house. Halfway there, while cruising down the road, the men following the rental truck watched in horror as the cargo door flew open, exposing the bales of marijuana packed into the vehicle. The truck traveled the remaining miles to the stash house flashing its leafy load.

  By the next day, the stash house was empty again, the pot packed into assorted cars and trucks headed for various points along the East Coast. Riley, who was paid with one hundred pounds of pot, and Foy returned in a pickup truck to check on the boat. Along for the ride was Foy’s brother, Pat. As they cruised by the vacant house with the dock, Pat asked a question: “What’s that on the side of the house, against that tree?” Easing up on the gas, Barry was seized with fear.

  “Oh, shit. That’s a fucking bale,” he said. “We forgot it.”

  The brothers and Riley looked around nervously, expecting police to jump out of the bushes at any moment. Foy peeled off. It must be a setup, he thought to himself, circling the block and trying to make sense of the situation. There was no way such a huge bale of pot could have escaped the attention of the neighbors and construction workers.

  Coming around again, though, he found the street empty. Barry’s confidence surged, and the men formulated a plan. Pulling up to the driveway, Pat jumped out of the car and ran to the garage, grabbing hold of the bale by the strings that wrapped it. Barry and Riley watched him drag it down the driveway and throw it into the bed of the truck before sitting on top of it. Barry hit the gas.

  Speeding away in broad daylight, Pat was giddy. His brother had previously forbid him from smuggling, reasoning that one felon in the family was more than enough.

  “Damn! That was cool, man,” Pat yelled to his brother from his pot bench, the wind in his hair. “We pulled it off.”

  Barry looked back at his sibling in disbelief.

  “Dude, that was one bale!” said Barry. “There was about 150 to 200 of them last night we were running around with. You should have been there then.”

  “I got to do one, man.”

  “You ain’t getting involved in nothing,” said Barry. “That was your one deal. Your one-bale deal.”

  Chapter Two

  It takes an exceptionally unreasonable person to smuggle drugs by boat for a living, someone who ignores or scoffs at all the things that could, and should, go wrong when sailing tons of drugs across entire seas every couple months. Someone who is unafraid of being stranded far from land, plying waters patrolled by the world’s largest navies, and transacting with foreign underworlds and associated militants. This person has to be a top-notch seaman, able to navigate a large boat along unfamiliar coastlines at night should their employees prove unable. He has to be tough as nails and wild as hell, and it helps if he is a little bit crazy. Above all, he has to be absolutely oblivious to consequence. Barry Foy and Les Riley fit the bill, but so did a few other men, and it wouldn’t be long before they joined forces, striking up partnerships that served to increase each other’s prestige and earnings.

  The more capers Foy pulled off in Florida, the greater his reputation grew, enabling his acceptance by veteran smugglers. His notoriety was enhanced by the many nicknames he attained. Some knew him as “Boy Wonder.” Others called him “Raul,” in reference to a prominent terrorist judged to be similarly dangerous. Yet others called him “Clone.” How else to explain how Foy could be in so many places at once, with his hand in so many deals? He must have a duplicate.

  The most frequently used and enduring moniker attained by Foy, however, was “Flash.” Given his bold crimes, big mouth, and ability to command attention, it was the perfect handle for the youngster, aptly describing his ability to narrowly escape police custody and live ostentatio
usly. Foy favored fast cars and fashionable clothing and gold jewelry, looking more like a rock star than a pot smuggler. People could not help but notice the tall and intimidating Southerner who looked so young to be brimming with such confidence.

  “He walked in, man, the room changed,” says smuggler Buddy Ray “Fish Ray” Griffin Jr. “Fucking energy in the fucking room changed.”

  To complete his look, Foy kept company with a slender brunette he had brought down from South Carolina. Foy says he first met Jan Liafsha when she was a high school senior in his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, but he moved to Florida before they could get serious. Despite the distance between them, Foy could not shake the fond memories.

  “I was loving on her, man. She was five feet, ten inches, and 120 pounds of smoke,” says Foy. “She was hot.”

  One day in 1973 he pursued her with the same determination he reserved for smuggling pot. Foy borrowed a gangster’s Cadillac and drove up to South Carolina, hoping to steal Liafsha away from another boyfriend.

  “I pulled up in the Eldorado with the top back, went up and knocked on the door, and said, ‘Look, it’s now or never … I came here to get you.’”

  When Liafsha protested that she already had a boyfriend, Foy was not deterred.

  “I don’t care who you’re living with,” said Foy. “It’s time to go.”

  Foy left without an answer, and a few hours passed before he received a call telling him to come and get her, that she was packing her belongings. Foy pulled up again in the Eldorado, threw her suitcases in the trunk, and sped off to Hollywood, Florida, where he and Liafsha rented a small apartment. There, they lived a quaint existence, removed from the rough-and-tumble action of Foy’s frequent smuggling episodes.

  “We were young and simple in life, the sophistication was yet to come,” says Liafsha. “He taught me how to make a proper egg sandwich and we played cards.”

  Soon after moving to Hollywood, they hopped aboard the old fireboat and headed to Stock Island, just north of Key West, making themselves a new home. The change in scenery suited Liafsha just fine.

  “I loved living on the boat; it was made from huge timbers, had a captain’s cabin, and a double bunk in the main room,” says Liafsha. “We were tied off at the end of the dock, and I used to get up early and go look into the clear water at the sea creatures just below.”

  Along with Liafsha’s stunning looks came a ferocious temper. Foy could upset her, and the two were forever fighting, according to other smugglers, then making up again. Nicknamed the “Mad Albanian,” she had the distinction of being the single person in Florida who could scare Flash.

  “When Jan got mad,” says smuggler Bob “Willie the Hog” Bauer, “Barry got out of town.”

  Ken Smith remembers trying to visit Foy in Key West after the two had a disagreement over the pot brought in by the Merry Chase. Foy was not home, but Liafsha was, making breakfast. She came to the door in a white slip, her hair freshly brushed, looking like Lauren Bacall. Upon seeing Smith, the angelic-looking creature became profane, cursing him for daring to challenge her boyfriend. Smith just stared at her and smiled, unaffected by the vitriol.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” she asked Smith.

  “You are so fucking hot,” he replied, unable to help himself.

  “Fuck you, man,” said Liafsha, before calming down. “Really?”

  “Jan, right now, you’re the hottest looking girl in the world,” said the utterly smitten Smith as he turned to leave. “Just so you know it … You are something else”

  Liafsha and other smugglers’ girlfriends might not have been clueless as to how their men made money, but they weren’t heavily involved, either, excusing themselves when business was to be discussed. Even though marijuana smuggling was a pervasive activity in 1970s South Florida, men tried to be discreet when projecting their power. Smugglers typically masked their ambitions with a cool demeanor, and their actions betrayed a sense of fear that their good fortune could dry up in an instant if they weren’t careful. They were socially aloof and often told strangers they were in the real estate business. One exception was smuggler Mike Abell, who tried to have a sense of humor about his occupation. When he was asked what he did for a living, he coyly told a woman he was “an importer of tropical plants.”

  For the initiated, others’ guarded conversations, fancy cars, and vague explanations of their livelihood were dead giveaways. So when Foy and Bob “The Boss” Byers met on the docks of a Coconut Grove marina one day in 1975, it didn’t take long for the men to size each other up as smugglers. About every other boat at the marina belonged to a scammer, Foy says, and the men kept identical forty-five-foot Columbia sailboats in adjoining slips. But the smugglers’ similarities more or less ended there.

  While Foy had enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing, Byers’s childhood was marked by an alcoholic father. As a young adult, Byers left behind family tumult in Minnesota to strike out on his own down South. Byers’s transcendence of his troubled youth and his eventual ascent as a marijuana smuggler gave him a keen eye for the qualities needed to succeed in Miami’s crowded drug underworld. No doubt he was impressed with Foy. As his Porsche and sailboat attested, Foy had already amassed a small fortune moving marijuana and had done so before the age of twenty-five. Foy had made money the hard way, too—by smuggling Jamaican ganja, which sold for much less than Colombian marijuana. Byers, five years Foy’s senior, was impressed. He was drinking in his sailboat with two women when he called out to Ashley Brunson, who he had seen walk by with Foy.

  “If you guys are up to what I think you’re up to, tell that guy you’re with to come see me,” Byers told Brunson.

  Byers’s proposition was intriguing: “Let’s take a trip to Colombia,” he said to Foy, “and do a deal together, choosing our supply firsthand from mountainside marijuana farms—I’ll show you how to make some real money.” The pair soon flew to Santa Marta, a coastal town at the base of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The mountain range, separate from the Andes, rises dramatically along a portion of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, running from Santa Marta to Riohacha before petering out to the arid Guajira Peninsula. The peaks of Cristobal Colon and Simon Bolivar both stand nearly nineteen thousand feet above sea level.

  To most people in the world, and, indeed, even to most Colombians, Santa Marta, Riohacha, and the Guajira were insignificant locales. They were underdeveloped, remote, and not particularly beautiful, at least compared to other wondrous areas of South America and the Caribbean. But to marijuana smugglers, Riohacha and Santa Marta were as renowned as Amsterdam, Hong Kong, New York, or Shanghai. Successful marijuana smugglers forged relationships with the area’s Colombian suppliers who could load boats punctually and with an agreed-upon amount of drugs. American crews regularly sailed along the shore, made appropriate radio contact, and then waited as Colombian Indians left the shore to meet them in their long marijuana-laden canoes, which were powered by outboard motors.

  During Foy’s first trip to Colombia with Byers, he made the mistake of drinking river water. Severe thirst had caused him to ignore warnings that upstream, in the hills, peasants used the rivers as baths and sewers. Foy was laid up in Santa Marta for a week, sick as a dog.

  On a second trip with Byers, their suppliers took the men into the foothills by Jeep, riding over rough, pitted roads and passing military checkpoints without incident, ostensibly because their hosts paid bribes to the soldiers. When the roads ended, they switched to burros, riding up narrow paths that hugged mountainsides and fell off to cliffs. Their journey ended at a camp beside a cold mountain stream. There, the men were provided meals and given lodging in a hut. Chickens wandered across dirt floors in the camp buildings.

  For days Byers and Foy entertained visiting farmers who led burro trains loaded with marijuana bales. Each bale was a sample from their nearby fields, and the farmers offered assorted bits of their crop to the Americans, who carefully examined the product. Foy and Byers stared hard at
the marijuana, preferring to see more buds than leaves, twigs, and seeds. They rolled it between their fingers, feeling how sticky or dry the marijuana was. They smelled it deeply, and then, as a final trial, they smoked it.

  As Foy and Byers sucked the smoke inside and their minds lightened, the farmers waited anxiously for a thumbs-up or smile from the men. If the kingpins were pleased with the pot, the Colombian suppliers arranged a wholesale purchase and paid the farmers. If Foy and Byers rejected a sample, the dejected farmer would leave, oftentimes slitting open his burlap bags and dumping the baled pot into the stream, unwilling to carry the inferior product any farther in the rugged terrain. It paid for Byers and Foy to be discriminating. Back home, top-shelf Colombian marijuana would fetch $250 a pound when sold by the ton to their distributors, which was double the price of Jamaican weed. Santa Marta Gold was regarded as the best pot available at the time, though one still had to be particular when attempting to procure it.

  “That’s their culture. They’ll show you the worst stuff, and if you’ll buy it, they’ll sell it to you,” says Abell, the self-proclaimed importer of tropical plants, who made buying trips to Colombia for Byers.

  Bob Roche, a longtime friend to Byers, confirms this. He recalls traveling to Colombia for the kingpin and smoking pot at a stash house. Soon his neck stiffened and he grew uncomfortable.