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  “Fuck. Nooooo. This isn’t what it is supposed to do,” Roche recalled thinking. “It was crippling. It was the wrong kind of high. It sent you into rigor mortis.”

  That experience was one of many uncomfortable moments during Roche’s trip, which was typical of what any American might encounter when venturing to coastal Colombia in search of pot. Before heading into the mountains to meet farmers and pick a load of marijuana, Roche stayed in a stash house in a seaside city. During the day he was required to stay inside, lest he be arrested and his handlers be forced to pay a bribe for harboring the obviously American visitor. His bathroom was filthy and smeared in excrement. Walls surrounding the house were topped with broken glass bottles, cemented into place to discourage burglars. Should Roche have to flee the house in the event of a raid, he was advised to throw a mattress on top of the wall to avoid cuts when scaling it.

  His meals were provided to him, though he quickly tired of the food. He found little relief in the area restaurants he patronized after dark. At one place he excitedly ordered a Chateaubriand steak. Out came a plate with a tiny piece of ham topped with a pineapple ring.

  When drivers picked him up for a long trip into the mountains on badly maintained roads, he was told to sit between the two men on a bench seat in the four-wheel-drive Ford Bronco. A stack of tires sat in the rear cargo area; they were gradually consumed as the wheels rumbled over the rutted road, suffering flats. Each time the Colombians changed a tire, Roche was required to hide behind nearby brush so as not to be seen by soldiers in passing military Jeeps. As he lay down in the sand of the desert lowlands, thoughts of snakes and scorpions crowded his mind.

  Upon reaching the mountains, Roche traveled to ravines lined with marijuana plants and caves crammed with harvested pot. He sampled the drugs and indicated which crops he preferred, making up a purchase list of close to thirty thousand pounds. Later he visited other stash houses in the mountains, including one with a pool and a view of the ocean. Here he enjoyed the company of hookers. Together they hugged the floor when someone mysteriously began shooting into the house before being chased away.

  Despite his handlers’ precautions, they did run into a military patrol, which extracted a bribe. The military could often be bought in Colombia, and soldiers frequently supervised the loading of marijuana on beaches after a burro train had brought pot down from the mountains. On the beach the pot might be loaded into wooden shakers to sift out rocks, sticks, and stalks. After that, a compressor squished it into bales. Soldiers, too, advised Roche when Colombian patrol boats were away and when to cue the smuggling boat to come in toward shore for a rendezvous with the canoes.

  Cooperation from the police and military was never guaranteed. Some soldiers had no tolerance for the drug trade, and some took pleasure in making an example out of the smugglers they caught. A number of American drug smugglers died in Colombian prisons, often because of brutality. Roche remembers meeting one smuggler in Colombia who was released from prison after his partner allegedly died from being sodomized by a military officer’s greased arm.

  Despite these dangers, the superior quality of Colombian pot enticed Foy and his fellow smugglers to cease making trips to Jamaica. Besides, among other drug enforcement support, the United States had started leasing helicopters to the Jamaican government in 1974 for marijuana eradication. It was wise for Foy to avoid Jamaica, too, considering the number of men he had stiffed, failing to return and pay for the marijuana they fronted him. One former South Carolina smuggler says that when he picked up his own shipments on the island, he was routinely thronged by Jamaicans who demanded, “Where’s Barry? Where’s Barry, mon?”

  Foy had figured out one easy way to maximize his profits as a kingpin: not pay people what you owe them. Such a tactic was to be used sparingly, as a spurned business associate might tip off the police or retaliate with violence. Calculations scribbled on a paper cocktail napkin—the kingpins’ answer to a spreadsheet—revealed there were only two reliable ways to significantly increase your profits on a deal: bring in more drugs or sell the load for more. In a country awash with marijuana, the only way to sell your product for more was to bring in primo pot, hence Foy’s and Byers’s jaunts to Colombia.

  The basic business plan for smuggling pot is straightforward. For every deal, a smuggler must coordinate three parts: the purchase, transport, and distribution of marijuana. On paper the tasks seem manageable, so long as a kingpin and his employees possess an adequate amount of moxie. But many an amateur smuggler has made a go of bombing in a load only to become bogged down by the inevitable mishaps that occur when inexperienced sailors pack a boat to the bursting point and try to cross the Caribbean. When these amateurs stumbled, they called established kingpins in to help, sacrificing a healthy amount of profit to salvage the load.

  It’s clear from smugglers’ accounts that kingpins like Foy and Byers rose through the ranks not by smuggling differently from others, but by smuggling well. It was the crafty and capable kingpin who could recover from a missed connection in Jamaica, a crew that quit right before loading, a conked-out engine, or crippling weather. It was the seasoned smuggler who recruited discreet and reliable men to execute each venture and paid them enough to keep them loyal. On a typical operation a kingpin’s payroll normally included a boat captain, two crewmen, and a handful of others who stayed behind to unload and distribute the marijuana, splitting duties as lookouts, radio operators, bale lifters, and truck drivers. Then there were all the other costs.

  “People involved heavily in the drug trade, particularly on the importation side, have a lot of overhead expenses: purchase of boats, airplanes, paying vessel captains and off-loaders, purchase/rental of stash houses, attorney’s fees, etc. Plus, when they spend all of that to bring in a load and it gets seized by the government, they have to absorb the total loss; they can’t report it to their insurance company,” says former DEA agent, Jim Mittica, a veteran of marijuana investigations. “Even so, if they are even mildly successful smugglers, they stand to make a lot of money.”

  To mitigate some of those potential losses, kingpins obtained marijuana on consignment from their Colombian supplier and paid the bulk of their debt once the marijuana was successfully smuggled and sold in the United States. Should the shipment be intercepted or lost at sea, the supplier would absorb the costs of the load, provided a smuggler could produce proof of law enforcement’s interference, whether in the form of arrests or a newspaper article reporting the drug seizure.

  It was a logical arrangement. On account of the low prices suppliers paid farmers for each pound, lost loads were of relatively little expense to Colombian drug lords. The marijuana attained value only upon successfully reaching the shores of America. Prior to that, it was just an inexpensive and plentiful crop in Colombia.

  Given all the overhead costs associated with smuggling, American kingpins with any sense ordained that if the pot didn’t get sold, no one got compensated. A bust canceled everyone’s payday, no matter where someone might be on the drug-running food chain. Money was managed very carefully by those in charge, as evidenced by the 1983 testimony of a frequent partner to Foy, Virginia-based smuggler Julian Pernell, who worked for years as an accountant before trafficking drugs: “Our [purchase] costs would run $40 a pound, and our transportation costs would run anywhere from $30 to $40 a pound, then our off-loading crews and so forth, maybe an additional $20. So if we could keep our costs down to $100 a pound and sell it for three, we would make three to one on our money.”

  Critical to every operation was finding an isolated spot to unload the drugs. The best sites featured a dock close to the ocean, the absence of neighbors, and proximity to major highways. The savvy smuggler scouted several potential sites to unload drugs in case the preferred location was unsafe to use the night a boat came in. In South Florida, where much of the coast was urbanized, finding backup locations could be tricky. Increasing law enforcement patrols in the 1970s also began to make Florida a riskier location to
import drugs, motivating smugglers to explore other states.

  “When Florida got warm, everyone was looking for spots,” says Foy. “[We said] let’s go somewhere they ain’t.”

  For Foy it was logical to look back home on the coast of South Carolina, where there were more than 180 miles of coastline and so many rivers, inlets, and creeks it’d take a lifetime to explore them all. An assortment of media—movies, beach novels, and hotel pamphlets, most notably—portray the South Carolina coast as the perfect place to find serenity or romance, what with the soft sand, palmetto trees, gentle night breezes, and breaking surf. Such depictions are not untrue, though they give short shrift to South Carolina’s extensive wetlands. On the coast, looking inland, just beyond the beaches, it’s marsh that stretches on for mile after mile.

  Marsh boardwalks, platforms raised just a few feet above gooey pluff mud, offer extraordinary vistas of cordgrass and creeks. Live oaks sit twisted atop small bluffs, and Spanish moss trails delicately from the oaks’ gnarled branches. Tidal creeks twist into the mainland. The salty marsh air can be exceptionally pungent. It is a repulsive smell, but one forgivable for its uniqueness.

  Small sandy islands dot the vast marshes, covered with cedar, pine, and palmetto trees, as well as more oak. The land looks exotic, or prehistoric even, fit for dinosaurs. In his tale of treasure seeking, The Gold-Bug, Edgar Allan Poe described the South Carolina marsh as a “wilderness of reeds and slime.”

  At low tide, mudflats covered with scurrying fiddler crabs are exposed. Herons walk the creek beds, pecking for food. Pairs of dolphins surface in the shallows, and rays glide in inches of water. Raccoon tracks are imprinted in the pluff mud, and exposed oysters spit seawater. As the tide rises, periwinkle snails inch up the cordgrass, clinging to the last bit poking above water. Below, blue crabs shake the stalks with their claws in hopes of dislodging their dinner.

  The Europeans who laid eyes on the South Carolina coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must have approached the shoreline with wonder, staring into the dense pine forests abutting the beaches. The coast is absent landmarks, save for the mouths of rivers. Anything and everything in this part of the New World was contained beyond or within the trees.

  What was beyond the trees of South Carolina? For Foy and other marijuana smugglers, there was isolation and rural roads. Rural roads led to highways. Highways led to the interstate. And the interstate led to big cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, New York, and Washington, D.C., where there lived legions of waiting customers.

  In the marshes, off-loaders stomped through muck to pull bales off boats, trying to avoid oysters, whose shells pointed upward like small alabaster daggers, threatening to ribbon skin from unprotected feet and legs. Off-loading in South Carolina creeks was vastly different from tossing bales in the condo-lined canals of Florida. Working under cover of darkness, smugglers agonized over the dangers of the marsh, home to alligators and poisonous snakes. They quickly learned that insects and mites could collude to make life miserable. Mosquitoes bit exposed skin, chiggers snuck under clothing to attack legs and groins, while no-see-ums swarmed faces and crawled through hair. One smuggler from Indiana was so terrified of chiggers, he religiously dusted his socks and shoes with sulfur before daring to work in the marsh.

  Navigation in the marsh could be extremely challenging, too, especially on moonless nights. The area’s eight-foot tides restricted operations, as a boat, already sitting low in the water because of its heavy load of drugs, could easily catch its keel or hull on a sandbar or the mud bottom. In places, South Carolina’s marshes spread for a few miles offshore, and the creeks that wound through them split continually, like capillaries, dwindling into dead ends. As the smugglers discovered, it’s much easier to enjoy South Carolina’s coastal landscape by looking across it, than working in it.

  Despite the challenges, smugglers were eager to exploit the sleepy South Carolina coast, especially as law enforcement patrols in Florida became more frequent. Julian Pernell, the Virginia kingpin, testified that he and his partner, Barry Toombs, conducted fifty-two smuggling operations in eleven years, forty-five of which were successful. Pernell, who forfeited about $7 million to the government, estimated about half of his smuggling operations came through South Carolina: “I had some in McClellanville, I had some in Edisto Island, some in Hilton Head, some in Charleston, some came into Georgetown, Conway, up and down the South Carolina coast,” said Pernell.

  “Is [South Carolina] a pretty good place to drop off marijuana?” asked a defense lawyer.

  “One of the best,” said Pernell.

  Among those smugglers most intrigued by the South Carolina coast was Byers, a native Midwesterner who’d spent little time in the Deep South. The almost unspoiled coast of South Carolina would serve him well, and so would its people. Within a few years he’d work closely with no less than five South Carolinians the federal government would classify as marijuana kingpins, including Foy. Born in Minneapolis on October 12, 1945, Karl Robert Byers Jr. spent his childhood in Minnesota, shuffling back and forth between households after his parents divorced when he was twelve. He was an average student, he later told his South Carolina lawyer, Gedney Howe, and had a paper route as a kid. In the summertime he learned to sail on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis with his buddies Bob Roche and Bill Thompson, whose parents had a boat. On weekends they volunteered at the lake to crew sailboats in regattas. Byers’s passion for sailing proved an enduring one. In time he’d own some of the world’s finest boats.

  Before his parents split, he and his siblings watched his father mistreat their mother. Nevertheless, when he was sixteen, Byers ran away from Minneapolis to find his father in Portland, Oregon.

  Life was not better on the West Coast. His father had remarried, but the relationship was crumbling. Byers’s stepmother, who had children of her own from a previous relationship, treated Byers as second-rate. Byers and his father moved out, but Karl Robert Byers Sr.’s drinking didn’t stop.

  “He was an alcoholic and I was subject to his abuse, and he was never around,” Byers said. “He really wasn’t much of a father.”

  Absent supervision, Byers began skipping school and stealing cars. After a 1962 arrest for boosting a new Ford, a judge asked the seventeenyear-old if he’d rather be released to his father or go to a state reform school. Byers chose the latter, and he attended MacLaren School for Boys for six months, wrestling and playing football and baseball.

  “I thought it did me a lot of good,” Byers said.

  After being released from MacLaren to his father in January 1963, however, the lessons from reform school were quickly forgotten. Byers was jailed in Portland for operating a car without a license and speeding. He moved in with a friend’s family while he finished high school. In February 1964 he married. His wife, Karen, waited tables while he worked at a furniture company.

  “I had a pretty, you know, torn-up childhood, and her childhood was pretty much the same as mine. Her parents weren’t divorced but they were constantly breaking up and separating,” Byers later explained. “I think we sort of found some sort of a common denominator of the two of us.”

  It was not, however, enough of a bond to ensure his fidelity. Within a few years, he cheated on Karen with her friends and even members of her own family.

  “When we got married, both of us being Catholics, she agreed— we agreed—that she was going to take the pill. About a month or two weeks before the marriage, one of her Catholic friends got into her ear and told her that wasn’t the right thing to do to take the pill. So discretion or better part of valor or whatever, I went ahead with the marriage,” said Byers. “She became pregnant immediately after we were married, which was against, you know, my better judgment and everything like that.

  “The first kid came along and she wasn’t taking the pill, so I was having extracurricular marital activities because I didn’t want her to get pregnant again and I didn’t want to have any more kids because we were only eighteen years
old and to be tied down by that sort of thing. That went on for a while, and I decided the best thing to do would just be to give up the relationship because she still wouldn’t take the pill.

  “So I left and went my way, went back to Minneapolis, and was working out there. She flew out to see me and we tried to reconcile our relationship, her still not being on the pill, and she ended up pregnant again. So that’s where it ended.”

  Alhough his parents had since reunited—they rekindled their love on the occasion of Byers’s wedding—Byers’s father did not stop drinking. The elder Byers’s debauchery reached a boiling point in 1967, after he and his son had separately moved back to Minnesota.

  “I went to blows with him one day and put him in the hospital,” Byers said. “After that one of my brothers did the same thing about a year later, kicked him out of the house. After we made up over that fight, we got along pretty good.”

  With an ex-wife and two young daughters left behind in Oregon, Byers traded Minnesota for Miami, where he worked for two years as a soft drink deliveryman along with Roche, his childhood friend.

  Byers was also building his criminal résumé at this time, though the petty crimes he was accused of were a poor preview of the future misdeeds he’d commit as a kingpin who’d make the U.S. Marshal’s most wanted list. In 1970, Miami Springs police charged Byers with buying, receiving, or concealing stolen property after finding him with a television, telephone, and liquor that had been taken three days earlier. He received probation. In 1972, according to Byers’s friend and fellow smuggler, Mike Abell, Byers was no more than a small-time pot dealer who drove a Volkswagen.

  Byers’s underwhelming rap sheet and a succession of blue-collar jobs obscure the fact that at some point in the 1970s he started making a fortune selling marijuana. Beyond buying the prized Columbia sailboat, Byers lived on a houseboat on the Miami River and owned a Porsche and cigarette boat that he towed across the country. Foy says he and Byers would take the overpowered motorboat, capable of speeds upward of sixty miles per hour, and jump the wakes made by cruise ships off of Miami. Cruise passengers would watch with delight as the cigarette boat went airborne. They’d holler when Byers and Foy’s female passengers removed their swimsuit tops.