The following is a conversation with Roger Reeves, one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history.
He worked for Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa, the leaders behind the Medellin Cartel.
Roger was the employer and close friend of Barry Seal, the infamous drug smuggler who was the
main character in the movie American Made. Roger transported countless tons of cocaine and marijuana
covering six continents. He escaped prison five times, was shut down in both Mexico and Colombia,
and was tortured, nearly to death in a Mexican prison. Through all of this, his wife Mari,
the love of his life, was there with him, and when he was in prison, she waited for him.
He recently got out of prison, where for many years he worked on his memoir called Smuggler.
This podcast is an exploration of his story. Quick mention of our sponsors, Noom, Allform,
ExpressVPN, FourSigmatic, and AidSleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
Let me say a few words about Roger Reeves, Pablo Escobar, and the war on drugs.
This conversation with Roger is unlike any I've ever done. In the eyes of many,
including the law, Roger is a criminal, a bad man who has added to the suffering in the world.
But he never directly engaged or participated in the violence,
unlike his bosses, Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa. His crime was a transport of drugs.
I thought about this, and about Pablo Escobar, who was at once both a brutal murderer,
and a Robin Hood figure who helped the poor and was loved by thousands, if not millions.
We sometimes idolize murderers and destroy good honest men. We give power and money to corrupt
politicians and dictators that starve and murder their own people. Given this, I think about what
makes for a good man, and what makes for a bad man, and who decides. Sitting across from Roger,
I saw a complicated man, but one who has kindness in his heart, a love for money and adventure,
and a disdain for violence. Again, his crime was a transport of drugs. Since 1971,
the war on drugs has cost us $1 trillion. Marijuana legalization alone would save and make
$13.7 billion that could send more than 650,000 students to public universities every year.
Then there's the human stories of the 500,000 human beings sitting in prison for drug-related
offenses, and the 1.1 million on probation and parole. Their life is damaged or ruined beyond
repair due to the prohibition of drugs. There's a lot more to be said about the damage done by
the war on drugs, but when reading about Roger's story and talking to him, I couldn't escape the
thought that while society wants to label him a criminal and a bad human being, there are much
worse men out there who we give a past to, even give power to, even men who hold political office
or run companies. I also think about my role as an interviewer. Sitting across a man like Roger,
in these interviews, in life, in many ways I continue to be myself. A person who, like Dostoyevsky's,
the idiot, seeks the good in all people, but is hurt by it on occasion and maybe is destroyed by
it in the end. I'm not naive, but I'm also optimistic and have hope for humanity. That's
who I am, and that's what these conversations are. I hope you join me and I hope you understand
that I come from a place of love. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's my conversation
with Roger Reeves. You are one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history. What would you say
motivated you? Money, power, the thrill, or was it something else? Money. But isn't there a point
where you've had more money that you can possibly know what to do with? Or is it always more money?
You know, I had plenty of money several times, and I think it's sort of like, if you was in Los
Vegas and you had the slot machine handled down and the gold coins was tumbling around you and
you had sweepers bagging them up, when would you let it go? But isn't some part of that the thrill
then? Oh, there was a lot of thrill. Sometimes way too much. You made certainly tens of millions
of dollars, probably much more. What memorable experience did having that much money make
possible for you? So there's one thing is the money, and the other thing is what that money can buy.
Well, I bought everything that I could hide. I bought seven farms. I owned the land where
the city of Moreno Valley, California is. I had an option on that land. Did the planning
and development of that, the most expensive coin in the world, yachts, ships, airplanes,
glower. Does that bring you happiness? No, absolutely not. In fact, I think I'm happier
now. I know I'm happier now. So looking back, would you do it the same way all again? No way.
Really? Even the thrill of it? Not even the thrill of it. It wasn't worth 33 years in prison
being away from my lovely family. So money, what about the power just being on top of the world
where nobody can, not the governments, the police, all the big bad agencies chasing you.
You could do whatever the heck you wanted. As far as having to look over your shoulder
everywhere you went and every phone call you made, make sure that you was naked with somebody in the
ocean before you talked. It's rather uncomfortable. Yeah. I like to make phone calls the same way.
What was it like meeting and working with Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellin Cartel?
He was just seemed like a gentleman when I met him. He was just like you and I sitting here shook
hands and I had flown one load for a fellow and it didn't work out well. The fellow that I give it
to got shot and it took a while to get my money in. They didn't put as many kilos on the plane
as they're supposed to and so I wasn't going to work with them anymore and my contact down there
introduced me to Jorge Ochoa and we went up and in Bogota we went up and the gate opened and
we was escorted in. There must have been 50 men out in the yards, a hitch and rail on an old house
and we was escorted right in and they was a beautiful woman in there. I mean, gore, drop dead
beautiful and she made us a cup of coffee then was ushered in to see Jorge Ochoa and he had 12
telephones on his desk and all of them was a different color and he shook hands, was very
friendly, spoke English and he said that each one of those telephones represented another city
in the United States. This is Chicago and this is New York. If I ring I knew who was calling
and so we chatted a while and he asked me what type of airplanes I had
and what experience I had flying across the U.S. border and I told him he seemed pleased with it
and he called the lady in and she went next door and came Pablo Escobar and he introduced me to
Pablo Escobar and he asked the same questions again and I answered him and I said,
and I asked him how much he paid and they paid $5,000 a kilo to haul it and so I said how much
you put on the plane? He said $300,000, $500,000. That's one and a half, two and a half million
dollars for an eight-hour trip. It sounded pretty good to me. And we're talking about cocaine
and we're talking about Colombia. Colombia and cocaine and Medellin cartel. And Jorge Ochoa was
one of the, what would you say, founding members of the committee. It's probably the brains behind
the whole thing. The brains and spoke good English. Yes. And they were nice people. Really nice people.
Were you scared? Not at all. What's wrong with your mind that you weren't scared?
Here's some of the most dangerous men in this world and you weren't scared.
Well, I knew I was going to do exactly what I said I was going to do.
Murray and the children were down there. They went down and they stayed in the hotel and five
stars treated royally on my first looting. And they just did ask security to make sure
that I wasn't a DEA agent. So I did the first looting. They can say they were hostages,
but they really weren't. It was just an insurance. So there was some integrity to the way they
operated. Completely. I mean straight up. The money was ironed and banded and just right.
And the numbers would never want anything wrong with it.
What would you attribute that honesty to? Within their own moral system and their
own set of rules. Why weren't people crossing the line and shaving off the top and injecting chaos
into the system to where it would be unpredictable and people would be dishonest and greedy and
all those kinds of things. That's true. Most people are, but there's certain people at the
top of the food chain that they don't need that. And if they're completely honest,
then they don't have to think of, remember the lie they told. And plus they're just
honest to start with. They make him plenty of money. They was making as much money as I did.
I'll tell you how that came about. I understand that 10,000 people were killed every year in
Medellin, Columbia. And what they were doing, they didn't have any organization. And if one
fellow had 10 kilos and he wanted it shipped to New York, he would tell his friend. And his friend
said, sure, I'll ship it. I have a pilot and I'll ship it up. And then he would look in the
newspapers. Oh, 40 kilos was busted in New Jersey. I'm so sorry. Yours got busted. Bang, bang. He's
dead. So here comes Jorge Ochoa and three Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar and Gacho. And they
decided that we will make an insurance company that we would charge you $10,000 to take it to your
contact in Miami. If it gets lost anywhere between the time I put it on the airplane
or the time you give it to us and the time we give it to your man, we will replace it in
Columbia for you. So there was no way anybody could lose. And I understand they got 100 tons
piled up under that insurance program. And I was right there the first day. So I had all the work
I could do. I would land in this. I said, when do you want me to come back? We waiting on you,
senor. Well, let me ask a difficult question. Some see Escobar as a brutal murderer and some see him
as maybe a Robin Hood like figure who helped the poor. How do you see the man? Both of them.
I think he started out to be honest with the help of the poor. And then they had a war down there.
And they blew up and killed his people. And the country was divided almost equally three ways.
They had the military. They were just as much into it as anybody. And then you had the
Fart guerrillas. They had about a third of the country. And then you had the conchers. It was
like the white farmers. And they're the ones that I was dealing with. And they were at war with one
another. And so if one of them started killing their people, I'll kill some of yours too.
So that's how it happened. And then when I heard about Pablo Escobar
blowing up that airliner and killing those women and children, I was sorry I ever shook his hand.
That's brutal murder. So you would say Escobar is not a good man?
Not at all. It's terrible. Now that looking back on it, when I met him, he was good.
Did just exactly what he said he would do. Could he be a bad man and a man you can trust?
Absolutely. You could trust him, yes.
So from your perspective, in terms of business, he was reliable. He was honest.
Had integrity. You could work with him. He felt safe.
Completely. We flew up into his ranch and we brought out motorcycles to start with.
And can you ride a motorcycle? Of course I can ride a motorcycle. So I took off
across the grass and there was a little ditch there in the front wheel dropped and that thing.
And I must have slid across that grass 20 feet before I got stopped. He almost fell off his
bike waiting because they knew what it was going to do. And then we got on horses. And we went
out there and pretended to type around up some cows and he put a Mac 10 machine gun pistol over
my shoulder. You know how to use this? Well, I never had, but it was all right. I think it was
like, okay, you got 10 bodyguards. What do you need me for? So that's the kind of time we laughed
and talked and drove some cows over the stumps. You said Jorge Ochoa was perhaps the brains
of the Medellin cartel. What was he like? And why do you say he was the brains?
Well, he was a gentleman. And I suppose he shipped, you know, tell me how many more times of cocaine
than Pablo did. Just him and his brothers, you could tell by the, they had on each load,
they was in duffel bags and his big football shaped fluffy stuff made with ether. And they would have
three horns on it or a rattlesnake or four X's on each bag. You kind of got to know in which was,
which was which and they shipped a lot. So, and he was just a gentleman. I took him to family. We
went one weekend to his ranch or his, my life show place out near Barranquilla and all we,
he just treated the family. His family had a, his younger brother wrote, made a bull fight and we
had skiing and little airplanes on floats on the water. It was really nice and he was really nice.
How do you make sense of the tension that a man could be a gentleman,
can have integrity, but also be a murderer? Well, murder is a, is a stronger word than killing.
Can you explain the, the, the line, the gray area we're talking about? I mean, I've just
talking with Jaco willing. Can we talk to a lot about killing in the context of
a military conflict and context of war. So there, there's a line between murder and killing
that you can draw. What's the line that you're referring to? It's something similar. If you,
if people are shooting at you and you shoot back and kill him, I don't, that's not murder
whatsoever. It's, he's trying to get away or out of the situation. But if some woman don't pay you
and you send a hit man over to, to kill her and her children, that's, that's murder. That's murder.
Was Jorge involved in those kinds of things? I don't think so at all. It just, I mean, he was,
he was just such a gentleman. He had a restaurant before and, and he was just smart. I understand
that the first 10 kilos he sold, he was sitting on a, on a motorcycle in the, in the sidelines in
a parking lot when the DEA come in, he's sped away. So he didn't come back to America. He was
just smart. Some people just have, are savvy. And he was such a gentleman and the whole family,
the mother and the father, the two brothers, their sister, I was there when she was kidnapped.
And finally, he kidnapped our, I guess 100 leaders of the FARC and said, all right, I mean,
she don't come back. None of these are going to come back. So they made a deal.
Is there something you can say about the power structure, the hierarchy of the Medellin cartel
that you interacted with? Was, was it a dictatorship where Pablo ran everything?
Was there a bunch of power centers? Was it like a company where you have CEO, CTO kind of thing?
And then there's like managers and all those kinds of things. What's the,
like, how did it run from a leadership perspective?
I understand that about five of them got together and made this, I will call it an insurance
company. And now known as the Medellin cartel. And I didn't see any difference. Each one of them
had their own business and their people from the jungle or wherever made the cocaine, gave it to
them and they shipped it. And so it didn't, it didn't seem to be any, any power play between
them at all. But my main contact was Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar was right there.
And I saw plenty of stuff for him too. It's strange that they didn't betray each other
regularly. You know, greed makes men betray each other. How do you explain that? How much
betrayal did you see? I didn't see any, absolutely none. If, if they shipped his 100 kilos, he got
paid for it. If the other one shipped his, I'm sure they got paid for it. How do you explain that?
Well, there was no need to. The money was just unbelievable. You think about 500 kilos in the
plane at $50,000 a kilo at the time. And they paid $5,000 to ship it. And they made $5,000
without even touching it. They just had somebody to load it on through the airplane.
I gave it to their man in Miami. They gave it to whoever it belonged to by the,
by the marks on the duffel bags. So they was making just untold millions. Just no reason.
But greed can blind men. I, you know, it's still, it's still strange to me
that there was not more betrayal. It speaks to something else perhaps that's bigger than money.
Maybe, maybe, maybe not. But it seems like just like in the casino, like you mentioned,
we get accustomed to whatever level of money we have, we get accustomed very quickly.
Yes. And then there's a tension that's natural between human beings. And when that tension
combined with money, combined with power, combined with, like you mentioned, beautiful women
and a bit of violence, it seems that betrayal should become a place. But it's not.
It wasn't. Not at all. They said, Carlos later, I don't know if he betrayed anybody,
but he started that. He was running cocaine through the Bahamas and he had the island.
I didn't go, I was offered to fly with a DC three with that, but I didn't like it.
So I had my route through the old wheels in Louisiana. And so I didn't want to change.
But he talked a lot. And I don't know if he betrayed, but they didn't like him.
Yeah. So as you expand, there could be tensions that lead to conflict.
Columbia was, like you said, an ultra violent place. How did you survive? Who protected you?
I was a hero. They liked me. I mean, I was just treated royally. All I did, I would come over
El Banco. There's a radio station at the Forks of the Magdalena River. I believe it was 720,
if I remember right, on the AM. And I'd fly at 10,000 feet and I'd see below me, there'd be a
Cessna. And I'd wiggle my wings and he'd wiggle his and I'd fall in behind him. And we might go
100, 200 miles, not land on some jungle strip or some banana plantation. And they'd fuel me up.
I could eat steak in the night. It was just like treated royally. And I mean, take off the next
morning, whenever I wanted to, it was just like that was protected. And I was honored guest.
It wasn't anything like in that movie, putting a gun to your head and taking your sunglasses
and betting. So one time I complained to Jorge Ochoa that the runway was pretty short
that they were using. And I went back down and it looked like Los Angeles International. They
had to bulldozers in there. Had to think 5,000 feet long. Just like the next week it was all
done. The jungle was gone and Clay put up there. And all the while you were not afraid. You were
treated like a royalty. Yes, there I was. I was afraid when I landed in the United States.
Well, maybe let's go back to the beginning. What was the first time you all flew an airplane
with drugs on it? Tell me the story the first time you smuggled drugs.
All right. I flew down to Jalapa Veracruz with a Cessna 182. And we landed the town. It was a
lovely town. Just an old town looked like Bible times. Women were washing their clothes in the
streets with stone basins and the stream running through. I just was just dumbstruck. It was just
so pretty. And I went in a church, a Catholic church, and it had the stations of the cross
all carved magnificent. I had never seen that. And I come home and told Murray about that. That
was just, I almost brought tears to my eyes. It was so beautiful. And three o'clock the next
morning I went out to the airport and taxied down to the taxiway. And there was a guard came out.
And I wanted to know what I was doing. And I pulled out. I was on the fire department
out of Redondo Beach, California. So I pulled out my wallet and it was a fire department badge.
And oh, he shook my hand. We're so glad. So I taxed it on down and we loaded up about 400
pounds in the plane. And I came on back and I was running the headwinds more than I thought.
And I landed on a little strip. You were talking about on the way back?
On the way back, on the way north after we loaded up early in the morning.
And the only time I ever got vertigo, the mountains were coming down at a 30 or 40 degree
angle in the Milky Way was overhead. And somehow I wanted that airplane to be level with the stars.
And it got me. And it's a phenomenon of how vertigo, it's the only time I ever had it,
was on that load. So anyway, the wind was on the nose of that system. I wasn't going to make it
to the dry lake where I had fuel. So I landed on a little bitty strip. And there was a little
house it was caved in. And it was a little boy named Lazarus, about six or seven years old.
And he was herding some goats. So we put the marijuana in that house and the man stayed with
it. So while I flew into some town and got fuel and came back and we sat down with the lunch
that I brought back and little Lazarus sat there and ate with us. And we had a good time. We loaded
him back and came home. Oh, wow. I wonder where he is now. So what was it like to fly? Maybe
describe the details of, do you have to fly low? Is there details that are unique to this
experience of flying an airplane with drugs on it on board? All right. Well, one of the mistakes
that just thousands and hundreds and thousands of pilots make, they don't stop at the border
going down and get their permit. Once you get a permit to be in Mexico, you've got it for six months.
You can go anywhere, any fishing village, any little town, any little place,
show them this and you're welcome. If you don't have that, you go straight to jail.
So you go down there and you think, okay, they're going to have fuel for me to come back and so
forth. Oh, sorry, senior. That was, had a rusty leak in it. We don't have any. Well, you better
be able to go to town and get it. So that's what I did. And when I was coming back for several
years, I would fly up in Mexicali and cross the border right at Calexico. Just, I would act like
I was landing on the Calexico side just after dark. And then I'd zip across the border and I'd go to
the Salton Sea and go below sea level, a hundred and something feet, I believe 170 feet, and come on up
and go out there and, of Palm Springs and land out 29 palms in the desert and put my stuff under
Joshua Tree and flying to town to get my pickup and going back out and get it. And that was fun.
And then it got really dangerous. They had a Operation Starlight, I believe was the name
of it. And they called a lot of pilots coming across the border. So I changed it. And by that
time I was flying bigger planes, I was flying beach 18s. And I would refuel in Mulaje on halfway down
on Baja Peninsula. And then over in the middle, 20 miles from the nearest road was a, was a goat
ranch where they milked goats and made cheese. And I would go there and unload the load coming
up out of anywhere in southern Mexico. And I would land there and a guy named Juan would,
would put the marijuana under the trees and I'd fly into Mulaje and they'd wash my plane and
gas it up and I'd eat lunch and rent a room for a few hours and take a nap and a shower
and then go back in the afternoon and fill up. And then I would go northwest out of there
and fly 200 miles off the coast of the island of Guadalupe. And from there I would fly on a
more northwestern heading about 300 miles out over the Pacific. And then I would come in behind
the center of Barbara Islands down low and then I'd come up and go out in the desert land. And I
did that for the rest of the marijuana trips. What was the hardest part about flying those routes?
The hardest part was getting good marijuana. So the hardest part isn't the flying?
No, it's the flying. It's just like driving your car down. But then I had people that would
bring me on strips that were just unworthy of an airplane when I'd land on a highway.
And in the rainy season I would come back to land again and the guy wouldn't think about it
and he'd have like little hills on both sides and the wings were out there. Well, the grass and
the weeds would grow up and it sounded like, I mean, it sounded like tearing the airplane apart
when those wings hit and mowing the grass down both shoulders of the airplane. The weeds would
grow up high in the tropics. So some of that stuff was bad and oh, getting bad gasoline and
telling me that land here in the light and knocked the wheels off when you land. Oh,
you should have landed a little further up here. They ditched down.
That sort of thing. What was it like landing on a highway? And when did you have to land on a
highway? I landed on a highway most of my life, most of the times. In Mexico, first time I went
down, there was a place called Pichilingi and you had a 900 foot strip and I would fly down and I'd
carry gasoline wing with me and Maury and I would go to the grocery store and buy all kinds of little
goodies and candies and toys to bring to the children. And that sand strip in the bend of a
river was just too short to take off with a load. So there was a young man there named Pedro,
must have weighed much over 100, maybe 120 pounds and he'd get in a plane with me and he'd direct
me 20, 30, 40 miles away to a highway and the people, Joaquin and the people would pull out
in a two ton truck with a machine gun on it and bunch of guys with their arms with us and they'd
block the road and then another one would block it up about a mile away, not land right over that
truck and they'd load me up like a bucket brigade with the marijuana coming. I'd shake hands with
all of them and I'd take off right over the other trucks and sometimes maybe 20, 30, 40 cars lined
up. One time I remember a patrol car, a highway patrol car, he didn't have his lights on, took
off right over him and then when I started flying to Louisiana, the bridge over the Mississippi
River, there were several contractors that went broke and that thing was out for years and about
five miles from the river was flashing red lights in a detour and then they swamped on both sides
of it in the middle of it. We're growing up with 20 feet trees and that was like an international
runaway from anywhere in the world. So I landed on that and over and over those red lights was
just like end of a runway and then the next morning we'd go out there and scrub the marks
off the highway where I landed before daylight. Wow. Let's go to somebody you've known well,
somebody who is also a drug smuggler is Barry Seal. Who is Barry Seal? How did you meet him?
Barry Seal is a friend of mine. Murray and I and the children went down in Honduras and we went up
Lake Azul, I believe it was, and we're looking at a ranch to buy. I was looking for something in
Central America where I'd have a halfway place. It was lovely. We stayed up there for some days
and our clothes got muddy and we went in the river and all kind of things. So we got to San Pedro
Sula and we was going back to New Orleans. So we went to the cleaners to get our clothes and most
all of them was in there and they got, oh, senior, they'll be ready tomorrow morning. We're not ready
now. Well, the plane leaves at nine o'clock or whatever. So I told Murray for her and the children
to go into the airport because it'd be easier for one just on a standby flight. So I went to the
laundromat for the clothes and they were ready and they was a pile of them. I put them on my back
and got into taxiing. The old taxi would drive him with it and I'd give him $100 to go faster and
he just blew his horn more rapid. So we got to the airport and I jumped out and ran around on
the tarmac and here's a brand new 727 taxiing out. Oh, no. So I'm waving to the pilot and
he's a young fellow and he waves back. Then I see Murray's face in the cockpit and the nose goes down
where he puts on brakes and he laughs and he puts some stairwell out and I run for the stairwell and
he pulls it back up and goes like a hitchhiker going to pick you up and go again. Then he put it
out and I got on and the whole crowd's clapped and I'm coming on with that blow to close.
So I go way down in the middle and the plane's full and Miriam, my daughter's about nine years old
then and she was sitting in the middle and by the window was Barry Seal, of course I didn't know it,
and I sat in the middle and we took off and the wheels come up with clunk and then I got up about
5,000 feet and we had a little clink-clink and she said, what was that daddy? I said he just turned
on his autopilot and that fellow reached over and I done looked at him. I said, he looks like
CIA or FBI or something. He ain't spoke to be here. Clear blue eyes, gentlemen looking man
and he said, you fly these things? I said, I got a few hours mister. He said, I fly them too or
something other and he said, my name is Barry Seal and he reached over Miriam and shook hands
and we got to talking and I thought there's no choice or seats on this. It's just open seating so
but I don't believe him one bit and he started talking about he just got out of jail that morning,
just got out of prison and I said, uh-huh and he told me he'd been a pilot with
TWA and this and other and he told me what he was for and so we had a nice conversation
for a couple hours to New Orleans. I didn't believe him so he got off in front of us and
what a crowd of people to meet him. An old mother and a wife and little children hanging on to him
crying and hugging and kissing. I said, he was telling the truth. So I reached over and gave him
a little piece of paper. I had Mario to write it out with our address. I said, Barry, I might have
some work for you. What was he in jail for? He got caught with 100 kilos of cocaine in a small
plane and so he's preserved a year. And that was from Columbia? I don't know where it comes from.
He got caught in Honduras probably refueling but he'd been in prison 90 before for bringing
explosives to the Cuban Contras and he lost his job with the airlines and then later on I found
out he was ex-CIA and George Bush Seniors Prodigé and had a thousand parachute jumps and was there.
He was a hot shot mouth. There's a million questions I want to ask here but maybe can we
linger on a little bit longer? What was your relationship with him like? You were a drug
smuggler. He's a drug smuggler. Your friends. How often do you guys talk? How often do you work
together? What was the relationship like? Well, I'll back up and finish where I started off there.
I gave him the things. Barry, I may have some work for you. I know I got some work for you
and I said, come out Santa Barbara and so I don't know what we could do later. He flew out and went
to our house and stayed with us a couple of days and I had an almost brand new Arrow Commander 690B.
That thing with turbo prop and it was hot. It's the hottest thing I'd ever had. So I said,
let's go Barry. Let's see what you can do. So I'm sorry I said that. We got about 10,000 feet
and he was like one of them Blue Angel pilots. He was running that thing out.
That's enough and then he did a falling leaf. That's where you cut the engines and the plane
falls from side to side. I saw Bob Hoover do that in the air show once and that's the only person I
ever saw do it and my hand was white and I was hanging onto the seat. You shut off the engine?
Yeah. He shut off the engines and landed flying side by side like this.
How do you explain that? Was he just a wild man or was he sufficiently skilled to work?
He was sufficiently skilled. Absolutely. He knew what he was doing. I can get a plane from
one spot to another and I guess I'm known as a good pilot but that guy was an aerobatic.
So anyway, he stayed with us a couple of days and then I told him, I said, this plane needs
tanking. I said, I got some work down to Columbia needs to come back to Louisiana
and I need 2,500 mile range. He said, I got somebody in Meena, Arkansas do that and keep
them out shut. So I gave him $10,000 and he flew away and in a few days he called me and said,
come to my house in Baton Rouge. So I went out to his house in Baton Rouge and I stayed with him
for a few days and that plane was tanked. I mean beautiful from stem to stern. I could
went from Bolivia to Canada with it. So he was, then I hired him to fly and he was funny. I paid
him a million dollars a trip. I paid him $2,000 a kilo so it's not a million dollar trip and I
didn't get paid until the people received it. They had to ship it to Chicago and New York and
then the money come back. So it was a couple of two or three weeks pipeline. Well I always had to pay
him before he'd go again. I mean, and he belly ache. I mean, he had my own in the room. So
one time I gave him a million dollars and I put it in a box real nice.
So how big is a box that contains a million dollars? So we're talking about $100 bills?
$100. It's not very big. You can put it in a large briefcase. It weighs exactly 10 kilos.
Each bill weighs a gram so you can weigh your money and almost get it exactly.
10, 20 something pounds is a million dollars. 22 pounds.
22 pounds. $100 bills. But $100 and $1 bills is one ton, 2,200 pounds.
We didn't even accept them. Were you the one that introduced Berry Seal to Pablo Escobar?
No. I didn't introduce him at all and our deal was that you don't meet my people. I mean,
we just kind of crossed New York for me to fly the airplanes. So he wanted these Panther conversions
cost $400,000 each with dorm scope and radar. So I'm on anything you want.
What's that mean sorry to interrupt Panther conversions?
Panther conversion was these people called Panther. They took everything out from the
firewall and instruments and all and converted them and put Q-tip propellers on them full-bladed
and you very quiet and the CIA developed those in Southeast Asia for running behind the lines.
And that's where Berry had flown those things. So he knew about them.
So, hey, that's what he wanted and that's what we got him.
How does that connect to Pablo and so he worked for you and you got those upgrades?
I think he flew about 30 loads for me and then I got arrested and was about everything in the
world. I got 35 years sentence. But let me back up a little bit. Berry was our friend.
But Mari and I both friend. We should pause real quick and say Mari is your wife and we'll hopefully
she'll we'll convince her to join us in a little bit. She's the love of your life and
sort of she weaves in and out of many of these stories that you tell.
Yes, she was there. She was behind the scenes but I kept her out of it completely.
And then also you mentioned Maryam as your daughter.
Yes. Our son was a baby. And I remember we went out to the festival. It was my favorite
restaurant in Carl Gables. Oh, God, it was good. And Berry knew about it. Anyhow, we went out to
dinner and so we came back and there was no rooms. So, Mary was in the night with us. So he goes to
our hotel room with us. We got two big beds in the Omni Hotel and he lays over there and gets down
to his striped undershorts and his t-shirt and he puts the baby up on his belly and gives him
the bottle and says, isn't that good, Red? Oh, my, my. And he just feeds the baby. We laugh and talk.
That's how close we were that we could all stay in the hotel room together.
And would you say he's a good man? Oh, wonderful man. A gentleman,
southern gentleman. Just looked after his mother, his family, everybody around him. Everybody loved
Berry. He just had a little smile on his face always. So you got arrested and then what happened
to Berry? Well, Berry knew the people that unloaded. Of course, he sent the cars down and all that. So,
he met the unloader, a guy named Lito, Louis Carlos Bustamante of Venezuelan and so he just
kept on flying. But he, I believe he had three of my airplanes at $400,000 apiece and they
owed me some money. Well, he collected a lot of that and gave Murray the money and put it in his
safe and took her to his house and all after I got arrested, sent a lawyer in. He got me the
best lawyer in the country, Albert Krieger. He was head of the defense team for all America.
Wonderful man. Can you tell the story of the months that led up to Berry's assassination?
What did you know? What did you sense? What did you think?
Okay, when I got out of prison, I hadn't been out long. I was eating breakfast and there was
Ronald Reagan's face right in the television. We have absolute proof that the communist Sandinista
government is in the cocaine-running business and there was that fat lady, the C-2126, on the runway
with the bellied in and I thought, oh, God, he had done it. So, I had heard that Berry might
been working with him. So, it wasn't long before with the DEA or whoever, that he is
even no longer on our side. So, can you clarify how you got that from the Reagan
making a statement about we've heard? Okay, there was his plane. There was Berry's plane and, okay,
on the way north, we could stop in Nicaragua and land on a military base or on a base that they
used as crop dusters and all and refuel. Yeah. And so, that short and our trip would go further
into the jungle and come up and that was what Pablo Escobar and Ocho and them and they had to,
they was associates with the people in Nicaragua. So, Berry was, if that plane was there, that means
Berry was feeding the DEA information. He was working with them at that time.
But let me back up a little bit. When I was flying and I told Berry, we would refuel and
train airplane, the loads in Belize where I had a spot up there and then that's when they told
me we can refuel in Nicaragua and then you fly all the way and Berry couldn't believe it. He says,
all right, but I wanted to land, I had a place in Louisiana for $10,000 that I could land unloading
a chair if an old one was paid off. And he said, no, no, no. I can't get caught in me in Arkansas.
I said, what do you mean? You can't get caught in me in Arkansas. You get caught anywhere.
He said, I can't, but it's going to cost you $50,000 every time my wheels touch the ground.
Why, can you explain why he can't get caught in me in Arkansas?
He said he was hooked up with them at the very top and he even said,
I'm going to have dinner with the governor tonight.
That's, at that time, Mr. Bill Clinton.
Undoubtedly. And he said, I like, did Bill Clinton, did you give him any money? And I said,
no, I never give the man any money, but it was like the money that I had that went to
Grand Cayman Islands. And I told my lawyer, I said, I never touched that money. He said,
you don't have to fondle it to be guilty. So, I mean, there's a lot of conspiracy theories
around the relationship between Berry's seal and the Clinton's.
Absolutely.
What evidence do we have? What would you say from your best understanding
of what was the relationship between Bill Clinton and Berry's seal?
Berry said, and he knew that he couldn't get caught in me in Arkansas. And when that movie
was going to come out, be called Mina, somebody stopped it. I mean, they stopped it dead in the
tracks for two or three years and the producer even quit.
You mean the American made with Tom Cruise movie?
It was going to be called Mina.
Yes. The name it was written and produced in Mina. And waiting on Hillary to be elected,
they would not let that movie out. And that movie would change drastically.
But to push back on that, that doesn't mean there's truth there. That means they were worried about
the power of the conspiracy theory, which stuck.
That's right. Exactly.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, some conspiracy theories, just because they're popular, doesn't mean they're true.
And ones that, but it also doesn't mean they're not true. And there's ones that are not very
popular, that could be true. But that one really stuck. I mean, what's your sense?
Well, I paid one and a half million dollars for Berry to land at Mina, Arkansas.
So I was pretty well assured that he couldn't get caught.
And I said, well, I can't get caught in Columbia. We can't get caught in Nicaragua.
I guess we got a license, except we went for it.
Oh, so when you say I can't get caught, just to clarify, there's a sense where this is a safe place to land.
Yes. Like completely safe.
So you don't think he was referring to some kind of, you know, like my grandfather,
who fought in World War II, would talk about bullets can't hit him.
Bullets can't hit him. So it's almost like believing.
He was taking that $50,000 and giving it to somebody.
To somebody.
And Berry was honest. So he wasn't just taking it from me,
because he was making a million dollars and he didn't care for the $50,000.
Man, taking the story forward, the months leading up to his assassination, what would you
understand? Why he was assassinated? Who were the players involved? Maybe could you have stopped it?
Well, I'll tell you, after I saw Reagan's face on the television,
saying we have the absolute proof, the phone rang and it would bury.
I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years. He said, I'm coming out tonight, Roger.
And I, oh boy. So he came out and he said, I'll meet you in this French restaurant.
I don't even know it in Santa Barbara. And I walked in, there's about 20 or 30 people in there.
And there's all 30, 40 years old women with plastic or leather skirts and men in their blue
jeans. And I looked around and Berry was at the back. He was leaned up, he'd gain weight.
And I walked up and I said, Berry, you wired. He said, no.
That's what I'm not going to talk of these DE agents. He said, every one of them.
With jeans and skirts. I like it.
I said, well, Berry, I'm going to sit here and you just talk to me, buddy, and tell me what's on
your mind. And you sit there and he just went to talking and he told me about, he was left holding
the bag. And it, what do you mean by that? Like that nobody supported him? Well, I think it's
another, he was, and I don't know this. I mean, this is just what happened. Putting it all together
that he had some CIA buddies that was pretending we go into supply all over Northwood arms.
And with that, you can land cocaine back here by the ton. So he's taken his little planes and
put in some AK-47s and maybe ammunition or whatever and takes it down to the Contras
against the Communist Party of Nicaragua where we've been landed. And all over North was involved
in this. So when all that, and so his CIA buddies was certainly involved and we know they were.
And Berry had been in the CIA earlier when he first got out of school.
So when, as I say, the shoot hit the fan, they all fled and left Berry holding the bag.
The CIA and the DEA.
Yeah. Not the DEA, the CIA. The DEA wasn't in on it. The CIA was selling that cocaine,
bringing it in. And just to clarify it, what's Iran-Contra scandal? What was the alleged involvement
of the CIA in using drug trade to fund things? What do you know? What do you think is true?
What should we know?
Well, I know. What I know is true that Berry was taking a small amount of arms back to Central
America and giving them to whoever all over North group were. All over North was a colonel
that got implemented and almost brought the government down. And so they said, all right, we're getting
the guns from Iran and we're taking cocaine to pay for them. And since Congress won't give us money
to fight this war, we're going to circumvent it. So that was a whole thing.
So it was a CIA's effort to circumvent the funding mechanisms of government by selling drugs?
Yes, but it was a handful of renegade CIA agents. It was Barry's friends that was making a load,
load of money, tons of it come up. If you would like to read the book, The Big White Lie,
The CIA and the Cracked Cocaine Epidemic, the CIA put, according to this, the book in
Michael Levine, I didn't remember his name last time I talked,
wrote that book and he was a head CIA agent, he was a head DEA agent that exposed this.
And the CIA tried to kill him and he says they put crack cocaine, they developed their,
their chemists developed crack and they put it in every country, every city in the United States
in one weekend. So they were bringing it up by the tons and that's for sure and Barry was bringing
it. Can I ask you a small tangent question? Do you think the public should trust the CIA
and the DEA? Do you think they're mostly good people that are carrying out a good mission?
Yes. Because this kind of makes it sound like there's renegade agents that are just
doing whatever the hell they want and with sometimes no regard for human life.
Well, that's certainly true, but that's not everybody in there. That's just sometimes
you get a few policemen in the department that do these things. I don't believe,
I believe that our government is good. I think we got some fools running it. I don't know how
we get them there, but I don't think I know. Okay, so what was Barry's involvement here?
So Barry leaned back in that chair and he told me that, you know, he got caught with one and a
half tons and he bailed it in the runway in Nicaragua and had cameras flashing inside and out
and he flew it back to Homestead with an agent there and he brought the agent over.
Jake Jacobson, a really nice fellow. I think he was a crop duster and we'd have got along
if we'd have been on the right side. And so we sat there and drank Chevy's Regal until I got pie
eyed and Barry told me about it. He said that he went to see Edwin Meese. He got out on bail
and he flew his lear jet up to Washington and went in to see the attorney general, Edwin Meese,
and they run him out of the office. The next day he went back and said, I have absolute proof
that the CIA is bringing tons of cocaine or they're running tons of cocaine into the United States
and Edwin Meese put him up with this agent, Jacobson, I believe it was, and they went down and
got one and a half tons and on the way back they bailed it in and Pablo Escobar and some of the
other ones in general there in Nicaragua, you can see them toting it from one plane to the other
in the book called The Big Nose, Kings of Cocaine. It's got a mention of me too and also the other
one has a mention of me in it. Said I'm in more files with the DEA than Noriega.
So who wanted to get rid of Barry? Who wanted to get rid of Barry more, the cartels or the CIA?
The cartel. So Barry leaned back and he told me the story and the tears came down between his
fingers and he put his hands over his eyes and he said, I just couldn't do it, Roger. I just couldn't
do three live sentences. So I've told him everything. I went to Congress and I've testified before
Congress and he testified before Congress for all these things that he'd done and he said,
I told him all about you, but you're under my umbrella. You got to testify with me
before grand jury in Miami. And so the guy said, you can come down, the DEA agent said,
you can come down tomorrow with Murray. First class or I'll take you down in chains.
And if you don't testify with Barry, the only place you'll ever see your wife and family again
is in a federal prison visiting room. Was that a difficult conversation?
My guts was just like ice water. I can't testify against my friends. I just can't do it. How am
I going to do it? I just, I can't work with people and he was honest with me. How am I going to
testify against them? I can't spend the rest of my life in a federal prison. What on earth,
what a mess Barry, you've got me into. So... Is that a kind of betrayal there?
Yes, but it's still, I wish he left me out of it.
I understand him getting in such a mess that he told because if the CIA and whoever else was
behind him betrayed him, then he's going to tell everything. So I says, all right, I'll be in Miami.
So Murray and I flew down first class and I went to a lawyer, one of the biggest lawyers in Miami
and I said, man, I am in a mess. This fella's told everything and I've got to say something,
but I'm not a snitch man. I mean, I can, what can I do? And he said, well, being a snitch is like
being pregnant. You either are or you're not. And he says, I don't represent snitches, but
if you want to fight this case, I'll do it for $600,000. And boy, my face turned red. Well,
I'm not a snitch. He said, well, that's what you're talking about. He said, let me tell you
something. If you go in there and say one thing and sign that paper and you don't tell them
everything you know, then they will convict you of everything you've ever done and you tell them.
So you can't do it. So I said, Barry, I'm having trouble with a lawyer. Give it, I'll go to Mara.
Let's go. So all right, use my lawyer. And he gave me his card, the lawyer's card. So
Mara and I went to the festival restaurant that night and Barry and Debbie came in. She would
dress pretty and Barry was. And so we was already about finished. So we had dessert together. And
I said, Barry, they're going to kill you friend. He said, no, it ain't going to kill me. So and so,
such and such is going and this and the other. I said, Barry, they're going to kill you, man.
They know you can't deny it. And I didn't tell him I wasn't going to testify. So I hugged his neck.
I really like and we fled to Brazil. I took Mara and the children went to Brazil.
So you decided there you're not going to testify?
I knew. I didn't know what I could do. I talked to a lawyer. I mean, I just didn't,
I didn't know what I could do, but the best in Miami said, what he told me. So I had to go.
And you went to Brazil?
We went to Brazil.
Did you have a conversation with anybody at the cartel? I mean, that's such an interesting
moment that tests the man's character to not snitch. And did you have a conversation with
anybody? Pablo with about it? So it's just understood.
I just didn't couldn't do it.
But how many men like you are there?
Not many. I had all my friends testified against me. I had 11 friends and every one of them put
their finger up, Roger did it. And I was facing life continuing to criminal enterprise. And still,
you couldn't do it? I just couldn't do it.
Do you ever get respect from the cartels for that?
There was all the time I got back and stuff. They owe me money and I can't get it.
Well, that's about money. I just mean about human beings.
Oh, I think so. I've been back down there and I've been welcome. I have my contact and when I was
in Brazil, I was trying to get this money. They owe me three and a half million dollars.
So I called up there and he was going to pay me. Oh, I got 600,000 today and I'll get you some more
tomorrow. And then the next week I called, Hey, he got great news, great news. Barry Seale's been
killed. So, oh no. And I went back to the hotel. We was up in northern part of Brazil and where was
it money? Yeah. And so went back and I told Murray and Miriam and they cried and I cried. I really
cried. How was that great news from the cartel perspective? Well, now there's no case against
me and him and them. Do you know who killed them? Yes. I'll tell you about that story.
On the first load I did, I landed at a banana plantation and it was raining and it was a muddy
stripped clay and they put the 300 kilos of cocaine and then the ugliest man you could imagine,
named Ronaldo, got in there with a Mac 10 and he was making sure I took it to Louisiana.
So this is many years before? Yeah, a couple of years before. So anyway, he,
we took off and the mud got up in the wheel well so thick until the wheels wouldn't come up.
Well, I'm going 200 miles an hour instead of 300 miles an hour with wheels coming down.
Well, I can't go back there. If I do, I'm going to be in the same situation until the sun dries
it out in a few days. And so, but in Belize, I had a runway that had been used for $10,000,
used to refuel. So I told the guy, listen, we got to land in Belize to refuel. No, no, no,
he put the Mac 10 and I'll shoot you. Go ahead, fool. You're going to die too. So it was in the
term. He wasn't just ugly, he was also angry. He was a bad, bad killer. So he's the one to actually
kill Barry, the one that went up on the first load with me and Ronaldo and he's doing life.
He's just a killer. Yeah. He's doing life in Louisiana.
I wonder who, is it known, who made that decision?
The younger Ochoa brother, I understand Favio, was the one paid for the hit.
I don't know that, but that's what I've heard and it probably sounds about right.
He's done in Jessup, Georgia, doing a long, long time. I think he's about to get out. He's been in
30 years or whatever. The movie American Made.
What do you think that movie got right? What did it get wrong?
Almost everything wrong. It was disgustingly wrong.
Okay, which parts? Can you maybe elaborate? It's about Barry Seale and it just didn't even,
it was nothing. Whoever wrote it had no idea who Barry Seale was. They sat in a rocking chair
and just tried to think of what was some baby bashing drug dealer doing and it's just like,
God, you just don't have any idea of the spirit of the man.
So they wanted just to try to tell a fun story without actually studying the story.
They didn't know him. They just had no idea. And Barry was such a nice person,
such a really nice gentleman person. They talked to you or no?
No. The people that made the movie.
And I see all these people telling about Barry and never met him. They telling all about him.
I think that's just ridiculous. And for one thing before his character coming out of
horror houses and all that, that was just like ugly. And then down in Columbia,
putting a gun to his head, going to take his sunglasses and then he put $25,000 million
worth of cocaine on his plane. And then they're going to bet $100 he don't have enough room to
take off. That's just insane. I mean, just the whole thing. And then he's talking to the DE
agents when he's coming up. You don't know what frequency they own. How he's got five planes
and they all split when the DEA comes out. These are just somebody just fantasy.
But those are like, those are details of the man, details of the story. Is there some big,
profound things they missed about just this whole period about that's something that's
really important to you that was missed? Yes. They just try to sensationalize on
little things that people remember. And it's just not true. It's just, it was just like a business
deal and good people and good airplanes and good flying. And it was like a good watch it was made.
It just clicked and it just went on. And they missed all that. They tried to make it sound
like it's something very ugly. Do you think it was a story that could have been told way better
and still be a helpful good story? Well, there's a series called Chernobyl done by HBO. And
because I have sort of family connected to that period, they did an incredible job of being
historically accurate and only not being historically accurate when it helped the story,
only in those rare cases when they on purpose left the story to make it easier for people to
understand. But it was still somehow accurate. And even though all the actors were British
actors speaking English with a British accent, it was still somehow accurate. Like they captured
the spirit. Yeah. So it was historically accurate and the spirit was captured. That was one of the
most incredible like series I've ever seen. It convinced me that the movie was made by non-Russians.
It convinced me that if you really care about a story, you don't have to have been brought up in it.
You don't even need to speak the language. If you're truly a scholar of it, if you talk to a lot
of people, if you learn, if you just pour your heart and soul into it, you can create something
really special. And so your sense is you could do that with the story with this period of time.
Oh, yes. There was a story that needs to be told. It needs to be told in the correct way,
not like we're trying to bash a certain angle. Yeah. Well, if Netflix or HBO are watching this,
you need to tell the story of Roger Reeves, in my opinion. There you go. Is this a young picture
of you? Yeah. There you go. That's from National Geographic. Jorge Archoa, Pablo Escobar. It's you,
Roger and Barry. Yeah. Smuggler, a memoir. Yeah, I really do hope that they make a movie of this one.
There's a movie called Blow that tells the story of George Young, Boston George.
Did you know George Young? That's one way to ask it. The other is, what do you think of the movie Blow?
I didn't know George Young, but it was a wonderful movie. Absolutely. It captured it.
It did. Yes, it did. That's the way it should be. So, he was a little bit before your time?
Exactly the same time. Exactly the same. He was using stewardesses to fly the marijuana out of
Manhattan Beach, and I was on the fire department in Redondo Beach, 10 miles away, flying it up,
sending it back. Somebody was sending it back. He might have been sending it back,
but he didn't have near the excitement that I did. I was shot down twice. I escaped from five
different prisons. I was tortured almost to death in the Mexican prison, so he didn't have all that
fun that I had. Funding quotes. Yeah. So, yours is a heck of a fun adventure. Just to linger on a
little bit. So, Johnny Depp plays George, and Ray Leota plays his father, and there's this
son-father kind of scene at the end. I don't know. It's heartbreaking. That scene paints a picture
of a life that could have been had if none of this wild drug smuggling happened. I don't usually,
I mean, I don't, I almost, I really never get like teary-eyed at a movie, but that got me.
It's almost like confronting at the end of your life what your life could have been with your
father, the way he calls him Georgie. It's like you fucked up, Georgie. Yes, I did too. I really,
really did. Mario waited for me all those years, and the children raised him without me,
pissed at me in prisons all over the world. It's unbelievable. It's just nothing's worth that kind
of money. Yeah. Can you tell the story of when you were tortured nearly to death in a Mexican prison?
I sure can, and I'm smiling, but it was nothing to smile about, if I can tell you. I was in a
poo, and a gentleman came over and shook hands with me and put handcuffs on me, and I thought,
what in the world? That was not one of the nice hotels. They put me in a jail cell, and I sat there
in all the trunks and the thieves and stuff kept coming in, and they had a bucket near overrun,
and I said, I remember like 18 people in a room about 12 foot square. Oh, it was hot, and I thought,
somebody's got to come get me. This ain't real. I hadn't done anything. Just like, it was a pilot
coming to see me up in Hermosillo, and he stopped, and he made a mistake and went to the International
Run, instead of where he was supposed to go, and he had my phony name in his pocket, so they got me.
So they said I was a drug smoker. So after about three days, they put me back into the back,
and it was a torture place, and they put me in a little cell. I guess it wasn't hard even,
it wasn't six feet, it must have been about five feet square and about 12 feet high,
and it was June, in the June, and it was hot. I mean hot, and they left me in there for,
I guess, a few days. You didn't know, so every once while they come drag me out,
and first off, they put my head under water, and it had seltzer in it or some kind, and I
took one whiff of that, and three or four of them couldn't hold me down. So then I learned
it just before you have to breathe, tear loose like that, and they'll let you up.
And that was the first treatment, and then they started beating me, and they beat me
blackjack and rubber hose until I was black and blue and yellow from the bottom of my feet to my
head. What did they want from me? They wanted me to sign a confession that I was a drug smoker,
and they put the papers under your nose. This is all over a fuel sign. Well, I knew if you signed,
you got six years. I wasn't going to sign. I wasn't going to sign. So they didn't want you
to snitch on anybody. They just want me to sign that paper. And you still didn't? About to.
I ain't beating that bad. So anyhow, it's coming to the good part. So then they come,
and they take me out, and I'm bug-naked, and they bend me over, and they have things to pull you,
that change, click, click, click, click, click, and they bent me over, and they put butter on my bum,
and they commenced to put hot chili pepper up there, and that stuff was bad. I mean,
it was red hot, and that was awful.
And still.
Just awful.
Yeah, but still you didn't...
I didn't think about it. I ain't going to. I guess if I'd have known he's going to kill me,
I wouldn't have done it, but I wasn't about... You get hurt bad enough, you'll pass out. So
I didn't pass out, so I was all right. So then the last thing they did was,
they brought a dead man in there, and he was frozen. He was wrapped in newspaper, little strips,
about a half inch wide, just like a mummy, and he was frozen, and they hung him on the wall with
a meat hook, and you next son of a bitch, you next. And so he's sitting there like this, and as he
starts to thaw out, which is pretty quick, it looks like he's crying, and it looks like he's peeing,
and the papers start unraveling on him, and the formaldehyde puddles on the floor.
What a smell that rotten insides and the formaldehyde, and there was a little space,
it wasn't even a half inch high under the door, and I lay on that filthy floor with my cheek
and put my lips right up under that door and was sucking that fresh air, and I went to sleep
after some time, and I know where Walt Disney gets his ideas. I saw white pink pigs with wings on
them, all kinds of stuff flying around. So when I woke up, I didn't know which was real and which
was the nightmare. It took me a minute to figure out where I was and what was going on.
How did you stay mentally strong through that time? Like what?
I don't know that I did. I was mainly strong, so I was just like, I'm now stubborn. I mean,
you could be that man that could have killed you. So what gave you hope? Did you have hope?
Or you're just a stubborn son of a bitch? I think some of both of it, and I think
they aren't going to keep you here forever. You know, you're going to get out into the prison,
or they're going to let you go or something. If you sign that paper, you ain't going nowhere,
and I want to go home. I had got shot down a few weeks before that. I got shot from my
disguise. 80 bullet holes through the plane, killed a fellow on the ground, shot the leg nearly off
the man in the plane. Where was this? In that little place of Peche Lingi.
And they were shooting you from the ground. Yeah, yeah.
All right. A little 900-foot strip there at Peche Lingi, a poor village with starving donkeys.
And that's where they, I'd give them $17,000 for loading, and I'd go over on the highway and load.
Well, on day 13, I did a load every day for 13 days. They had a bunch of marijuana pretty good
piled up, and I was going load a day. And on the day 13, I had that little warning sign going off
in my stomach, uh-oh, uh-oh, don't do it. But I asked this walkie, oh, we had the federalist
paid off nowhere we were. So I spent the night in a hammock and walked down to the airplane
just as it didn't stay light. And 10 or 12 men walked with me, and Pedro got in. I brushed
my teeth in the little stream. It was about foot deep, a little river coming through there.
Got in the airplane, and I fired her up, bam, blah, blah, and bam. I thought a tire blew out.
I looked over and see if it was, and it still ain't dawned on me. And Pedro was yelling,
please see it, please see it, Roger, please see it. Well, it dawned on me, and I shoved it, the
throttle to the firewall. And I only happened to... So that was a bullet.
Yeah, somebody, they, there's off to the side, they'd shot, they'd shot, just a warning, like,
get out, stop, we're gonna rob you, whatever it is. That's what they do. They're just taking the plane
and me and put me in prison, the whole thing. So, but even though I had papers, so I just shoved it
the firewall, there wasn't enough room to take off on that strip, and half of it was behind me,
or some of it was behind me. And so just at the end, I'm just like, I think that thing stalls at
about 50 miles an hour, just turning 50, and I just pulled it right up and put the flaps on.
And as I pulled off the ground, they opened up on both sides of me with machine guns,
and they riddled that airplane. I mean, the windshield came out, I got hit three times.
Do you, like, your body? Yeah. And, well, I didn't know I was hit. I mean, it was just the
gasoline, the gasoline just pouring in. The world turned yellow. I must have went into shock.
So it just stopped in slow motion. And one bullet hit the strut right by my head, and it just,
parts of that bullet just went all over me. I would just look like I'd been peppered,
which would lead. And the gasoline would just pour in, and I'm just pouring in where they'd
shot the wing up above, and the windshield's gone. I mean, I didn't, blah, blah, blah, blah,
it was just like a hail storm. So I... The airplanes, the stall or no?
I was in a stall anyway, and I didn't realize it, and I guess you wouldn't unless you trained for it.
But when you in a stall, the elevator is kind of flappy, and I didn't realize it. At the time,
I thought they had shot the elevator cable in too. So I thought, oh God, so I just reached over and
switched it off, switched it off, pulled the mixture, pulled everything. And in the river,
there was rocks about as big as this table, and they were like the turtle back all the way up
until there was a waterfall. There's quite a pretty place. And I crashed straight on to it.
I thought, if I get those rocks... And when I did the first time I hit, the wings came off,
and then it bounced, and the next time the nose came up and came under the plane.
And I'm sitting there, I must have been knocked unconscious, because Pedro was shaking me,
come on, Roger, come on, Roger. So I stepped out into the water, and here comes these full
federales still shooting at us. And I'm bullied the two hit the airplane, and I kept a nine-millimeter
browning high power taped to the top of the radio in case I ever needed it. So you didn't want it
in the airplane. So I just... It was just handy. You just lay in there. So I took and popped a
few caps out of them, and they ran into the rocks. So we took off running, and then I looked,
and Pedro's foot nearly shot off. They'd shot him on one side of the ankle, and it just blown
out the other side, and it wasn't even hardly bleeding. It's a shock of it. So I took my t-shirt off
and gripped it and tied it best I could. But you had still bullets in you, so you could still run.
I shot the top of my toenail off. I shot across my head and my kneecap. So I was just nicked.
Okay, gotcha. It was very painful later on, but right that time I didn't... It was just hot.
And there's a bullet still in my foot from it, a piece of a bullet, good sized slug.
So we went on up the mountain through the cactus and just running, just going,
I want to go down. No, no, the federales are going the easy way. Let's go this young fella.
And we came to an old donkey. She must have been 30 years old, long and way back,
long hair owner, charlotte, charlotte. And he petted the donkey and we jumped on. And we rode for
seven... Like an actual donkey? A donkey. There were donkeys all over the place. Anyhow, he knew
that one from the village. And so we rode seven miles, two of us on the donkey with no bridle,
no saddle, nothing. And we came to a little man plowing a little horse and a little ox.
They both of them spotted, and the ox was... The yoke was across her back this way, and he's plowing
with a little plow amongst dumps. It was like one of these people clearing a little piece of land.
And he had a little house there. And so we went into his house and his wife and his daughter,
they put like a cloth over my wounds and on Pedro's, it was terrible. And they pulled diesel
oil on it to keep the flies off. So I'm covered in diesel. So the man left and he was going all day.
And then about dark, he showed up about 15 or 20 horses and mules showed up in the yard,
walking fast. And a doctor got out. He said, I'm Dr. Benjamin Soso with Red Cross. And he worked
on my foot and he worked on Pedro. He gave us a shot of morphine and tetanus shots. And he said,
you got to get to hospital. He said, Pedro will die if he don't get to hospital. And he said,
they were looking for American pilots and shot down. They think he's dead. There was a lot of
blood in that airplane. And so they rode, I don't know how far we rode, but we rode miles and we'd
come to a road and there was a big truck. And it was loaded with corn in the ear. And the duck holes
in that corn put us in it and covered us up. And the road was rough. And every time we'd hit a dirt
road, that corn would cover me up. And they'd scratch my face out again. And when it came to the
highway, we went into a house and they got me some clothes and mine was messed up. And a white basin
and they must have brought 20 jugs of water different times. I kept washing and washing my
foot to all the blood and the crud got off of me and put on those clothes. And somebody went to,
they said, you can't go north, the roads blocked. They're looking for the pilot. So you got to go
south. So they found a taxi in Mazatlan. And it was a rather new taxi. And the fellow would take
me to Guadalajara, which was, I don't know, seven, eight hours south. So we got in that taxi and
they brought me up with sheets and blankets and pillows in the back seat and give me these great
big white paint peels. And I was quite content. Then I was shot down in, shot down in Columbia also.
What, can you tell that story? I sure can. All right. I was, I went down for Lutom,
Lutom, marijuana. And we got to the place and we got there too early. And the gorillas
screamed, you got to get out of here. Got to get out of here. And so we went back to the place where
we staged from and refueled. I had a beautiful DC3, carry three tons. And so while I was waiting,
I ate something for lunch and I went around behind the house. We refueled the plane up. I had to
wait until late in the afternoon. They wanted me to come just at dark so the military planes couldn't
see me on their strip. So I'm leaning to hammock asleep and I hear this terrible roar. And I looked
right up through the trees and at the end of two military jets going straight up.
And they do a dive over and they came back down the strip in front of that airplane
and they just tear it up with 50 caliber machine guns. They just showing out. So I
run for the airplane. I just give that guy $80,000 and he ran for the truck and all the rest of them
ran for the truck. I should have ran with my money. But I didn't. I ran for the airplane.
And the copilot got in and the name was Al. He got in with me and two fellas got in the back.
We had drums of fuel in there to refuel when we got down to the gorillas. So we took off
and I couldn't get the gear up because I'd taken off in such a hurry these pens in the struts of
a DC3 and with big flags on them and you have to take them up so that the plane won't come up.
So these jets swarmed on me and they tried to get me to go. They kept telling me which way to go
and the pilot would be just as close as just right over there. I could see him. I just held up the
old hippy piece. I didn't think they would shoot. I really didn't. Nobody had shot before.
So I kept flying out and I kept getting slower and slower and they kept slowing down, down, down
and the black smoke rolling and then they started shooting up under me boom, boom, boom, boom with
them 20 millimeter counters and then the tracers just going up. They looked like the curving up
from me and I whoo and I pushed the nose over so they couldn't get under me and later on I heard
they thought I tried to ram them. So one of them went for fuel and I kept on going and the one
just tore the left wing tip up with a 50 caliber and then he come back again and shot tail up.
He's warning me and I tell the fella and I says you know if you bring me enough water I believe
I can fly this thing. My mouth got quite dry. So I went on and I landed on a big pasture
and it was huge pasture and it was rougher than it looked and the wings just flapped and I come
to a stop and jumped out and pull those tabs out and threw them on the ground so I could get my
gear up and I understand that during the 1980 World Series baseball game that it says American DC
three has just been shot down by Colombian jets. You know it's the first plane shot down on
Reagan's new war on drugs but he's up. He's up in the way ladies and gentlemen we'll keep you
posted. So I took off again and I went into a thunderstorm and they came close to the mountains
so I spiraled up and every time I'd come out that jet was there boom, boom, boom and I dove back
into that storm boom, boom, boom in there and at 20,000 feet I started icing up so I went out
one last time and he was right there waiting. He had me on radar. So I went back in and I
kicked it over and put it into a spin and went straight down to 2,000 feet and come out under
it and I was flying along the Guadalajara River and it was 20 feet above the water. It looked like
a pasture. It was just grass and I made several runs to tear the grass down and it looked like
it felt hard. That little DC three weighs 30,000 pounds and I put it down on the fifth run. I said
all right, we're going to land now. So you flew like close? No, I put the wheels down.
Oh, you put the wheels down with that landmine? About half a mile and just so I'm making my run for you.
Okay, so you're being tracked by a jet. He's gone. He's trying to, well before that, I'm just like
retelling this story how insane it is. So he's trying to shoot you down and there's a thunderstorm
that you're escaping into and then you do a spin down to what, 2,000 feet, whatever you said,
like somehow escaping all of this and then you try to land on a pasture on a giant heavy plane
that carries three tons by touching down five or six times to make a landing strip for yourself.
Yeah, the grass is three or four feet high. So it looked really good after a few times.
So then just before it stopped, I said, I'll take your feet off the brakes.
He said, I don't have my feet on the brakes. Well, I knew I had broken through the crust
and I put full power on but it didn't. That old big plane just come on down and it just did a head,
as it came to stop, it did a headstand 90 degrees to the ground and the engines held it up and the
nose and all just crushed in right on it. We fell between the two seats to keep from getting killed.
Wow. And when it come to a stop, all that fuel was pouring out on those hot engines
and there's a escape hatch at the top. I just stepped out, took my suitcase with me.
Did it, was there fire? No fire. Left the plane there and the two guys, it was in the back when
I broke his thumb and it was with the barrels and they had to put a hose, tie gas hoses together
to shimmy down to get out. That's an incredible story. Well, let me just tell you,
they had a little bit more to it. I learned to fly with the idea of being a missionary aviation
fellowship pilot. Fly the missionaries in and out of the jungle. Well, I went 11 days through
that jungle. The rest of them went on down the road and got, went to prison. I said,
I'll crawl on my billage six months in here a year, eating snakes before I'm going down the road.
So, I went in there and I was 11 days in the jungle and I finally came to his place and
it had airplanes. I kept asking the Indian, don't just die of the owns. I want to steal an airplane
and get out of there. And when I came to the place, I asked, what is this place? Lovely place.
It looked like Honolulu and World War II. It was a runway there. I said, you don't know.
This is Loma Linda headquarters for missionary aviation fellowship for the Amazon and they flew
me out. Wow. You escaped from prison five times. So, what, what stands out to you as the most
difficult or miraculous escape in the bunch? The most black miraculous was when I was in
the courtroom in Spain. I think I was on the third floor of real high and I ran across the courtroom,
handcuffed, kicked the window out and I looked down and it was above the palm trees.
I thought there might be a power line or something I could grab on as I went down.
There was nothing. And there was a car parked, a station wagon on the-
He just jumped out?
I jumped out from 31 feet on top of that car and it exploded in the street. The windshield went
over three or four cars. He looked like snow going up and I looked like Donald Duck with the
thing coming up and handcuffed and I got out. And he just kept running?
Yeah, kept running. They ran me down and hit me in the back. I still got a dead spot in my
back where the policeman hit me with a shotgun and they brought me back.
Murray was there and he was saying, your husband is crazy. That was spectacular,
but I escaped from Lubeck, maximum security prison and I cut out of there and got out.
That was a miraculous escape. And Lubeck, Germany.
What was that escape like?
I was there and I was going to extradot me back to the United States where I still had all these
charges and 25 years special parole. And I was cleaning the lawyer's vesting room.
And on it was bars that looked like a piano notes or this way to make it pretty, but there was a
little bit. So I got a rope from a guy where they made boats in there and I had 20 minutes.
So I went in there and I wrapped it around and I put a broom handle in it that was cut off and
wrapped it around until they pulled the bars together on that side. And then I pulled them
together on the other side, but that only put me in inside the prison yard where the
soccer equipment was kept. But they were putting new windows on one side of the prison and they
had it scaffolded up to the fourth floor. So there was a little recess there and there was
guard towers ever 100 feet or so. I mean, they were shooting kill you. So I got behind that
and climbed up holding to the bricks on one hand and the scaffolding on the other
and went to the roof. I lost my shirt and most of my clothes going through the window. I got
all the skin off of me. I thought it was going to die. And I was trying to go sideways like this
and finally I got a grip and the bars let me through and took all the skin off of me. So I got
up on that roof and I have asthma and I just lay there trying to catch my breath. Didn't bring
me inhaler. With blood everywhere. Oh, I would bloody, yes. And so I got down to the end and on the
end, the reason I did it, they were putting a new wall again around the prison to make it larger.
And they had taken all the wire off above the Sallyport where they could join the two walls
together and I saw that when I came up. And there was a guard, a half of like a dome sticking out
of that brick building where there's a guard there with a gun and he'd kill you. And I mean he was
made, he was surely trained to kill you. And we had some bad people in that place. So I lay up
a one floor above it and I saw a guard and his wife come with a double umbrella and it was just
pouring down the rain. And there I am without a shirt on, bloody. And she had a little boy with
him under that double umbrella and I knew him when he'd come and she started back from the Sallyport.
I hit the top of that guard tower, bam, with both feet. And I jumped, I guess,
at three more floors. I jumped, there was a pile of sand, like a cone where they were digging it
there. And I hit that and my feet buried up to the knees, but I didn't fall. And I ran straight
towards her so he couldn't shoot me. And then I went around some bushes and went downhill.
And then I heard, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, behind me. And I looked and that fool woman was in a
big old car and she was knocking down the parking meters behind me. She was trying to run over me
and I ran behind a car and she tore the fender off of her car, trying to yell and yap, yap,
yap, yap. And a terrible evil looking face at me screaming at me and the sirens going off in the
prison. And there was a fence there, a wall. And I jumped up on it to jump over and it had
glass embedded. And I cut my hands and my arms all up getting over that. And I hit the ground on
the other side and it was like, it was that muck, muck where some farmer had dug it. I dug in there,
Mari had slipped me $200 into prison and I had that in my shoe and I lost my shoes in that muck.
Anyway, I got out of there and got to Holland. Really heck of a story how I could do that.
What was prison like, whether it's Germany or whether it's Australia? What were some of the
darker moments in prison? The United States prisons are awful, awful, evil places now.
And just really, there's nothing nice about them. There's the guards, the L.A. and everyone I went
to. It seemed like the further east, I went to Oklahoma and it was nicer. But all of them on
the West Coast, they was hatred there. And they got really stupid people hired, just incredibly.
Oh, hatred by the guards. And the inmates. Like, I speak Spanish and I walked into the Spanish
TV room and it was in your know, you can't come in here. And I walked across to the black, hey,
get out of here, white boy. It was just like, what? Man, I like all you people, you know?
And so I walked down to the white people and said, show us your paperwork.
You can't come in here until you show your paperwork. We don't let snitches and homosexuals
and all this sort of stuff in here. So they have, so it's just like, man, I don't want to be in here.
I mean, it sounds absurd, but you're saying like the basic humanity is gone.
Completely. Completely in the guards. It was just like, come here, Reeves. And I woke up to him,
get the fuck out of my face. He sticks his chin out like for me to break his jaw.
Like, why in the world, man? I love people. And it's just...
Yeah, you got this joy to you. You have a joyful nature. And it didn't seem like that broke you.
Not a bit. How did you persevere? Did you know, I didn't even think I persevered,
but I tried to enjoy my life wherever I am every day. I do. I ran every day and like I told you,
why do you run so, Roger? I said, to help me suffer these fools. And I played a game of chess every
day, almost in my life in there. And I read two books a week and I talked with people, storytellers,
guys were coming to tell us another story, Roger. Give us a poem. Tell us one you never told us
before. And so it was just nice. A lot of them have original boys. They picked their country music
and it was all right. Red Morgan Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption says the
following, these walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them.
Enough time passes you get, so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. Is there true to that?
100%. I get to see the walls, except whenever I was playing on escaping.
In Shawshank Redemption, he spent so many years in prison that he almost didn't know what to do
with himself, with himself once he left, once he was a free man. That's the, you get so used to the
system, the rituals, having to follow orders, even being treated poorly, all those kinds of things
that you become dependent on. Well, down in Australia, I spent the first a little over a year
in the shoe. It was like, did you see the movie, The Silence of the Lambs? Thank you.
Thank you. He's there. I had five or six guards looking at me with one-way mirror. That's whenever
I thought I might never get out. I got a life sentence. I had all this time waiting here in
Germany. They had a computer in there, but it didn't have a program on it. I just started
writing these little stories of stuff I did in my life. I wrote one line and I wrote a million
words with them looking at me. It was after a year they let me out. It wasn't long before they put
me in a place called self-care. Particularly, I was in what they call the lifers pod. There was
268 men in self-care there. It was unbelievably good that we were left alone. Basically, they
were there. The guards were certainly there, but they had their shack and we had apartments
for apartments to the building. Six men to the unit with your own door and a key to it,
and a kitchen, dining room, freezer, refrigerator, and they gave you, allowed you $360 a week to
buy groceries. I cooked for about 16 years and learned to cook good. Other people have their
specialties. That was quite... It wasn't so like being in prison. It was somewhat living with me,
and it was difficult, man. I had some good fights and carry on. You don't get along with everybody,
but then whenever I came back to the United States, I was laughing and talking, and when
I got off the plane in LA, I had three marshals with me from Australia. I was slammed upside
the wall. I mean, hard, put an ankle or back zone and handcuffed so tight till he cut my
plane off, face forward, face forward, lands apart. Good gracious, and walked me 50 steps
and turned me over to the marshals, and they took part of that off. That was a border patrol that
was there over my marijuana charge from 1977. I did 11 years for parole violation. Now,
they want me for more violation, and they put me in... Down in Los Angeles, they put me in... The
marshals put me in there, and they put me in isolation. I thought, what in the world they got
me for isolation for? I don't need anything. How long did you spend in isolation? More than six
months. After three or four days, the little Judas window slide open, and a man in a nice-looking
man in a suit come there. Hello, Reeves. I want to just want to see what you look like. I saw
your National Geographic documentary, and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation.
They slammed the thing, and I couldn't get out of there, and by law, the U.S. Parole Commission
has spoke to give you a hearing within 90 days. So, Murray paid a lawyer $7,500, and he never
picked up the phone. Somebody got to him. Who's that somebody you think...
Christopher Cannon was his name, and I don't know who got to him, but he didn't do anything
to get me out of there. I got one 15-minute phone call a month, and I couldn't get out.
So, then after six months, they shipped me to put me on con-air, double shackled in
black box on my hands, and I went to Oklahoma, and they let me out on the floor. I couldn't
imagine. Then I could call after a couple of days, and they said, there was a man here from
Washington, give you a parole hearing. You only got here at 3.30, so he left. He said he'd be back
next year. What? I've been here now over six months. So, then there was a lovely little lady,
she was a case manager or something. She said, you can ask for parole on the record,
and I said, please do. So, I'll send them an email, and the next day, I got my parole.
90 days later, they sent me to Terminal Island and put me in the place there with the
infallit, I guess, since I'm as old as I am, 78 years old. So, they put me into people in there
dying, and wheelchairs, and legs off, and arms off, and cancer. So, I was in there, and I pushed
the fellas around, and I came out to Chow Hall there, and I went to go to the right to get me
a haircut, and two Mexican guys there looped in another one, between us, and he went like,
I could outrun you, and they slammed me, put me on the ground, handcuffed me, and put me in the
shoe for a week. I got out, and man, they put me back in the place, they treated me rough. So,
I got in a little more trouble, and they put me back in the shoe, and I wouldn't come out.
They had that, the virus was killing people, so they killed eight people in that unit I was in.
So, I mean, I wouldn't even come out to take a shower. I had a little straw that I put in the
sink, and I'd take a sock that I had, and scrub myself with it with some soap, and glass of water
over my head, and then cleaned the floor up, and put it in the toilet. So, that was your time during
the coronavirus pandemic? I got out last April, right in the middle of it, and they were dying
bad in there. So, I was treated worse for that last year in America than I was for the whole 20
years in Australia, 18 years in Australia. And then you were a free man at the end of that year?
They put me out and sent me home, and the parole officers couldn't even come. They weren't working.
They were just doing everything by video. They'd not have a drink. The only thing was,
I couldn't even have a drink of wine. So, after a year, I had to take psychiatric treatment
every week. I had to go talk to the psychiatrist, psychologist, and me and her got along great.
She was a good Christian woman. We just chatted and talked, and I think they said,
I had to pee in the bottle every week. And I said, I've been in 33 years. How many
piss deaths do you think I've had? Never been dirty. Only thing if y'all want to clean when you come
get me. Before I talk to you about love, let me ask you a difficult question. You write in your
book, I don't consider myself much of a criminal. I don't lie, cheat, or steal, and I always take
up for the underdog. Violence makes me sick. Yet, I know I'm an outlaw and those that break the law
must be punished. I think many people listening to this, or some people listening to this,
will see you as a criminal, as a bad man who increased the amount of suffering in this world.
What do you have to say to them?
I would like to tell them that they have been indoctrinated by the spin
of news and politicians, and they don't know the truth of the situation.
You lay the truth out there and an envelope and let me open it beside something else that
is false and it's staggering. The truth is that I was a tobacco farmer, and tobacco kills 500,000
people a year in America, and 6 million have a debilitating disease because of it.
Drugs, all drugs combined kill between 10 and 15,000 people a year by overdose,
and 60% of those are pharmaceutical. Now then, when I was a tobacco farmer,
come sit on the front pew, Mr. Reeves. Come on up here, you're a gentleman. You just join the
Masonic Lodge and you join our church, and you just come on and sit down with the good people.
You grow two marijuana pellets. Get out of here, you scumbag. The marijuana doesn't hurt anybody.
It's just that's the truth of it.
And so in your career, you walked amidst violence, but you never participated in the violence.
I didn't even see it. It just didn't happen around me. In prison, it did. I sewed people up.
They called me doc. I had dental floss, and one time I had to get a blade and try to
keep them from my patient, from getting again. But I don't, it was just,
like if I shot at those people, I shot at them to keep them from killing me. I certainly didn't
mean to kill them. So that's just, some people are evil and they will kill you and hurt you and lie
to you. I just don't do any of that. It just makes you sick. I've seen it. When I was in
the shoe, three guys tried to kill a guy and they stabbed him so many times, but they stabbed,
breaking the blood, getting out of the room, and I said, you're going to kill him. You're going to
kill him and save his life. Drug him up there where the guards could see him. There's stuff like that.
I'm just not of that nature of those people. They're just evil. They're people born evil, I believe.
It is heartbreaking to hear that the basic humanity is gone in prison in the United States.
That's heartbreaking because that basic humanity is actually the light at the end of the tunnel.
It's the thing that saves us as opposed to when it's absent. It's the thing that destroys us.
The prisons are filled, absolutely filled with people that have some mental problems.
Now, you see tent city all the way up and down here. I guarantee you, every one of those people
have mental problems. Some degree, however little it is, but they're a little bit off.
Now, then you get a DEA agent that wants to make a name for himself. He goes down there and gets
two of them, one of them to sell a little two grams of methamphetamine to the other one,
and he gets a conviction. And a young prosecutor, he gets a conviction. He wants to make a judge.
And we got the judge in, where was it? I'm going to give a million, what was his name? Gilbert.
I'm going to give him in a million years before I get off the judge. You get
fools like that in charge. You're going to fill prisons up with pitiful humanity.
And those are the ones. And then the other is people over drugs. And drugs should be a
health issue. You can't, you cannot police it enough. It's just, they know like the only thing
that overdoses is opioids, the heroin. And if they can give it to them, it costs about a dollar a day
to give the worst addict his fix. But they'll give it methadone, which is from a pharmaceutical
company, which is just as bad. Why in the world, we tried it all over the world in Portugal and
England. And when they give the girls cleanup, no more stolen cars, why? Who wants to keep this
this forest going? They just perpetuating it like, oh, every little police place is getting all these
suits and armor and machine guns. It's just like, oh, it's, it's such a spin. It's sad.
Do you think all drugs should be legalized? I don't know about that, but they certainly
should be controlled if a person is an addict. He should be able to go down and get his fix
with somebody there to help him with a clean needle and a glass of orange juice. It's so much
cheaper than prison, so much cheaper than him stealing cars or prostitute having to go to work.
That's sad. You've lived one heck of a life. Looking back, there's a lot of young people
that listen to this, high school, college students. What advice would you give them? How to live,
how to have a successful career? How to have a good life? How to be a good man or woman?
To be a good man or woman, if I had it to do over with, I'd just tell you what I'd have done.
I would have paid attention and studied my lesson and did the best I could.
In school?
In school, yes, and went as far as I could have. I would have liked to have been a doctor. I just
didn't have the stickability or anybody to tell me, hey, go over there and do that.
And if you can do that at a very young age, start in a trade, learn to do something. It
doesn't matter what it is. If you learn to do something good, there is a great demand for you.
And I would say that in prison, the prison system should come in and you get a thief,
young fans of thief, a robber. And you say, all right, we need carpenters, we need plumbers,
we need electricians, we need ships. Sentence them to that trade. And when you get an A-plus in
that, where you can go out and make you $30 or $50 an hour, you go home. Now, you can mess around 10
years if you want to or you can do this in two. I think that's just for the prison.
But anyway, I would say that they find somebody and be true to them, that we have,
just be honest and true in your life.
You mean like relationships?
Relationships, yes. I mean, so many, so many people, particularly our children are from
relationships where they're not wanted, they're divorced, their father's left, they don't know
who their daddy is, they just in foster homes, 500,000 children in foster homes in America today.
And we have, our government inadvertently is encouraging those people. My daughter is a
doctor and she delivered a couple of years ago a baby from a 10-year-old child. That child,
and she said, in the individual room is four generations, all of them on welfare. Now we
got one more, and it reminds me of Elvis Presley's song, Indighetto. So for an individual,
learn a trade, become a craftsman of sorts, and find somebody to love and who loves you.
That's right. Have a family and stick with it. They should be surely, you're going to get angry,
you're going to get disappointed, you're going to get all kind of stuff, but come back and make up
before you go to sleep. Well, I did half of those things. I got the first one and working on the
second one, so I appreciate the advice. Well, Mari, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell
me the story of how you did that? Well, my parents every summer would go to the lake in Canada,
and the place was called Turkey Point, which is on Lake Erie, and just have a nice summer holiday
there, water skiing, swimming, sunbathing. This was back in the 60s, and I was sitting on the
pier with a few girlfriends and telling them my story, and then all of a sudden I looked up,
and I saw this figure in the distance coming onto the pier. Now we're all dressed in bathing
suits and swimwear. We're swimming in this, that, and the other, and here he comes,
dark trousers. In fact, they were black, white shirt, and a tie, and a straw kind of a Panama hat,
and so he stood out, and so I invited him to come and sit down, and so he continued to talk,
and we just talked and talked and talked, and then later moved to the beach, and I think the next
time I saw him, he was talking to another girl, and I thought, yeah, I know. I was okay. Okay,
next. Well, about six months later, I received a letter, and it's a letter from Roger,
and then we start this lovely correspondence, and we just start writing. In those days,
you just wrote everything, and then the next summer he was coming up again. He was on his way
to Alaska, and he says, I would like to come by and see you, and I said, well, I'll be in the same
place that I met you last year, and so when he came up this time, for some reason, Roger reached
for my hand, and I reached for his, and man, that was it. It was like love at first touch.
That was love. It was just like a silence in a, oh my gosh, and we didn't even look at each other,
it was just, oh my goodness, what happened here? Yeah. And I was the type of person,
I never wanted to get married, way, way, way down the road, never have any children,
and I wanted to see the world first, and then do all that. But that was it. That was love,
and you've been together ever since. Yeah. Well, the thing is about the love that the two of you
have for each other is they had to persevere through quite a heck of a journey. So how did
Roger's drug smuggling change the nature of your love and your relationship?
Well, Lex, that remains steadfast. It endured. And since Roger's been home, I think we've
rekindled the love that we had when we first met. But I think my faith, my steadfast faith,
and also the fact that Roger and I communicated, we wrote letters. He never complained. I know
there were the children there. He never had mistreated me. I love this guy. And we had a lot
of experiences. It was just even the like. He's a good looking charismatic. He's pretty, you know.
Yeah. And he was adventurous, you know, and would you say that again? But yes, it was just,
I know, you know, I missed him physically, but he was just, we were just so strong in spirit, you know, and we could talk to one another. Yeah.
Well, what was it like, Roger, when you're a free man, seeing Mari for the first time in person again?
I cried for three days. Everything, I'd look at a picture of her. I came home and
there she prepared a meal for me. And there was the old oak table that I'd
redone and the chairs, the same one, and the green placemats, and the same
china that we had, and the same silverware. And it just, just all of it just brought back
the same paintings on the wall. It was just like unbelievable. After 35 years, she had all my clothes
cleaned and my shoes shining. And I put the shoes on and I walked out on the strings and the soles
came on with the shirts and all fit perfect. Everything, so it just was wonderful. And just
to see her and then just to think about, see her picture of her 50th birthday or her 60th
birthday or her 70th birthday, I wasn't there. And the picture of her and with the children,
it just, it was heartbreaking. And about the third day, I thought, man up, I mean, you've got to.
So I got over and quit, quit the, quit the tears. But it was, it was, it was,
everything was just pulsating with life. It was just unbelievable to get out of that place.
It really was. Is there a, do you regret the, the drug smuggling that took you away from the one
me you love? Oh, yes. 100%. Just, no, I wouldn't have done it again if you don't think you're going
to get caught. And it's just, no, it's just, I did it for money and I had everything in the
world I wanted before I did that. So the adventure, I mean, it was one heck of an adventure for the
two of you, for the both of you. Yes. Were you able to enjoy it? Or was it always danger?
Was, what is, was it always something that threatened your relationship, your love,
your family? Are we able to enjoy the adventure of it? You know, we'll all die, life is short,
and to live that kind of adventure. Well, whenever I did the first loot, I got $10,000.
And that was just about, that was just about two years pay on the fire department, take home.
And I brought that home and I put my hand over my mouth. I said,
Roger, I can't believe this. Oh my, what in the world?
Roger said, let's go have dinner. And so we went to the little restaurant that we would go to,
you know, and he said, and don't you dare look on the right hand side of the menu. He's just
ordered anything you want. And it was just, as we were in the restaurant, you know, it was just,
we were giddy about it. Yeah, I was giddy about it. And were you afraid that, I mean,
did you think about the fact that it's illegal and Roger can end up in prison?
Oh, yes. Did you guys talk about it? Well, I just, I kind of thought I was bulletproof. I mean,
they didn't catch you. I thought if they didn't catch you, you was all right. And it was hard to
get you, hard to catch you in the air. So you never thought hard to catch you in the air? I didn't
know that if your friend told on you five years later, you'd still go to prison. That was a problem.
I didn't know that. Did you, did you guys ever talk about walking away?
I asked Roger to walk, to walk away. And he says, I can't Mario just now, you know, and then of
course, the, the amount of people that he began to support the family and the gifts and the deals,
the deals. Yes, the deals. Big ones. Yes. And then you always want to do, what do you do with the
money? You know, so you want to, I guess you clean it up or you want to invest in a, in an
enterprise or in a business. Well, it just doesn't work. They know the source of it and they take
it and run every one of them. Yeah. Yeah. But he was very generous, extremely generous and benevolent.
And when I started, I, I, I would ask about it. I went to a lawyer and a good, good people, a number
of people in, in California at that time wanted to legalize marijuana back in 1973. And I went to
a lawyer and I says, Mr. Lawyer, I put a hundred dollars on the table. What, what would they do
if I caught me bringing marijuana across the board? He said, if you have a criminal record,
I said, no, I've never had a speeding ticket. Nothing, nothing, not even a traffic ticket.
I said, he said, he worked for the fire department. I didn't know what to say. I said, yes, sir.
He said, you'll get probation. The worst you'll do is you'll get one year and you'll spend four,
four months raking leaves on the military base. So my mother and my father died some years before
and I brought mother and baby sister came out and I took them down to Disneyland and she said,
what are you doing, boy? I said, I'm hauling pot, mom. She said, how much you making? I said,
making $40,000 any day I want to go. And she said, what do they do if they catch you? And I told her
what the lawyer said, four months at the most where it raking leaves. That's what do you think?
She said, do you need a co-pilot son? Yeah, money is money. Yeah. So your relationship
persevered through some, some big challenges. Is there advice you can give about what makes
for a successful relationship? Oh, well, you know, I think the initial igniting meeting someone,
you know, that, that's the love. That's it. And that, that, that little fire, just that fire just
keeps burning and burning and burning. You can't put it out, no matter what. It's the, the love fire.
But it gets difficult. It's funny. It's funny, the love fire. So you're saying the love fires
all it takes to, to persevere through the difficulty? Well, no, I, well, that's a huge part of it.
And also I contribute my, my individual situation to, in order to endure what the prison years is
my faith. Faith in God? Yes. And friends who were unconditionally still loved me no matter what.
Yes. So she had love around you in general? I did. And my children, they, you know, and that was a
real purpose to guide them and to love them and to help them become citizens. What advice would
you give? I just don't know how to do it. I do know that you have to work on a relationship.
Maury and I has had problems. I mean, we get really, you guys getting fights? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yes. But not, they don't let them last long, you know, but certainly you're so different.
We're the same and yet we're so different. Yeah. Like little stuff? Little stuff, yes.
And it might be big, but I usually win her over, you know. But anyhow, I just feel like
Maury was always there. It was like she was my anchor. I was coming home. I was always coming
home to her and the children. And you can see throughout my life, I'm working on getting there.
Are you afraid for his life, by the way? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. There are times. Yeah. But you know,
I had faith in him. He was an excellent pilot. For example, I always said, Roger, if the ship's
going down, I'm jumping in the lifeboat with you because I know we're going to get to shore.
You will save us. And so I had that, I have that faith in him. You know, I mean, he's a man, but
yet he's the one you want to get into the lifeboat with. Definitely. But then there is, you know,
Pablo Escobar, one of the most dangerous humans in history, plus the US government.
Very difficult, very difficult to get away. In terms of your faith, how has your faith helped
you to be the woman you are in this relationship and seeing love the way you see it? Well, I think
my faith gives me hope. I have lots of hope. It helps me to dwell on the good side, you know,
when I ever meet someone and there's some negative. I try to see why they are like that or what's the
source of all that. And I try to pull out the good. I really do. Not that I'm a goody-goody,
but that's what your faith does. You know, you see them as God sees us, you know.
How has he changed over the years? Roger. Yeah. He's still the same. Actually,
I like him better now. He's a little calmer. Yeah, that's crazy. Oh, yes. And happy to be,
you know, at home or he'll say, Mari, I am just so happy to be with you here in this condominium.
I'm content because I used to call him my homing pigeon. You know, I just have to let him fly.
I couldn't, you know, he has to fly, but he always came home.
Do you think about the end of this ride, our mortality? Do you think about your death?
I do. Particularly, I'm going to have a heart valve replacement in about seven days where
I could not make it. You know, it's a very serious operation. And I think about that very much.
And I asked for peace. I just lost my brother about 10 days ago, so unexpectedly. And that really
put, you know, makes you think of your mortality. Are you afraid? Somewhat and yet not.
Yeah. I want to live, Lex. I want to live, you know. This life is fun. Yes.
Do you think about your death, Roger? I have visions. Visions in me often happen very, very clear
like what I have seen in the future. Scientists might call it wormholes or
in the Old Testament, they call it prophets, but I see sometimes in the future around the corner.
It's clear as we're sitting right here. What's that look like?
I was on a porch and I believe I was in like Central America place. I was an old man with
khaki pants and a white shirt. And it was a chair with a wide arms and it was straight.
And there was like the beams coming out above my head and I'm on a porch.
Both can be yet. And I have out of the body experiences also. And I came out of my body,
just I just floated out of my body and went into a veil and like into a mist.
And I believe that's probably why it happened. You talk about, you talk about like it's in your
past. This is your future. This is in my future. This is something he has seen in the past.
Yeah. No, I know, but it's funny just the tense you use, it happened and yet it's
something that will happen to both are true. It's just unbelievable. And I don't know how
many people have it, but I have it. Out of my body, just like where I could come up to you and look
and set up on the radio. I used to be at work on the railroad and I had them there.
How do you explain that? What the heck is going on in this universe that's possible?
Oh, I don't know, but certainly, certainly a phenomenon that just happened. And
there's a guy, Bill Monroe, that wrote the book on the out of the body. He tells about it.
And who was the guy that writes the Alchemist?
Pablo Coelho?
He has them also, just like that. And he tells about how it happens on him.
Might happen differently. But you certainly can come out of your body.
What do you think the meaning of this life is? Maybe from your faith, but also from just
the amazing adventure that you live through? How do you make sense of why the heck we're here?
I don't know. It's just kind of like who you are. Even when I was a child, I was like,
I'm different from other people. And just as a boy, I was.
Could you put into words how you were different or was just the feeling?
Yeah, like my brother, I mean, he kept his hands clean and his shoes shined. And here I was barefooted
catching a wild hog or rafting a horse trying to get it down.
I saw pictures of you climbing a tree recently.
When I first got out of prison. Always something like that.
So I don't know. It's just that. And I noticed that something about me is sometimes in prison,
there'd be a knife fight. And people just, you see them rough guys that turn white from it.
I just kind of almost like smile. I mean, they come at me. I turn white, you know what?
But it doesn't bother those things. That doesn't bother me. I just prison didn't bother me.
So you don't know what the heck the meaning is. You just know you're a bit different than the others.
Yeah, I might be a little bit cookie. Well, maybe the whole point is you want to realize you want to
let that madness flourish, that uniqueness flourish. That's the whole point of life. We're all different
and are in like very interesting little ways. Yes. And the more different you are, you want to let that
that, you want to let that become, you want to let it be as full. It's like a garden, you know,
all the different flowers. Yeah, like a garden. You did mention you weren't sure if there's a
free will or not. Do you think it's all predetermined? Or do you think we make out decisions? I just
said if it is, I hope that. But I know that we make out decisions. Yes, I agree. And I know that we're
spirits that are living in this flesh. That's beyond the shadow of a doubt with me. If you
walk out of your body and have out of the body experience, you will know it. So the body is
just the temporary container. The spirit lives on eternally with no beginning and no end. And
that's hard to fathom. Yeah, this is just a little, this is a shell to contain that spirit.
You know, this is the way we work on earth, you know. But yeah, I know, I'm an eternal being.
So are you. Do you think there's a why to it? Do you think there's a meaning to this life?
Well, I think the why is beyond my capability of understanding. It's someone greater than me. I
don't understand it. But it's awesome. I just know that it's awesome. And one day we will
know the answers. Once we get to that crossover to the other side, I think we will understand
clearly. It says, you know, now we see through a glass, darkly. But then when we are face to
face with God, we will understand. And until we know, let's just enjoy this beautiful life.
Yes. All we got it. And we're meant. That was my gift. I love everybody and everything. I do.
And it just, and I'm sorry if I put a stumbling block in anybody's way, I wouldn't want to.
But these are these things that I just think about. Oh, what a hypocritical world we live in,
though. Like most anybody out there listen, okay, he's a drug dealer. And I would say most of them
are committed adultery. That's a cardinal sin. Yet they move through rocks at me for moving a
marijuana cocaine across the road. It's just if you saw the two different things,
you'd say, what a terrible difference it is. But we become conditioned with this mad society that
we have. You mentioned that your daughter, Miriam, wrote you a poem. You mind reading it?
I'd be glad to. I was doing 11 years up in Lombok Penitentiary, maximum security prison
for parole violation for possession of marijuana in 1977. They should have given me six months,
but they gave me 11 years because they wanted me for what they call silent beef.
Anyhow, while I was in that dungeon, I received a letter from my daughter, Miriam,
called Daddy's poem. A year ago, I became a poet when I wrote your birthday prose.
And here I am today, ready to give it another go. First, I would like to wish you a very happy
birthday to be and to thank you so very much for without you, I would not be me. Secondly,
I want to say that your support has been immense. It has been true, honest, loving, and free of all
pretense. Thirdly, it goes without saying your love has surpassed all my wrongs, and you always
made me smile with one of your old country songs. I can remember on Quervo, Daddy, with you holding
me in your arms as you sang Jim Reeve's songs and talked about the farm. I can see you walking
through the door from one of your travels far and wide, and the thought of you coming home, Daddy,
kept a twinkle in our eyes. I can smell you as I did when I used to climb into your bed,
and you would talk to me again about one of the adventures that you led. I can see me and
Mario asleep in one of your airplane's extraordinaire, and remembering wondering to myself
why there wasn't an available chair. I remember having to meet you and worrying that you wouldn't
be there, but you would pop from behind some counter and give us all a happy scare. You gave
us presents in Quibis Cane and Hotels Pleasure Galore and three dozen roses that we came through
the airport door. I can see your face in Amsterdam with the luggage carousel, and you looked like a
boy with a secret that you were just dying to tell. You taught me mathematics in the sands of far
away places, and taught me to sail, and we left without any traces. We climbed glaciers in Argentina
and saw the blue of the beautiful caves, and witnessed the majestic beauty of such a juggling
maze. I learned how to change gears on the dirt roads of Brazil. We ate hot dogs in Paraguay,
a memory we smile over still. We talked about lions, elephants, and bears on a hacienda in
Uruguay, but decided it was better if to Europe we did fly. Over the old world and all its luxury,
what a good time it was. From South America to the Krasmopolski, I think we fell in love.
The European jaunt, well, it is considered a book in itself, but it's a story about beauty and
knowledge, suspense, and worldly wealth. We went from Holland to Sweden, and we went from France
to Spain, and I promise you I have no regrets. I would definitely do it all again. I would see
the world with you anytime, sir. There's no doubt in my mind, because being by your side,
Daddy, always ensures a wild good time. So our past took a turn, and we're back in the US of A,
but life here isn't so bad, and I'm plum-content to stay. I'm happy to be near you, although I'm not
as close as I was before, but because of your loving encouragement, I've been able to open
your doors. I'm grateful to be in school, and I'm generally happy where I am,
and I even like when you call and tell me to study for the next exam.
What a life you've given me, Daddy. It's a tremendous and a magical gift.
We already have so many stories to tell, they're far too many to list. But I want to thank you again
this day for the very big, happy birthday to you, and to tell you just a few more things
that are new in my heart to be true. I love you, Daddy, with all of your wrongs and your rights,
that you're ahead of our family, and you've kept us all bound tight, that you have an
honest love in your heart for God and all mankind, and you truly do believe in yourself
when you say it will all be fine. I know you will be there to catch me, if ever I waver or slip,
and I know I'd want you as captain on any sinking ship. I also know a new chapter is written.
It's almost time to move on. It's time to sail another sea and to witness a brand new dawn.
It'll be good to see you at the helm again as you point out our destination.
The laugh and dance on the upper deck is while the boat glides through. It'll be good to see you
on the go, as I know you like to be, and to know you can open any door without any key.
But while we revel in our days together, we will know better than to hurry,
because as you told me many times, life is an incredible journey. Wow, that's beautiful.
Yeah. Roger, I'm really honored that you would take the time to visit me in Texas
and to sit down and talk with me. Thank you so much, Roger. Thanks so much, Mari.
Thank you. It was a pleasure. It's been a real pleasure. Yes. Beautiful.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Roger Reeves, and thank you to Noom, All Form,
ExpressVPN, ForSigmatic, and Aidsleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Pablo Escobar.
All Empires are created of blood and fire. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.