Saltwater cowboy, p.22
Saltwater Cowboy, page 22
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small clear plastic bag and handed it to me. For two hours I picked up crap out of that asshole’s grass; then he came back and snatched the bag from my hand and said, “From now on stay off my grass, boy! Now get outta my face!”
My first week was taken up with classes that were held in the education building. The first class was administered by the warden. He felt that it was his responsibility to personally instruct new fish in the rules and regulations of the prison. The warden also felt that it was his responsibility to let each of us know that if we did not have a high school diploma, we would most certainly be getting one. We took tests to ascertain our level of education. If your test score reached the equivalent of or exceeded a twelfth-grade level, you could move on into general population and be assigned to a regular housing unit. If you scored below that level, you would remain in the admissions and orientations building until you achieved that level. It was determined that my education level was that of a third-year college student. Thank God, now it was only a matter of time before I was removed from that cattle pen where I was living.
I spent three more weeks in that shithole before finally being assigned to a unit with an open bunk space. When my name was called and my assignment handed to me, I was instructed to head down to the laundry, where I would be issued new prison uniforms, a bedroll, and a pillow. I was given three of everything: three shirts, three pairs of pants and shorts, three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear and T-shirts. With my new wardrobe in hand and bedroll and pillow under my arm, I walked into A-unit and was given my bunk assignment by the unit guard. After eleven months of being locked down in steel cages, I was finally walking into the place I would call home for the next nine years and one month.
The first thing I did was make up my bunk. It was on top. The bottom bunks had to be earned over time. They were down low and relatively out of sight and were coveted. Guys have to wait until someone is either paroled or dies before they can make a move.
The second thing I did was take off that damned orange jumpsuit and put on a pair of pants and a shirt. I threw that jumpsuit in the collection barrel next to the exit door, then began to take a tour of my new house. It really wasn’t that bad considering where I had just been. It was a dormitory-style setup. The linoleum floor was polished to a mirror finish; the block walls also shimmered with dozens of layers of glossy enamel paint. The ceiling was vaulted, and the hundred-by-fifty-foot room was lined with four rows of steel-walled cubicles. Each cube had all the comforts of home, a set of bunk beds, two lockers, a desk, and two folding chairs. At that end of the building was the TV room, and next to it was a locked wooden door with blinds covering the window laminated with wire mesh. That was the room where I would meet every six months with a team of counselors, prison administrators, and guards who would be evaluating my custody level along the way. I ambled to the other end of the building, where the toilets and showers were located. Those facilities weren’t much to look at, but at least they were clean. For the next forty-five minutes, controlled movement had me restricted to the unit, so I took this time to acclimate to my new surroundings. After a leisurely stroll around my new home, I took the folding chair that was next to my locker and went into the TV room. It had been months since I’d watched anything. Sure, there had been a TV just about everywhere I went before landing here, but you couldn’t hear it above all the commotion. Trying to watch it was a waste of time. But now I was the only one in the room. All the other guys were either working or out in the yard. My favorite program was about to start, so I settled in and lost myself in the latest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a rare treat—not just because I was alone and able to enjoy the show but also because the room was air-conditioned. The rest of the unit wasn’t. The solitude and cool comfort of that room provided me with something I hadn’t experienced for almost a year: total silence. What the hell, my work assignment with the prison construction crew didn’t start until tomorrow, so I stayed in there the entire afternoon until three thirty lockdown.
Four o’clock count kicked off the dinner hour, and controlled movement between the inner compound and rec yard was terminated until nine thirty, when they locked us down for the night.
Exiting the chow hall with a bellyful of hamburgers and French fries, I took my first walk around the rec yard. There was a full-size soccer field on the upper yard surrounded by a running track. To the right of that were the six racquetball courts. Spread out over the lower rec yard were the weight pile, softball field, basketball court, sand-filled volleyball court (nicknamed “peter beach”), and I’ll be damned if they didn’t have a nine-hole miniature golf course. I hung around the volleyball court for most of the evening and even got in on a few games. It was unlike any volleyball game I had ever played. The cons called it “jungle ball,” and they played it using prison rules. They were easy to follow because there were only two of them: the ball was either in bounds, or it was out of bounds. This was the only way the game could be played by a bunch of criminals. If there were any more rules, the game would quickly escalate into an all-out brawl.
Nine thirty lockdown and ten o’clock count were close at hand, so I made my way back to the unit. Lying on my bunk, sweating my ass off, I decided there and then that it was time to get myself back into shape. The next day, the weight pile would be my daily hangout, and perhaps I would recruit a workout partner. Being that it was so close to count time and the showers were all occupied, I decided to clean up afterward. The guards came in right on schedule and did their last count for the day. I put on my flip-flops, wrapped a towel around my waist, grabbed my soap and shampoo, then headed for the showers. Minding my own business and walking between the rows of bunks, I tried not to look in on them, but when I passed the last cubicle in the row, I heard a voice call out to me.
“Excuse me, son!”
I was surprised to be addressed in such a polite manner. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned, and looked in. All I could see of the single occupant were his legs sticking out from the bottom bunk. The rest of him was sitting back against the wall of the cubicle, and the shade from the bunk above his head hid his face from my view.
“Hello there,” I said. “My name’s Tim.”
And from the shadow he spoke to me with a slow, melodic Southern drawl.
“Hello there, Timmy. My name’s George. You don’t happen to know how to play gin rummy, do ya?”
AFTERWORD
I was arrested in October of 1988 and released back into the world on March 3, 1992, to three more years of “special parole.” Shortly after, I took on a new adventure and became a father, something I thought I’d never have a chance to experience. As of this writing, my son has just turned twenty-one, and my beautiful daughter is now eighteen. My long nights of running offshore have been traded for even longer days running a construction crew. Déjà vu washed over me as I recalled my first few days home from prison. My brother Pat had a job waiting for me. He was the company’s only superintendent at that time, and in just a few months I went from jumping out of the back of his pickup truck with a shovel in my hand, just like the other laborers, to running the entire labor force. I was so fucking glad to have my life back and so fucking glad to be home, I was exploding with energy. Within a year I was the company’s new commercial superintendent, running a growing crew of fifty men over the next eleven years. Over the next seven years I assisted in the logistical operations of three more local companies with which I had once competed. Sound familiar? In 2008, when the housing bubble burst, so did my little bubble. I had, by that time, been a divorced single father for five years, and since the divorce, my kids came home with me and did not leave my sight. I found myself sitting at home without a clue as to how I was going to keep a roof over my little family’s head and food on the table. Then a thought occurred to me. Before I went to prison, I had more friends than I could count, and when I got home, I could count them all on one hand with a few fingers left over. But through the years, those few friends and I would get together with their friends, and inevitably someone would say, “Hey, Timmy, would you mind telling these guys one of your crazy-ass stories?” And their reactions were always voiced the same: “DAMN! That would make a great book! That shit is fucking nuts!”
On June 25, 2011, I staged a reunion of Saltwater Cowboys at a pub in Naples, Florida. The local press quickly picked up on the story, and the turnout was surprising. I received e-mails and phone calls from pot haulers I never knew. The Fort Myers News-Press was there at the party, interviewing people for a Sunday story. A reporter who wanted the viewpoint from the opposing side of marijuana smuggling for the newspaper story contacted supervising agent David Waller, who is currently the resident agent for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Lakeland, Florida. It turns out that he was my nemesis back in the day: the man behind the wheel of the tan Bronco that fateful night on Pine Island. He was also the agent who was in charge of my case.
A few months before the Saltwater Cowboys reunion, Agent Waller contacted me, and we had a very pleasant chat. I gave him a Reader’s Digest condensed version of my life since our last encounter, and he told me that he had recently attended a conference at the federal building in Fort Myers with dozens of agents from around the country. The topic of the conference just happened to be Operation Peacemaker, and my name had been tossed around for most of the day. So out of curiosity he looked me up online, then called me and we became reacquainted. This News-Press reporter asked Waller if he believed the stories of how I made more than $25 million smuggling weed. Waller was quoted as saying, “That’s a good conservative estimate. McBride had direct contact with marijuana wholesalers from other countries. He was good, a very smooth talker.” When the reporter told Waller that I was planning a reunion of the Saltwater Cowboys, he burst into laughter. He wasn’t surprised.
I’d like to acknowledge all of those crews out there who worked at this game throughout those years. Whether your loads made it to shore or not, my hat’s off to you. To say that my crews were the only ones out there crisscrossing the Caribbean and risking their asses to gain a foothold in this revolution would be just plain insulting. I’m simply saying that because of this labyrinth of the Ten Thousand Islands that Mother Nature constructed in our backyard, we were able to be consistent enough in this game to have integrated smuggling into a way of life spanning three generations.
Ironically, I would not be able to tell my story if I had not gone to prison. My bank-robbing friend Dennis Lehman took me under his wing and taught me how to bare my soul to the pages of a yellow legal pad. I don’t expect to get cash rich from this attempt at authoring. But what I do expect is to become rich in the knowledge that, through my testimony, I have done my friends and the little town of Everglades City a bit of justice. It’s time to pull back that dark veil of infectious ignorance that has caused them to bow their heads in shame for their long-standing relationship with a plant that, in today’s world, is quite benign. The town remains pristine and beautiful, and the hearts and souls remain pure in my many friends who still reside among the mangrove islands. They are the caretakers and the guardians of a vast and beautiful wilderness paradise. And if your travels should bring you to southwest Florida, do yourself a favor and hop on an airboat or take a guided fishing trip into the backcountry of the islands, because you just never know. Your captain might be an old outlaw with a story or two to tell.
Only a handful of Saltwater Cowboys are left who have the knowledge of how the jobs were done. Not even the investigators had this knowledge, as proved by their years of failed and frustrated efforts to capture us. This book is meant to erase the fiction and myths and awaken you to a nonfiction world filled with harsh reality.
Earlier, I wrote that I never once feared for my life. Well, I take that back. The one and only thing that ever threatened my life was the US government. Our government is still playing the bully when it comes to marijuana laws. Properly regulated, this new market has the potential to create a stream of revenue that would change the course of this nation and its economy. It also potentially harbors the cure for cancer, our plague of the twenty-first century, yet the federal government blindly continues to justify the ridiculous and expensive task of criminalizing marijuana. Consider that the typical US citizen isn’t going to get caught with more than 150 tons in his pocket when you dwell on the following facts. For having been caught with just under 400,000 pounds, I ultimately served four years in a federal prison. So what is the most powerful nation on the planet saying to its own citizens when it can take more than two hundred potential life sentences for flooding North America with marijuana and reduce them to what amounts to a mere slap on the wrist? Why would it continue today with this childish bullying and posturing when there is a simple truth and a simple fix? The truth is that I wound up with the most time for acting as a manager of this operation, and after being threatened with life in prison four times over, I was handed ten years, and that was ultimately reduced to four. This not only illustrates the insane range of time judges dispense with discretion, but it also points to a rather large inconsistency within individual state and federal sentencing guidelines. I don’t know about you, but I think this demonstrates our justice system’s inability to level the playing field even in matters left to the judges’ own discretion. There is a simple fix to all of this, and it lies within the answer to this next question: Why doesn’t Big Brother continue to give out a little of that compassion he gave to my crew and me? Here is an example of that compassion.
After my sentence was pronounced, I was told this by the US attorney who prosecuted me: “We just wanted to stop your activities and give everyone a little time as punishment, Tim. When it came to sentencing, we took very much into consideration the background and type of people with which we were dealing. We discovered that beneath all of this lawlessness, there were nonviolent hardworking men and women, most of whom had their own families. Each case was reviewed one by one, and the wives and children of each family that would be left behind were also taken into consideration. Then a reasonable sentence was determined.”
I know that Big Brother is out there somewhere reading this, and I want you to know that I’m grateful for the compassion that was ultimately bestowed upon me. But my sincere hope is for that same understanding and compassion to be dispensed equally among all your little brothers and sisters; for that you would have the gratitude of a nation.
While presenting you, the reader, with this twenty-two-year snapshot of my life, I felt it was important for you all to understand and for me to remind you that—although the men whom I worked with in Miami were shooting it out to see who would ultimately dominate the drug trade—we Saltwater Cowboys weren’t violent, nor did we ever carry weapons. We were very much the opposite. We were just a bunch of young, barefooted, modern-day outlaws running these southern waters and the Caribbean on a quest for that one thing in life that we all crave: adventure. We possessed a unique ability that our clients needed, and for this ability they were willing to pay, and they paid very well.
It was this relatively harmless good ol’ boy mentality that makes us unique. Couple that with an amazing sequence of events, and it ultimately became the deciding factor in why I’m able to sit here in the comfort of my home and tell you these stories.
Twenty-two years have gone by since my release from prison, and it is only now that I feel comfortable passing these stories along to you. I also feel very passionately that America, as well as the world, should know exactly what we did, how we did it, and the extent to which it was done. In those days there was, and still is, an overwhelming demand for our product. So for nearly two decades our little corner of the world supplied that demand, and it just happened to be for the most popular and the most widely used illegal drug on earth. A plant.
In the wake of the recent changes in legislation regarding marijuana legalization, let me just say, it’s about time! I am not going to launch into a one-sided debate on this subject—I’m just hanging up my diploma. I also want to say to the very cool people of my generation and the next that if you’re finally willing to step up and join this revolution, then you should at least be introduced to a few of its founding fathers.
In these changing times this story is absolutely relevant in that it reflects a true belief in a thing and a true desire to make that thing a reality. Along with changing times and changing attitudes, there must also be changes in perception and presentation. It’s time to remove the stigma that has plagued this little plant and give it a respectable introduction to those who have not been introduced. The days of making midnight runs are over, and there’s now a spotlight shining down where there was once shadow. It’s time to put marijuana, with all of its wonderful flavors, aromas, and experiences, out there on the shelves and let the people make their own decisions. Human nature, more specifically curiosity, dictates that some of you, in states that have boldly spoken up, who once said you wouldn’t will now say you will. Because you have freedom to choose. And that blows my mind!
Author’s Note
This book is for all the men and women of Everglades City and Chokoloskee whom I am proud to call my friends and my extended family. This is also their legacy and one for which they should not be solely recognized. Southwest Florida’s wilderness frontier was tamed and settled by real men and women who dared to show the world that no matter where on this earth you should choose to call home, Mother Nature will teach you how to provide for your family.
The characters I introduced to you within these pages are spoken of with my utmost respect and admiration. My acknowledgment also extends of course to those whom I did not mentioned, yet I’m comfortable with the fact that if you read this you all know who you are.
