#38 Roger Reaves - Pablo Escobar and The Medellín Cartel's #1 Cocaine Smuggler

The adventures of Roger Reaves has you sitting on edge as he tells you his vivid memories of Smuggling Drugs into the U. S. He spanned the globe in his numerous aircraft smuggling tons of marijuana and cocaine for Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel and at one point was shot down by Colombian Military Jets. At the height of his career he had a net worth of $60 Million Dollars. It all came crashing down for Mr. Reaves and in total cost him roughly 30 years of his life locked away from his family. 🚨↘️ Sign up for the SRS Newsletter ↙️🚨 https://www.shawnryanshow.com/newsletter SHAWN RYAN SHOW SPONSORS: https://www.mudwtr.com/shawn (USE CODE SHAWN) https://www.bubsnaturals.com (USE CODE SHAWN) prepwithshawn.com https://www.meetfabric.com/SHAWN https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite #VIGILANCEELITE #SHAWNRYANSHOW Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Shawn Ryan?

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  On October 2nd.

• 0:34Shawn Ryan?

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:40Roger Reaves?

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Shawn Ryan?

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You starve, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:00Speaker 03

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• 1:29Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of you have heard me talk about my psychedelic journey this year and all the benefits that came from doing it. One being, I haven't drank in seven months. I haven't had any caffeine in seven months. My anxiety's gone, my anger's gone. A whole list of benefits came from that. And that led me down this journey of researching benefits of mushrooms and fungi in general. And in my research, I found this company called Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative with four adaptogenic mushrooms and herbs. With a fraction of the caffeine as a cup of coffee, you get energy without anxiety, jitters, or...

• 2:09Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:50Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:03Shawn Ryan?

  Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. This week, we have a very special guest for you guys. Something completely different, way out of the norm of what we usually do. This guy spent over 30 years behind bars and is still married to the same woman. I had the pleasure of meeting his beautiful bride, Maury. Ladies and gentlemen, Roger Reeves, the most prolific international drug smuggler in the world, is on the Shawn Ryan Show. He used to run cocaine out of Colombia for Pablo Escobar, Ochoa, and the Medellin cartel. He ran hashish out of Pakistan.

• 3:47Shawn Ryan?

  He's run just about every kind of drug you can think of, from every nook and cranny corner of the world. Roger Reeves, it's a hell of a story. If you like this video, please like, subscribe, and leave a comment to the channel, and...

• 4:06Shawn Ryan?

  You guys remember these Vigilance Leap gummy bears? They're coming back. It's gonna be right around Black Friday. The only way to get these gummy bears to be able to find the link is one, either join my Patreon because they're gonna get first dibs, or two, sign up for our email newsletter. It's in the description. You can find it down there. We put all kinds of good stuff. There's gonna be an EDC Pocket Dump coming out soon, but if you want to be notified on this and you want to get the link on where to get these tasty gummy bears that are made right here in the USA, you gotta be subscribed to the email list. All right. Love you all.

• 4:51Shawn Ryan?

  Enjoy the show. I want to see the comments of what you think about this episode and if you're feeling extra generous, go leave us a review on iTunes. And if you're feeling even more generous, head over to Spotify and leave us a review there too. All right. Love you guys. Enjoy the show. Lots of good stuff coming. Cheers.

• 5:15Shawn Ryan?

  Roger Reeves, welcome to the show.

• 5:18Roger Reaves?

  Mighty proud to be here.

• 5:20Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks for, thanks for making the trip. I really appreciate it. So you're one of the most prolific drug smugglers in the world. You broke out of prison five times, moonshiner, smuggled cocaine, marijuana, worked for Pablo Escobar, the Medellin cartel, the Ocho Brothers. Is there anything you haven't done?

• 5:44Roger Reaves?

  I hope.

• 5:46Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, man, what a story. I've been listening to a lot of your podcasts lately, uh, doing some research on you, skimmed through your book, didn't have the time to read it. It got a little late, but, um, but I cannot wait to dive in on this. So once again, I just really appreciate you coming down.

• 6:07Roger Reaves?

  You just ask the questions and I'll try to answer them.

• 6:09Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Well, everybody starts off with a gift here and, uh, so there's the first part.

• 6:17Shawn Ryan?

  Those are Vigilance Lead Gummy Bears.

• 6:21Roger Reaves?

  Oh my goodness.

• 6:23Shawn Ryan?

  And just regular gummy bears, nothing funny going on.

• 6:27Roger Reaves?

  Oh, why?

• 6:29Shawn Ryan?

  We'll save that for after the show.

• 6:30Roger Reaves?

  Okay, good, good.

• 6:31Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 6:32Roger Reaves?

  Thank you, thank you very much for the.

• 6:34Shawn Ryan?

  And then, because you spent so much time in Colombia, I got you a.

• 6:39Roger Reaves?

  Oh my. Colombia, Colombia, what in the world is that?

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  That is Aguardiente.

• 6:48Roger Reaves?

  Oh my God.

• 6:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Roger Reaves?

  I have had to drink that a few times.

• 6:54Shawn Ryan?

  I tried to.

• 6:55Roger Reaves?

  That brings back memories.

• 6:56Shawn Ryan?

  I tried to find the original Aguardiente, but.

• 7:01Roger Reaves?

  After I drank that first, I thought about going down to South America and opening a bourbon place and making whiskey because they need it back.

• 7:09Shawn Ryan?

  They definitely need it, but yeah.

• 7:12Roger Reaves?

  It will do the job.

• 7:13Shawn Ryan?

  It's hard to find guado in the middle of Tennessee.

• 7:17Roger Reaves?

  Thank you very much.

• 7:18Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. Roger, if there's one thing we have in common, it's that we've both led very dangerous careers, you being a drug smuggler, me being a Navy SEAL CIA guy, and there's one thing you're worried about when you have a dangerous career back home, and that's your family. So if you don't mind, I'm just going to take a quick second to tell the audience about Fabric. Fabric by Gerber Life was designed by parents for parents to help you get high-quality, surprisingly affordable term life insurance policy in less than 10 minutes. It takes less than 10 minutes to apply, see your quote, and then personalize your quote

• 7:57Shawn Ryan?

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• 8:42Shawn Ryan?

  Policy issued by Southern Life Assurance Company. Not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. All right, Roger, let's get back to it. I want to get a little bit of your childhood. That's one thing I didn't hear anything about in the stuff that I read or listened to. And so we'll start with childhood, go through your whole career into prison, when you got out, and that'll be it, bud.

• 9:10Roger Reaves?

  All right, I was born in St. Augustine Hospital in the East Coast Railroad Hospital back January 26, 1943. My father worked in a veneer mill. My mother and that was during the war effort. They was making boxes for shells to ship overseas. And my great grandparents had a big farm up in Georgia. In 1945, after the war was over, we moved up there. That's the earliest memories I have is going up there on the train and all that dining car and riding with my grandma. And I slept with my grandma from the time I was just a little fella until I was 14

• 9:55Roger Reaves?

  years old and she died. So a big old feather bed. So we moved up to Georgia to a three mule farm. And things were wonderful. They had mules. I mean, I'd ride those mules to the field and cry if I couldn't go. And I'd ride the plow with my daddy plowing. And he'd say, it's hard right now. Sit hard. He'd make a little board on front of the plow for me to hold. And I'd put my little butt down real hard to help him put the plow in the ground. And life was great. And then my father started drinking. And he become absolute hopeless alcoholic. But he's a wonderful man, he's intelligent, he was just, but he just loved that bottle better than he did life. How old were you when he became an alcoholic?

• 10:38Roger Reaves?

  I guess about eight or 10 years old and he just come, come right on and he died by the time I was 17 years old. And so I had seven little brothers and sisters. And so my mother worked hard, she worked hard, she hated his drinking and we lived in the house with his mother, my grandma that I slept with. And my grandma, for some reason, got cross with my mother and they didn't speak all my life. So I, I, I kept, I wanted a horse. And so my grandma, I'm gonna buy you a horse, Roger, we're gonna go to town, we're gonna buy you a horse. She just was sweet and talking, just, so I kept telling my mother about it.

• 11:19Roger Reaves?

  And she says, Roger, your grandma's not gonna buy you a horse, just hush it back. Grandma, mother said, you ain't never gonna buy me a horse. They go get your Uncle G. And we went to Fitzgerald, Georgia and went to the mule and horse lot. And there he was, a beautiful Pinto back in the back. They said, a little boy can't handle that. Boy, I didn't want nothing else. And they brought that horse for a hundred and forty-five dollars. And man, he was just way too mean for me to handle. So my daddy came out there and tied him to a corner post, gave me a switch, said, ride him forever. So me and that horse rode for a long time with a three-foot lead.

• 12:02Roger Reaves?

  Finally, I got work a horse and I think that toughened me up to life with that little, little horse. Really? Yeah, I do, I, I really do. That thing would bite me and I'd bite him, he bit me and I bit his ear and he nearly jerked my head off. So that was life on the farm. And I cropped a back and hoe and worked in the field hard. I mean, I, I would and we had three mules and then later on we got a John Deere tractor, pop, pop, pop. You could hear it a mile. If anybody quit plowing, you could know he quit. So my daddy died when I was seventeen years old and he died from an aneurysm and one day and it was a terrible sad thing for a man fifty-four years old with several little brothers, children and Seven of you guys.

• 12:45Roger Reaves?

  They called us in one by one. He just came in the morning. He came in and sat down and it was in his stomach, it had blown out. And I don't want to deluge into the sadness, but anyway, it was really sad and they come and they said he can't live. So he said goodbye to all of us and he told me, I don't mind, son, dying that you can help your mom and these little sisters and brothers you have. So I tell that story to say that a most unusual thing happened there shortly thereafter that. I had a sister a year younger than I was. She was sixteen. There was a fella from across the river, a big fella. He asked her out on a date. These two are the guys, we knew them. So they took her out and her cousin Barbara

• 13:29Roger Reaves?

  and they went to the picture show and it was all nice. Afterwards, she came in all clawed up, her clawed up bloody on around her neck and her face. And so, wow, she said they took her out and tried to rape her. One of them sat on her head and the other one tried to tear her clothes and wow. Well, what in the world to do? I didn't have a car or any way to go, but I knew I was, had to do something. So the next day I walked down to the little village of Jacksonville, Georgia, and there was Stanley Wells. And his daddy owned him on the little store and he had an old Chrysler and he said, you want to ride across the river to the skating rink? I said, sure Stanley, let's ride across. So we went across and

• 14:12Roger Reaves?

  there was that man roller skating with a woman in a long white dress. And he was going around, around the corners. So I just went up and paid my dime for one of them large Coca-Colas and I dried it off. I didn't say nothing to nobody. And I walked out and when he came by, I hit him in between the eyes with the bottom of that Coca-Cola bottle and it rained his head. And I run along beside him and kind of rearranged his face. The guy that owned the skating rink, Bill Newman, he came along, grabbed my arm and fell down in all the blood and broke his glasses and everybody, the whole world just stopped. There must have been a hundred skaters and that, it's a cotton candy world, just kept playing.

• 14:54Roger Reaves?

  And they come with a knife and I thought, oh, I grabbed that bottle. And somebody cut his skates off to drag him out of all that mess. And so I walked out and they said, why did you do it, Roger? And I said, April fool. It was the first day of April.

• 15:09Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 15:10Roger Reaves?

  My sisters couldn't get a date after that.

• 15:13Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's probably a good thing.

• 15:15Roger Reaves?

  So that was my first brush with the law.

• 15:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 15:18Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Shawn Ryan?

  So when did you, when did you start studying to become a pilot?

• 15:26Roger Reaves?

  Uh, back up there, I want to, um, tell you about how I met Mari over there.

• 15:30Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 15:31Roger Reaves?

  I, uh, uh, it was like in the Grapes of Wrath at John Steinbach. They was advertising for tobacc- tobacco harvesters. We called it cropping tobacco. You had to crop it, take the leaves off three or four at the time as it ripens. You have to look at the stalk and tell what it is. And, uh, I was raised on a tobacco farm, so I knew how. So they was pay- they was paying twenty dollars a day, room and board in Canada.

• 15:54Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 15:54Roger Reaves?

  And that was after our season finished down in Georgia. A lot of the boys here from South, North Carolina went up there also during those years. And so, uh, it was twenty dollars a day and so it was like you could make six or seven hundred dollars a year in six weeks.

• 16:08Shawn Ryan?

  In Canada?

• 16:09Roger Reaves?

  In Canada, after I was finished. That was a, that was a huge amount of money.

• 16:13Shawn Ryan?

  Why was everybody going to Canada to grow tobacco?

• 16:16Roger Reaves?

  Uh, I think the Dutch and the Belgians, they found out that it would grow just north of, uh, Lake Erie. It was kind of the banana belt of Canada.

• 16:23Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 16:24Roger Reaves?

  And it was just like two hundred miles of solid tobacco. And huge tobacco barns and beautiful, and it was beautiful farms and so, but they had so much tobacco, they didn't have people to harvest it. So they advertised all far and wide. So I hitchhiked up there and, uh, I, uh, after, after a few, a week or so, you could get rid of the sand lugs and you'd go really fast. And so we could, we'd finish about twenty, two o'clock in the afternoon and then I would pull suckers. And so I make thirty dollars a day. They'd pay you by the road.

• 16:58Roger Reaves?

  So some of the boys came from a neighboring farm and said, Roger, you want to go to the fair, there's a fair in Tilsonburg. And I said, sure. I took a shower every evening after I came in in the greenhouse anyway. And I put on a pair of black slacks and a shirt and off to the carnival we went. Well, what a place it was. First, we went to the hoochie coochie show for fifty cents. And I'd never seen anything like that. It was just delightful. So then we go on down the road and there's a man of great big fellow with a long flowing beard. He must have weighed three hundred fifty, four hundred pounds. Five brand new one hundred dollar bills. Anybody to wrestle my bear and get all four feet off the ground. Ten dollars to anybody that's got guts enough to give it a try. What's your name, young

• 17:43Roger Reaves?

  man? Roger Reeve. How much you weigh, Roger? Hundred and forty-five pounds. Hundred forty-five pound man against six hundred pound beast. And the crowds flocking in. And he opened that circus door, that little circus wagon, and threw me in with that little black bear. And when that black bear got getting up, he wasn't little at all. So I ran into that bear. And we had a round or two, but the bear won. And I lost most of my clothes. And I asked the man for my money. And he told me to go to hell. I'd hurt that bear. So I couldn't

• 18:23Roger Reaves?

  work for two days. So I went down, it was Sunday, and I went down to the Turkey Point on the beach at Lake Erie. And I walked out on the pier. And there was three girls sitting on a towel. I tipped my hat to one of them. And it was Mari. And it was sixty years ago, a little over. Sixty years. Married ever since, yes. You guys have been together for sixty years. Sixty years. Congratulations. That's amazing. So I took Mari back down to Georgia. And she come from Holland and lived in Canada. And to bring her down in that heat and them flies and teaks and rattlesnakes.

• 19:02Roger Reaves?

  That was, it was really in a swamp area where I'm from. Till I could feel that was, that was something else. So, uh, Perina Company had really promoted chicken business down there. And so I got my mom a mortgage of farm and we put in thirty-six thousand laying hens. And that was just about the time that the curve was over. It was going down the other side. So every time we picked up a dozen eggs, we lost a nickel.

• 19:31Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 19:31Roger Reaves?

  So it wasn't long before we seventy-eight thousand dollars in debt to feed to Perina Company. And it looked like the farm might be go to the bank.

• 19:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Roger Reaves?

  So I decided to turn some of that chicken feed into moonshine. So I started making moonshine whiskey. And I got up to a thousand gallons a week.

• 19:48Shawn Ryan?

  You were making a, how old are you at this point?

• 19:51Roger Reaves?

  Twenty-four, twenty-five years old.

• 19:53Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty-four, twenty-five years old, making a thousand gallons of moonshine a week?

• 19:58Roger Reaves?

  I'm selling it for three dollars a gallon. Talking, cost me maybe about a gallon to make, a dollar a gallon to make. So I'm making two thousand dollars every week, ten days, according to the temperature of the weather.

• 20:07Shawn Ryan?

  What year is this?

• 20:09Roger Reaves?

  Nineteen, uh, sixty-six, sixty-seven.

• 20:14Roger Reaves?

  So, but they were, it was legal over in Florida, but they'd shoot and kill you over in Georgia if they caught you. So anyway, the steel, we, one of the bottles got too close to the steel and they call it puking. When it gets a little bit hot, it, it'll boom, the sides come out. And one of those big, uh, butane bottles got knocked over and there's two hundred of them. And it looked like World War Two with flamethrowers.

• 20:36Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 20:37Roger Reaves?

  They going off. And I went back, I, after I got the fire out, I went back to the house and I was eating it behind our house. And, uh,

• 20:45Roger Reaves?

  after, after all of them blown up, I, I thought the revenue was blowing it up and I ran back there, but it wasn't. So I drew, took a hoe and pulled those tanks all into the creek. It was cold. So, uh, we heard pow, pow.

• 21:02Roger Reaves?

  I'm already running to the back window there while I was eating a second breakfast. And I let me look and she said, "Just whamming a favor. He's, he's chasing lice. He's chasing lice. He, he fell down. His, his hat fell off. We knew the deputy's spare. It's a, he's chasing lice. Lice is getting away." So anyway, they brought the bloodhounds out and oh, boy. So, uh, that was over, but then I started up again and then, and then a feller turned me in and I, I had to, I had to run from them too. And the bloodhounds after me and they blew my steel up again. Had to swim across the creek and oh, everybody knew it was me. How long, how long were you making moonshine before you got caught? About a year.

• 21:47Roger Reaves?

  A year? So then we was ashamed to go to church. We ashamed to go to town. Everybody pointed their finger. It was all in the news. It covered Dixie like the dew. The front page of the Atlanta Journal. So, and, uh, so the, the long chain men came and took my tractor. They took my truck. I had a big old ten wheeler. They took that. They just, I mean, I didn't have nothing. I was paralyzed, broke. Yeah. And I, what in the world can we do? My sister was out there in California. She said, Roger, they, they need laborers out there. They, they making seven dollars an hour. So we went out to California. So I say, when I quit running, I was in, I was in Redondo Beach, California. And I went to work, uh, uh, doing construction framing

• 22:29Roger Reaves?

  and, uh, so, uh, I mean, I, it was killing me doing that framing. There was a electrician there, Italian man. He said, Roger, why don't you be electrician? I said, I don't know much about it. He said, I'll teach you. So every day at lunch, he would say, this is flex. Here's how you cut it. And here's a handy box. And this is a forest box. And this is that. And he, so he taught me whatever. He said, now go get some used tools and go down to Wilmington and sign the right to work book. So I went down and signed it and they sent me out on the job and they never knew I wasn't a real electrician. I worked there two years and then I got on the Redondo Beach Fire Department and I was real happy with that job. So I continued to do the electrical work and then

• 23:14Roger Reaves?

  buying, I was one of the first pickers. I'd go down into the Los Angeles area where the people were moving out and getting rather slummy and I'd park my truck and I'd walk a block or two just on the corner and I mean, within an hour or two, I'd have it completely loaded with junk and antique, not junk, but and I'd take it down to Antique Road and make me $200 and I'd be home. And that was one of my days off from the fire department. So I made, made quite a bit of money. Then I came back here just across the river and you might not know, but the settlers, when they came from New York and Atlanta, wherever, they came on a train here to, to the river and then they had to take a ferry across

• 23:59Roger Reaves?

  and then they, they put it into wagons on the other side and those wagons were Studebaker's, the ones that went across the schooners and later on they made the cars. But anyhow, that's what the wagons, the good wagons, they took. Well, they couldn't get half of the stuff that they brought on the train into those little wagons. So they left pieces here by the millions. Really? So I started hauling it back. I had other firemen here buying it for me and putting it in a big barn and I'd fly it once a month and rent a truck and take it back. And I was bouncing along the highway there with a load of those antiques and I was reading the National Geographic paper and magazine and it said that mercury was 13 times higher and the more expensive than the United States. It was Mexico. And I told my friend Mike there

• 24:42Roger Reaves?

  that was driving. I said, I believe I'll go down and get me some of that mercury. And he said, man, that'll, that's so heavy. It'll knock a hole in the bottom of your airplane. I had a little airplane then. And so. You were flying? I, yeah, I'd, by that time, I'd backed up. I forgot to tell you. So I'll back up and tell you. I started flying in Georgia. I had read a book called Jungle Pilot.

• 25:05Roger Reaves?

  And it was about an eighth saint and he had a bad knee and he couldn't fly in World War II. But he was a Christian, so he wanted to, he saw about the missionaries and how that they took, sometime they'd take two or three weeks to walk out to get their mail and to get their medicine. And so he wanted to help those people. So he got a little, little cub and he started flying them and he would, he would, I don't know where it was in Borneo or South America, but he'd put a rope out and he'd put a bucket with a lid on it and like a cowboy can take a rope and do that, he'd put the bucket right at their feet as he circled. And they'd say, I need penicillin. And they'd give them their, their lit mail and they'd put the mail back in. He'd wind it back up. And I thought, oh, boy, I would just love to do something like that.

• 25:51Roger Reaves?

  I'm not worthy to be a preacher, but I could certainly help those people and do it. So I learned to fly in a little airplane called Death Trap. Rode down the trap. A $700 airplane. Holy cow. So, uh, uh, but that's how I learned. So now then I, things didn't work out like I was planning. And so now I go out and I'm on the fire department and I do the antiques and I, and I bought an airplane. I bought two or three of them and traded them off until now I've got a Cessna 182, a pretty nice little twin-engine airplane. Still my favorite for a family plane. It just, it's just the Volkswagen of the sky. It just does it. Yeah. So, uh, I says, what does it pay?

• 26:33Roger Reaves?

  He said, I don't know. I'll introduce you to someone. So we met a fella. He was so nice. He was paralyzed. I didn't realize, start with that beautiful voice. He spoke Spanish. He said, you got an airplane? I said, you'd fly some pot? I said, I don't know. What do you pay? See what the deal is. He said, let me introduce you to somebody. So he introduced me to this guy, Wild Bill. He was a nice looking young man. He said, I'll give you $10,000 to fly down there and bring some pot back. I said, let's go. Did you ask how much pot? I go, you can't put much in there. It's about big as just two chairs in the back seat, you know. Okay. Wasn't a very big airplane. Were you, were you nervous at all? Not a bit. Not a bit? Not a bit. I'd, I've been going down there flying, getting fishing in Baja and stuff.

• 27:15Roger Reaves?

  You fly back sometime, it'd be dark. I decided not even stop for, for the border. Then nobody bothered you. There was nothing separating Mexico and California or the United States but a barbed wire fence. There was nothing. Okay. So I went down there and flew a load and come back. Guy gave me ten thousand dollars and I took it home and I didn't need that money. I had two houses, a nice car, an airplane, what in the world? Beautiful wife, two little girls. Just, it was just, just something to do, it sort of, sort of thing and so. But that was a lot of money, ten thousand dollars, just to fall in your pocket at that time. So I shook it on the bed and my wife put her hand over her mouth like, oh my goodness. The baby grabbed some hundred dollar bills and was crawling around with them and we just laughed and. I told my wife, let's go out to dinner.

• 28:00Roger Reaves?

  Well, we'd go out to dinner if we wanted to, we just didn't, we just, you know, working people. So, we went, I said, don't you dare look at the right hand side, just look at, just look at whatever, whatever you got on the list. So, we put that money in the lockbox and I went to see a lawyer. And I put a hundred dollar bill on his desk and I said, Mr. Lawyer, I got one question. If I got caught bringing marijuana back from Mexico in my airplane, what would they, what, what, what would the penalty be? He said, what's your criminal history? I said, I don't have one. He said, nothing? I said, I've never even had a speeding ticket. I didn't even had a parking ticket in my whole life. He said, you work on the fire department? I said, yes, sir. He said, well,

• 28:40Roger Reaves?

  for sure you'd get probation. But the worst, if it, the worst happened to worse, you'd get one year and you'd spend four months raking leaves on some military camp. And I said, now that ain't, that's, that's pretty good odds. So I went and bought me a Cessna two oh seven, a really big Cessna, biggest they made back then. So I'd go down and make forty thousand dollars a day. So I told Murray, I said, we're gonna make four hundred, three hundred thousand dollars and we're going back to the farm and we're gonna farm.

• 29:10Roger Reaves?

  And it was like a thermometer with a match under it. I made three hundred thousand dollars quick. It wasn't, you turn your head and that was done, I'm, a couple of months, I had it. How much was this new Cessna? You remember? Uh, yeah, I paid fifty five thousand dollars for a used one. You could get a. It was two oh seven with the wing off, had to put the wing back on, it gets to fly. Damn. So, uh,

• 29:33Roger Reaves?

  I, I bought me a new Cadillac like an idiot.

• 29:39Roger Reaves?

  It was pretty. So I called my mother and my baby sister. I said, "Come out here. I got something to show you." So they flew out and I flew them out and I took them to Disneyland. And so my mother looked at me kind of funny, and she was a sport now. And she said, "What you doing, boy?" I said, "I'm hauling pot, ma." She said, "How much you making?" I said, "I'm making forty thousand dollars any day I want to go down there." She said, "My goodness, what would they do if they catch you?" And I told her what the lawyer said. She said, "My." I said, "What do you think, ma?" She said, "Do you need a co-pilot, son?"

• 30:14Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 30:17Roger Reaves?

  So that's how my marijuana days started.

• 30:20Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 30:21Roger Reaves?

  It was just so, I was just... The maximum sentence would have been five years. And, and it was just like, they were nothing. DEA wasn't even started. They were just nothing to stop you. If you went across the border with your airplane and cleared customs at the first place and got the permit for your airplane, you could fly in Mexico, just like it was a Mexican plane, for six months. Fly back and forth with that. If you run out of gas and had to go into town, just show that. You were just welcome as, as any tourist.

• 30:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. How many, how many ten thousand dollar, did you only do one ten thousand dollar trip?

• 30:59Roger Reaves?

  I did two ten thousand dollars and I went to forty thousand dollars. And then I went to, I bought a Twin Beach airplane. And I, I guess I must have made sixty or seventy thousand dollars a trip on that. I always just flew it for somebody else. I didn't like to buy it. I didn't like to sell it. I did a little bit, but I just was absolutely a trucking company. And so I must have, I did it over a hundred times.

• 31:20Shawn Ryan?

  You did it over a hundred times?

• 31:22Roger Reaves?

  A hundred times.

• 31:22Shawn Ryan?

  Were you ever...

• 31:25Shawn Ryan?

  You, you were never nervous? It was so lax back then?

• 31:28Roger Reaves?

  Well, it was lax, but I, I got shot down twice. And so I'll get to that a little bit later. But I'd like to tell you how I, how I come about being able to do it and not get caught.

• 31:42Roger Reaves?

  They formed the DEA and they they put up trucks across the southern border between Mexico and the United States, probably on every little hill or a lot of them. And they had a little radar on those trucks. And they called it Operation Star Trek. And they caught lots and lots of planes coming across. Really? So I said, oops, I can't go across there. So I thought, where don't they come across? They don't come across between San Diego and Hawaii. They don't have them out there.

• 32:19Roger Reaves?

  So I started I started flying and way I'd come up and there was a place in central Baja that I have to tell you about. And I call it Juan's Goat Ranch. Twenty two minutes south southwest of Mula Hay. And it was over twenty miles to the nearest road. And it was a goat ranch where they made cheese. Twenty miles to the nearest road? To the nearest road, yes. And it was a beautiful runway. Many, many years ago, they used to haul meat out of there when somebody had a huge ranch there. And musketech treats just sick all over the place. Just beautiful. And I would land there and the

• 33:03Roger Reaves?

  doves would just fly out, just like it was in in a movie. It was so pretty. And I would land there and and this guy Juan would come up on his mule riding fast. And I'd unload the load. We put it under the muskeet trees. And he would look after it all day. And I'd fly into Mula Hay. They'd wash my plane and clean the windshield and fill it up with gas. And I'd eat barbecue or whatever was there. And I'd get a room and take a nap for a few hours. Then I'd fly back out to the goat ranch. And we'd load the plane back up. And I'd take off heavy and go out. And there's some islands 200 miles off the coast of Baja called Guadalupe.

• 33:41Roger Reaves?

  And I would go over Guadalupe Island and then I would go northwest out of there. And so when I came to the border of the United States, I was three hundred miles off the coast of San Diego.

• 33:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 33:52Roger Reaves?

  And I put it right down on the deck. So when I came in, there was a quarter inch of salt on my windshield.

• 34:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 34:01Roger Reaves?

  So, and I would, then I would fly all the way up to the Santa Barbara Islands, Santa Rosa. And I would come in late in the afternoon, just about dark, and I'd come up from a runway there and I'd pull it right up. And just fly like I'd just taken off from there and I'd go out to the desert and unload. I never, ever had a one ounce of problems, except with airplanes sometimes.

• 34:25Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing?

• 34:26Roger Reaves?

  Nothing.

• 34:27Shawn Ryan?

  How many, how many pounds of?

• 34:30Roger Reaves?

  I would carry from twenty-two to twenty-five hundred pounds at the time.

• 34:34Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty-five hundred pounds?

• 34:35Roger Reaves?

  Yeah. And then I got a DC three and I'd carry three tons.

• 34:39Shawn Ryan?

  Three tons?

• 34:40Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Shawn Ryan?

  How many pounds is three tons? Is this like six thousand something pounds?

• 34:44Roger Reaves?

  Six hundred pounds, yes.

• 34:48Shawn Ryan?

  How long does it take to unload six thousand pounds of pot?

• 34:51Roger Reaves?

  Not long. I'm telling you what, you can throw it out of there real quick.

• 34:55Shawn Ryan?

  Must be one hell of a two wheeler.

• 34:57Roger Reaves?

  Back truck back up there, we had rollers, just put it on there and just put those rollers, I bet twenty minutes it was done.

• 35:04Shawn Ryan?

  How, how did you know, did you always know who you were picking up from?

• 35:09Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, I had one guy that I was partners with.

• 35:11Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 35:12Roger Reaves?

  And I was partners, except he was stealing more than his share, but anyhow. And, and he, it was his responsibility to load it and to sell it. And I didn't have anything to do with it.

• 35:24Shawn Ryan?

  Who was, who was paying the bills? Was it Mexican cartels?

• 35:28Roger Reaves?

  See, I owe my airplane was about fifty thousand dollars.

• 35:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I meant who was paying your paycheck. Was it a Mexican cartel or was it?

• 35:36Roger Reaves?

  Well, here, it was real simple. I, he would load it. And bring it up and he had a fellow that unloaded it, that drove the truck and they took it to town. They had a guy sell it. And it was some, oh, it would just go disappear, just like zip. People be mad with you if you didn't save them some more. Like they'd come back next week, why didn't you bring me, ah, man, I wanted to, you know, this and that and the other. It was, that's how it sold and it was no problem at all.

• 36:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 36:04Roger Reaves?

  So you then uh so I I would he was always he was trying to uh build a big restaurant down in Mazatlan, he don't wanna pay me, so I'd go and had to had to go and run him down to get my share of it. I just give you fifty thousand dollars last week. I said, you didn't give me nothing. You just paid me what you owe me, man. What's my part of? And I'll tell you about that fella, that's the most unusual thing in the world. I hired a pilot to fly for me. And him and that pilot got together and decided to cut me out. Hmm.

• 36:42Roger Reaves?

  So he had a fellow work work for him named Peter, and I've never been talked to so ugly in my life. You said on your pile of puff ass in Santa Barbara, you had to deal. Well, he owed me about three hundred thousand dollars, and they had my DC three. And and no, no, you you you had to deal. We got your pilot, we got your plane, and we got your contact, and bye bye, don't come down here, we'll dust you for a nickel. Really? Well, I hate to say this, cause I'm not a violent man, and I never went to shoot nobody in my life, but that was just a little bit too much to swallow. So I had an old leather suitcase, and I had a nine mm nine millimeter Brown and High Power and a thirty eight big Smith.

• 37:27Roger Reaves?

  I put them both in there, and I took off to the airport in Los Angeles. Well, I got to the airport, and there was no flights to Mazatlan that night. So I had to go to Houston, I believe it was, and change planes. And when I got there, there was a terrible thunderstorm. That plane, I mean, the wings almost touched the ground, scraped the runway, and bounced down that runway, and finally got stopped, and it just flooded all night long. And I went down, and my suitcase didn't come. So I went down there two or three times a night, see if it had come in, it didn't come in. So the next morning, I knew I was gonna have to go buy a new suitcase and new guns and start over again. So I called down there to tell them, just hold your horses, I'm on my way.

• 38:11Roger Reaves?

  So I called down there, and that Peter answered, oh, Roger, oh, Roger, somebody shot and killed Mark last night.

• 38:21Roger Reaves?

  God had somebody kill him in my place. No way. Surely did. Interesting. The only time I ever picked up arms for anybody.

• 38:33Roger Reaves?

  Damn. Interesting. Any idea who did it? Yeah, we know exactly who did it. The guy that we bought marijuana from was a guy named Roberta. He was the nicest man you could imagine. He was just a farmer that put it together, him and his brothers. And we could get it from them and he'd give a lot of credit. He didn't care. And he had a bunch of ranches out. And so this Mark was building the elephant bar and grill. He needed a couple of million dollars. So he was slow on paying him. He's slow on paying me and he was doing what his thing was. I kinda understood it. I wasn't mad with Mark. But, uh, so I guess Roberta was drinking that Saturday night and he sent three of his cowboys in.

• 39:15Roger Reaves?

  And when Mark closed up his place, he went across the street there, the way I understand it. And the cowboy says, hey, the boss wants to see you. Nah, my boss, ay, ay, ay, ay. So one of them pulled a pistol out and says, the boss wants to see you. And Mark was a tough guy. He just reached and took the guy's pistol away from him and shot him.

• 39:36Roger Reaves?

  And the other boys jumped on him and took the pistol and shot and killed Mark. Right there. Oh, they did. Right, right there in the street. So that's how that happened. It was just so, nobody wanted to hurt anybody. I mean, it was just like, Roberta still didn't want to kill nobody. I was taking off of my airplane one time and the federalist came and they shot Roberta down. And he spent five years in Cuyahcon, kept his mouth shut. Wow. And I just, I was just taking off. What's there about that? That was all it was to it. That's it? That's it. Loaded up and I was there and they just swarmed in on him while he was leaving. Is that when you got shot down? No, I got shot down another time. I'll tell you about that. That was, that was lively.

• 40:22Roger Reaves?

  That was in Mexico? Yes. Same time period? Uh, a little bit before this. It's back when I had the two oh seven, the long, the big signal engine plane.

• 40:33Roger Reaves?

  There was a little village, a starving village, starving donkeys where I'd got a contract to buy the marijuana.

• 40:41Roger Reaves?

  And had a ugly little hair-lipped man came walking. That said he had the Federalis paid off. He had nobody paid off. So I, I'd land there on that little village. I had about an eight or nine hundred foot runway in a, in a oxbo of a river. And the river wasn't as deep as, knee-deep. But it was just beautiful. Cactus out there. And even all the fences were made with cactus, so a goat couldn't even get through. And I'd land there on that little sand bed on the bend of the river. And just up there was a waterfall. It was pretty. Well, not high, but as high as this ceiling here. Just enough to just be picturesque. And I'd, but I couldn't take off with a load.

• 41:24Roger Reaves?

  And Mari would get all kind of toys and, and goodies and candies and red apples. What the children like. I saw how starving they was. They, they had nothing. I mean, they were just poverty. And I'd bring that airplane down, loaded with this goodies and these candies and little toys. And give it to those children. And I noticed every week there was more and more children. They was hearing about that American Santa Claus coming. So I think that might have been my undoing. So I remember I did twelve loads in a row. And on that thirteen, I had that little thing going off in the ding of your stomach. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Don't do it, don't do it.

• 42:07Roger Reaves?

  And I landed and so I, I, the children were there by, by the gobs. So I landed about halfway down the strip. And I went by the starving donkeys and up the road to the place. And I asked this walking, do you have the Federalis paid off? Oh, yes, they're completely paid off. So I spent the night in the hammock in this barn-like structure and the donkeys braying and the roosters crowing. And the next morning, just at daylight, just before daylight, they'd wake me up and we'd walk down to my airplane, which was a quarter of a mile, I reckon. And I'd brush my teeth in that river. And they had a young fellow, Pedro, that he didn't probably weigh a hundred and twenty pounds. And he'd get in the plane with me.

• 42:51Roger Reaves?

  We'd, we'd fuel up the night before I'd take fuel with me. And then he would show me where they have a roadblock. So he'd take off and I'd take off of that empty airplane and I'd go twenty, thirty miles or maybe. They would block a road when he had a two-ton truck and he'd come out with all the guns on it. They'd block the road and then you'd see about a mile up there, another big truck had come across and blocked it. And the road would be clear and I'd land between them and they'd come up with a truck and put the marijuana in the airplane and I'd shake hands with all of them. And I'd get in the truck and take off over the other one.

• 43:24Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so you were landed in the highway?

• 43:25Roger Reaves?

  I landed in the highways. Cause that was the only place down there that was a runway long enough to take over the load like that.

• 43:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Roger Reaves?

  We didn't have any place that you could take off, so I'd always on the highway. And sometimes they wouldn't be six inches from the wheels on that side to the, to the little berms. I had to keep it right dead center. And so that morning when we got in the plane to, I was gonna taxi back to the end to start.

• 43:52Roger Reaves?

  I thought a wheel blew out, they kinda stick out there and I'm looking and Pedro was yelling, "Policier, policier, Roger, policier." And it dawned on me, uh-oh, I don't want none of this. So I just pushed it to the firewall and I only had a four, five hundred feet in front of me. And I went tearing off down that dusty, sandy place. And when I got to the end of it, I pulled up real strong and just hoping it would fly off, I had to. And it took off and it was just hanging on a stall on its nose. And they riddled that airplane with machine guns. I mean, there was eighty bullet holes in there. One took the top of my head, creased it, took my kneecap off, took the end of my toe off.

• 44:34Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, you got shot?

• 44:35Roger Reaves?

  I got shot three times.

• 44:36Shawn Ryan?

  Three times?

• 44:37Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, and Pedro, I didn't see it at the time, I tell you, but anyway, the airspeed indicator just went away. That's what I was looking at to see where I was and the instrument I was watching at the time, it just disappeared. And the bullets went up above me, over my head, they was all over, I don't know how I didn't die. And they shredded up the top and the wings were high and the gasoline from that left wing was just pouring in on me like just pouring it out of a bucket. It was all over me. And somehow or another, it scared me so bad until time almost stopped. Things turned yellow. The only time in my life I was, that's crisis. I thought I was fixing to burst into flames any second. Yeah. Those bullets was hitting so hard, it was like a hailstorm.

• 45:22Roger Reaves?

  And it was over just like that. Could you see him down there shooting at you? I didn't see them, see them shooting them because it was, I went through them. Now, I'm, I'm up at end and I looked ahead of me and the river is maybe eighteen inches deep or so. And it looks like it's huge turtles on the river. Those rocks had made shapes, you know how diamonds and other stuff make. They're just laying there in that river like that. And I pulled that power and I cut the electricity off so that there wouldn't be any sparks hopefully till I could get down there. I knew I was fixing to die. And I hit, bam, I hit hard and the wings came off. And then it bounced again. And when it bounced the next time, the whole firewall under came under the airplane and I'm sitting in the middle of the river and I'm not, I guess unconscious.

• 46:07Roger Reaves?

  Because Pedro's hitting me in the ribs. Come on Roger, come on Roger. Well, I undone my seatbelt and stepped out. And now there's four federales running down the runway and they quite a ways from me and they still shooting. They shit the plane twice while we start. Well, it just happened to so that I had that nine millimeter taped to the top of the radio. So I'd have it in case of crashing in the jungle or whatever. Well, I just reached now, it's just there in the holster, in the most conspicuous place. And I popped a few black down the runway. And they ran into, they ran into rocks. I didn't see the federales no more. When the rabbit got the gun, the farmer he run. Oh my gosh.

• 46:51Roger Reaves?

  So we still go off down the singing and I looked and Pedro's footage ruined. It came under his, it, one of them AK forty sevens came in his ankle and blew it out the other side. It wasn't even bleeding. It was just white.

• 47:06Roger Reaves?

  So, my goodness gracious, so I, I want to go, he said, "No, no, we've got to go up the hill." "Federal is a go down here, the easy place, let's go up." So we went up and got into a path of cactus, there's big old cactus there everywhere. And there was a donkey, she must have been thirty years old with long hair. And Pedro just runs up to her, "Charlotte, Charlotte," and starts petting her. And we jump on the back of that donkey and we go for several hours, a couple hours. And we come to a place, um, a little, a little farm, a white house in a clearing. It's just like where the indigenous people will just make a place for themselves. And the trees was down and it had been burned.

• 47:47Roger Reaves?

  And a man was plowing there and he had a, uh, he had a cow and a, a little mule. And the, and the thing over the neck was sideways like this. And he had a little plow and he was plowing with them, trying to make him a living. And Pedro knew him. So then he put us in his house and his wife and his daughter were in there and, and he went for help. So, uh, we were there all day long and, and the woman got, uh, some cloth and put over our wounds. I remember on my head, and then she poured diesel over, all over it. She stopped it, but it did keep the flies off. Anyhow, we sat there all day long, I mean, just in a straight chair all day long. I guess I was in some kind of shock. And about dark. Were you worried about anything? I wasn't worried, I didn't.

• 48:32Roger Reaves?

  You weren't worried about getting caught? Well, I, I, there was a hunting rifle on that wall and I wanted to go back over there and take care of business, to tell you the truth, but I must have been out of my mind. Uh, but somebody shooting me, I ain't particular in, uh, in favor of them. But, uh, so late in the afternoon, a bunch of horses and mules come walking fast up into that yard. I'd have been twenty of them, they was help come. And there was a young man there, he spoke English, Dr. Benjamin Soso. He's a Red Cross doctor from twenty, thirty miles away. And he came in there and boy, he, he gave us tetanus shots and give me a big shot of morphine and same thing for Pedro and that, that eased things up right quick.

• 49:13Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, he worked, there's a, there's a slug in my foot, back in the ankle bone. He, he looked for that for a while, I think he did more damage looking than the slug did. But, uh, he says, "You got to get to, you got to get to hospital. And Pedro, you'll die if you don't get to hospital quick." And he said, they got the roads blocked all the way north. They looking for an American pilot that they thinks dead. There was so much blood, blood in that airplane. So he said, you got to go south. He knew you were a pilot? Yeah, he knew I was, of course. And he come for the help. He got the story. So and he said, it's all over. He said, so there's roadblocks everywhere. So there's three, there's a platoon of soldiers in here looking for you.

• 49:54Roger Reaves?

  So we, I got on a horse, a mule, I don't know. And we rode a long way. And we came to a road, a dirt road, and there was a big ten wheeler truck and it was loaded full of corn, corn in the shuck. And they dug holes on one side for me and that corn. I got down in it. And they, on the other side, they dug one for Pedro. And these people sitting all over the truck and their serapis and their big sombreros. And that truck, that road, that, that road was rough. And every time that truck would roll, that corn roll over my face and they dig me back out. We must have rode twenty miles. And we came to the highway and we run through three roadblocks. Soldiers all over it. Nobody said a word. So we came to the road.

• 50:36Roger Reaves?

  They took me in a house and stripped me off and got me some, I remember the pan had a little chip in it. I must have changed water twenty times to get the blood and the crud off of me from all day and all that stuff. And finally it got clean. They put, got me some clothes and put on me. And so they needed a taxi to take me to Guadalajara. I don't know how much, how long it is, but it took all night. So the long way. So they had to go to Mazatlan to find a taxi. And so finally they had to find, hard to find one that would go that far with something like this. So finally they come up with a brand new car. And they made a bed in the backseat for me and laid me up there and that doctor give me, they give me those pills. And I was, I was buzzing.

• 51:19Roger Reaves?

  So the, the man was a dwarf. What kind of pills? What did they give you? I guess something morphine or something to keep the pain down there. I was shot. I was, I was hurting. And one was in, in the, in the middle of my foot lodged in there. It was, it was rough. It was rough. Right in, right in the joint of the ankle bone. So I, I got in the backseat and I lay down in there and he started off to Guadalajara. And he was a small man, dwarf. And he talked all night. And I'd like to tell you what he said. I said, uh, I said, do you have a family? He said, oh, I have a lovely family. Let me tell you about my beautiful wife, Dora, and how I got her.

• 52:02Roger Reaves?

  He said, I was in the village and, you know, look at me, no girl would even look at me. But I had my eye on this girl across the way. And one day, she's playing the flute in the back of the band, and she comes by, and I go out and I grab her, and I pull her in the gate, and my mother helps me pull her in the house. And I tell her I love her. But she sits straight in that chair all night and won't even look at us. So, señor, the next morning, what could I do? I have to send her home. So, I sent her home, and I follow her at a distance. And she knocks on her father's door, her door, and her father, get away from here, you prostitute.

• 52:42Roger Reaves?

  You spent the night with some man, you're no daughter of mine, get away from that door. So, Dora left with her hair, head hanging low. And I went up and said, Dora, let's go talk to the padre. And, señor, that's how I got my beautiful wife, Dora. He said, and you won't believe it, but one year later, we have a beautiful boy. And I was driving a new Ford, so we named him Ford.

• 53:12Roger Reaves?

  And, señor, the next year, we have another boy. And that year, I just bought me a new Dodge, so we named him Dodge.

• 53:23Roger Reaves?

  And, señor, I know you're not gonna believe it, but the third year,

• 53:28Roger Reaves?

  we had another boy, and I had just bought a new Chevrolet. And that priest wouldn't name him Chevrolet. I had to teach that son of a bitch to drive before we'd name him Chevrolet. And that's how I got my three boys, Ford, Dodge, and Chevrolet. Oh, my gosh. So, you see some of the tales I had, and they're all true. Yeah. They're just unbelievable.

• 53:52Shawn Ryan?

  You also went to prison in Mexico?

• 53:55Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 53:56Shawn Ryan?

  Is that around this time?

• 53:58Roger Reaves?

  Yes, it was right during that time, right after that time. I, uh, I'd paid seventeen thousand dollars to Waukegan for that load that I didn't get. So, I went back down to get my load and I had a, a fella, an older guy, that I said, bring me an airplane and we'll go partners. He had, he had, he had an airplane. I said, now, here's five thousand dollars. You land at the, the, the strip just south of, um, Hermosillo is a huge cattle feed lot and you give them five thousand dollars both ways and they'll give you all the gasoline you want.

• 54:34Roger Reaves?

  He wasn't paying attention.

• 54:37Roger Reaves?

  He landed the international and tried to give him five thousand dollars.

• 54:41Shawn Ryan?

  He did what?

• 54:44Shawn Ryan?

  Can you repeat that?

• 54:46Roger Reaves?

  So, I'm, I'm at a, a real nice five-star hotel and, uh, a gentleman, I was, I was, had a phony name Ardell and he, really nice-looking gentleman, you'd never dreamed it. And he said, are you Mr. Ardell, sir? I was in the swimming pool. I said, yes, sir. He shook hands with me and put handcuffs on.

• 55:06Roger Reaves?

  And he took me to jail. They all came over and took me to jail. I went, went up and got some clothes. And they took me in there, of course, they, they took my clothes and my suitcase. I had three hundred dollars in my wallet and the guy took a blackjack and took that from me when I went in, so I didn't have nothing. So, I stayed there about, about three days in a, in a cage and sometimes it's eighteen people in that little, little room and, no, it's filthy. And, uh, then they took me back to the back and started a torture deal.

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  What'd they start with?

• 55:35Roger Reaves?

  They, they, if they want you to confess, they, they don't wait around for the court. They make you confess. So, and then, then when you confess, you get to ju- go before the judge and he'll give you two, three, four, five, six years. If you don't, they can keep you up to four years.

• 55:51Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 55:52Roger Reaves?

  Major crimes, they call it, you know. So, uh, I, uh, first off, I went back there and they, they just put me in a cell about six foot square and fourteen feet high and it was really hot. I mean, hot. Over a hundred degrees there at that time.

• 56:09Roger Reaves?

  So I heard the torture and the carrying on, the begging and the crying and stuff out right in front of me. They do that to soften you up so they don't have to work so hard on you. So then, then they come got me and uh, they, they keep you naked. They put you in there naked. They supposed to take, take away your Dignity. Grip. Yeah. But uh, so they, they took me out and wanted me to sign it and, and they, they started off on the bottom of my feet with black shacks and rubber hose and they beat me yellow. So I wouldn't about what about to sign that thing with a beating. So uh, they got a, a tub of water and they had some kind of, I guess that was the first water board that they ever did. And they had some kind of seltzer in that water. I mean, if you go whiff of

• 56:51Roger Reaves?

  it, it took the top of your head off. Your eyes, tongue and your nose and ears. I guarantee you, three of them couldn't hold you down. So I found out just before that happened, you, you screamed and you carry on just like that and get a good whiff of air. That didn't work.

• 57:09Roger Reaves?

  So uh, they, they, they came after a while and, and uh, took me out naked and, and they put chains on me with a little click, click, click. Then they pull me apart and they put butter or something on my backside and they just packed me full of hot chili pepper, ground up. And they just, they showed it to you and just with their thumb, just poke, poke my colon full of it. I mean, that was some kind of terrible. It's, it's, it's common. They do it. Yeah. So anyway, I begged and cussed and carried on till finally they washed it out, but I didn't do it. And then they came and uh, I don't know if it was that day or the next, but they hung a dead man in a cell with me and he was frozen. And he was wrapped in uh, wrapped in newspaper strips of it like a mummy from his feet all the way to his

• 57:54Roger Reaves?

  head. And uh, they put him on a meat hook onto a bolt on the side of the wall and hung him there. Say you next, son of a bitch, you next. And all right, dead man in a cell with me. Okay, but so, but then he started to thaw out. It was so hot. The first thing he thawed out was looked like his eyes and the paper rust started unrund. He was a black man and it started running down his face. The tears looked like from the formaldehyde running out of him. Oh, man. And then stuff started unwrapping off of his private parts and it looked like he was peeing on the floor. And it puddled down there. Oh, what an awful smell. And then as he opened up, you could see that the hook was on his ribs here and it pulled it apart.

• 58:39Roger Reaves?

  You could see his liver good and clear.

• 58:43Roger Reaves?

  So. How long is all this? Pardon? How, how many hours is this all? I don't know. Days? No, just. One day? One day, yes. Okay. But I, there was a little hole. It wasn't even a, maybe a quarter inch under the door. That thing was filthy. There was blood spatters, crap all over the floor. It was a filthy place. I laid down in there naked on, under there and I put my lip just as far as I could under that door, trying to breathe. And I had the, the darnedest dreams you've ever seen or hallucinations. I was sleeping completely. And I had, I remember pink flying pigs. They were really pink with big wings. And they were just flying around. And whenever I came to, I didn't know which was real and which was the, uh,

• 59:24Roger Reaves?

  whi- which was a hallucination or the, because, and so, but I, I didn't really come to. They took me to the hospital and I woke up then, I had an oxygen mask over me. You woke up in the hospital? Yeah, in the infirmary. And there was a, a doctor there and he was concerned that they had gone too far, that I was gonna die from that formaldehyde fixture. So they took me then and put me into general population. And I stayed out there for a while until my wife came down and paid the bribe and I got out, went out the back door.

• 59:55Roger Reaves?

  What did your wife think about all this? I don't know. Did you ever ask her? She was glad, she was glad I got home. Dog bet. Was she upset? Not particularly. She just, I did it so many times and I think that she just had such faith in me that she just thought, surely he can do it. I, I, I think it was and she just never took it so, and it was marijuana at that time and it wasn't, wasn't any big deal in the United States. And I was, everywhere we went, I was a hero. Did you tell her everything that happened to you when they were torturing you? She, she, she made sandwiches for me and I get love notes, you know, I'd be eating one of them and there was a little love note in that thing. So she thought, what's going on? I didn't tell her what, exactly what I was doing. I mean, yeah, she knew what I was doing, but Yeah.

• 1:00:38Roger Reaves?

  I didn't have, I didn't let her get close to it, nothing, not even know so she, not guilty in any way. Okay. But, uh, mo- there was, there was about half the people in California voted for the referendum to legalize that stuff way back there in early seventies. So there was, there was nobody mad at me, not, not in my side of the fence anyway. Yeah.

• 1:01:00Shawn Ryan?

  Did your wife want you to keep making these trips?

• 1:01:07Roger Reaves?

  No, she didn't want to. She wanted me to quit, but I had such real estate deals going. I just had to keep supporting.

• 1:01:15Roger Reaves?

  I was gonna make a billion dollars.

• 1:01:17Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:01:17Roger Reaves?

  I went and bought Marino Valley, every foot of that land out there. Got an option of 6,000 acres. Now I wanted to see if I could help that.

• 1:01:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:27Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Shawn Ryan?

  So you said you did hundreds of loads, right?

• 1:01:33Roger Reaves?

  About a hundred loads of marijuana.

• 1:01:34Shawn Ryan?

  A hundred loads of marijuana. Was it always for the same entities? Was it always for the same?

• 1:01:41Roger Reaves?

  It was always for me, but I mean, I had different people load me and sell it.

• 1:01:47Shawn Ryan?

  So how does that, how does it work?

• 1:01:49Roger Reaves?

  Okay, I figured that I had an airplane worth 50, 60,000 dollars at the time. That was what the load cost down there. And I'd say, all right, Bill or Bob, you load me. We, I got, we're both risking the same amount.

• 1:02:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:04Roger Reaves?

  You load me and then we'll sell it and we'll take the price of the pot out of it and we'll split what's left over. But I do not want to sell it. I don't want to come down here and I don't mind being in the jungle and loading it. But if you come and you get a load and you come back for it, it's not the same stuff. You need to stay there.

• 1:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:22Roger Reaves?

  So it's better to have a partner in this.

• 1:02:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:25Roger Reaves?

  So that's what I did and it didn't matter. And so that's how I got away with it a long time because I didn't touch it. I'd come back on a dry lake in the desert, throw that stuff out real quick. And I'd wait till the truck leaves and he gets away and then I'd take off and go back to town.

• 1:02:43Shawn Ryan?

  Did your name get spread around everywhere?

• 1:02:45Roger Reaves?

  Not really. There was a DEA agent that followed me for years. He had really nice things to say about me. He never told any lies. He just, he had a stack of papers 16 feet high when I went to court. It was 16 bucks or something. He had me all over the world in different airplanes.

• 1:03:04Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:03:07Shawn Ryan?

  What would a phone call be? Was it a phone call? What was it back then? How did you know, all right, load's ready to be picked up?

• 1:03:17Roger Reaves?

  I don't even remember. We didn't talk much on telephone, I know that. How were you communicating? We'd come see each other and talk and just go down there and it must have been a phone call or somewhere or another. It was all, it was face to face too? You know, we'd say something and I'd know it was ready. Okay. I, I knew it'd be ready anyhow, but, and uh, sometime the weather would stop me. I didn't want to go if it was bad weather. I didn't want to fly through thunderstorms. Did they know when you were arriving or they just? Yeah, and I would, you could set my clock by me. If I said I was gonna be there six o'clock, I would be with there within ten seconds. I'd put my wheels down. I'd adjust it just out there, just, I, I enjoyed being on time. Roger that. So then what happened?

• 1:04:00Roger Reaves?

  I uh, I got in trouble in Mexico. I uh, I was in a

• 1:04:09Roger Reaves?

  it woke up, knocked on the door one morning and big red faced waiter, I'd, I'd ordered breakfast down, Waver's Ranchero and some coffee and uh, bam bam bam on the door and I went there in my blue jeans and big red faced waiter, "Wainas Diaz." And he put that thing down and put the forty-five right between my eyes and says, "Federal Police of Mexico, you're under arrest."

• 1:04:34Roger Reaves?

  Then he went to looking through my stuff and I got me a coke hole out of the bar. I started knocking him in the head and then run. But I was on the sixth floor and I didn't know how many was out that door. So I said, "Oops, I better go." So they took, he put a gun in my ribs and went down the elevator and put me in a car and there was one behind and one in front. And they went through town. I thought he was gonna put me into prison where I'd been sometime earlier, a year or two earlier. So they went on out and uh, went across a railroad track and went down a rough road and they stopped right in the middle of about a acre of dead animals. And all kind of decomposition. And that's where the, these trucks that pick up the dead burrows and cows on the highway and bring them there.

• 1:05:16Roger Reaves?

  And they just a stinking place. I mean, blue flies everywhere. But this was just in daylight. Well, he got out and says uh,

• 1:05:27Roger Reaves?

  Donde est tu, avions? Where are your airplanes? And I says, I don't speak Spanish. And boy, he's a great big red-faced fellow. He hit me upside the head with his flat, knocked me plum off my feet. My, uh, Spanish rather improved.

• 1:05:43Roger Reaves?

  So, uh, he grabbed me by my hair and slapped me around, busted my nose. And, uh, they want me to sign this confession. They say they're there with a, uh, a joint group from Mexico City of American DEA, and they have orders to stop me, that I have two airplanes and a yacht that I'm hauling marijuana with. Of course, I tell them I don't know what they're talking about. And they continue. I mean, they, uh, put me down in a rat just in that car. And I don't know how he stood it. And I remember he had a white shirt and he had a big old gold chain and he had a, uh, a sailfish with a big red eye on it that just dangled in front of my eyes as he's doing his work on me.

• 1:06:30Roger Reaves?

  So then they, they bring out a cattle prod and they burn me up with that thing. I mean, they eat me alive and they start just about my knees and they stop about my waist. And they come and put a cigar out on my, my neck. Well, I'm not too happy with those fellows.

• 1:06:47Shawn Ryan?

  I can imagine.

• 1:06:49Roger Reaves?

  So the, the, uh, it, the cattle prod gets, runs out of electricity and got about that many batteries in it, some bull prod. I mean, it burns. It just, and there's red rocks everywhere. I mean, these big old rocks and clay around. And I guess once a year, the bulldozer just comes and pushes all that car off into a big pile. And you can see it's about that high dirt and all bones sticking out of it and cow hides. And, uh, gourds were growing thick. And then beyond that was the jungle. And those three cars was parked up there a little bit.

• 1:07:26Roger Reaves?

  So, uh, he keeps, every once in a while, grab me by my hair and tell, puts that paper under me to sign, it'll all be over. Well, I done been through that and that other deal. So, uh, I fooled around there and he had my hands tied with my belt. And now I'm all sweaty and slobbery and sticky and bloody and, and I get my hand loose. It pulls some skin off of one hand. Now I got a hand loose, but I can't let him see it. And I fooled around there and I got a rock loose under my, I'm down with my feet this way and this way the whole way. They got me, and got my shirt pulled up and it's all bloody. And, uh, I get that rock in my hand. And so, the other ones go back to get the, some batteries.

• 1:08:10Roger Reaves?

  And I say, "I'll sign, I'll sign." And he been a what? And I came up with that rock load and I hit him in the head with it. And I ran out of my shoes trying to get, get away. And they started shooting at me. There was about eight of them. And they emptied their guns at me. I wasn't a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet away. And it was dry ground. They were just gunning and they opened up with a, and just as I went across that, those, dove across that pile of dirt, a little machine gun pistol or a MAC-10 or something opened up and it was just tearing it up all over me. And a vine caught me across that nose and it's still a cave. It crushed my nose in right there. And I caught that nut and, and when I went, my feet kept going.

• 1:08:55Roger Reaves?

  And I went and hit the ground hard. Whoop!

• 1:09:00Roger Reaves?

  And I went, "Oh, oh." I went to screaming like a dog that been shot. And all shooting stopped. And I run through that jungle and got away. You got away? I got away. So, uh, there was something about I killed that man in Mexico, but I know I didn't. I didn't kill him, of course I did. They extradited me back down there all sorts of stuff, but the DEA said that and just make, make things work for me. So I thought it's best I not to go back to Mexico.

• 1:09:28Shawn Ryan?

  Probably a good idea.

• 1:09:29Roger Reaves?

  So I, I didn't go back.

• 1:09:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you had mentioned you also had a yacht.

• 1:09:35Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 1:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know, I thought the yacht didn't come into play until later on. So you were doing, you were smuggling marijuana in both planes and yachts at this time? Let's, let's, let's talk about the yacht.

• 1:09:50Roger Reaves?

  Oh, it was just too slow and too dangerous. I get away with an airplane. I didn't like that yacht stuff. So I, uh, um, probably after that time, I went to Pakistan. And I, I, I bought a eighty foot shrimper. I didn't know the difference.

• 1:10:08Shawn Ryan?

  You went all the way to Pakistan to buy a boat?

• 1:10:09Roger Reaves?

  Around the world.

• 1:10:12Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, it was like a bulldozer going around the world. I, I should have bought a fishing boat like some tuna boat. It'd have burnt about one tenth of the fuel. I didn't know. Here's a brand new, beautiful boat that's been seized by the, uh, bank. And I can get it just for a little bit of payments. It took more fuel. I could, oh my goodness, if I'd have just known.

• 1:10:32Shawn Ryan?

  How did you find a boat in Pakistan? I mean, there was no internet back then.

• 1:10:37Roger Reaves?

  But I was, I, uh, I went to New Orleans. I decided to quit the, uh, probably after the Mexican deal. I went down there, started one of the first hydro blasting business in the world. I, uh, went to shell, went, went down there, bought a Wheatley pump that pumps up, uh, pipelines. And I put the, got the right hoses and stuff and I would go in those ships and spray them down and clean the inside of them. And, uh, I, so I got a contract to clean the Russian grain ships that was coming into America. They had been, they had been loading ships with dirty grain that had oil and fertilizer in it. And the United States had to pay the Eastern Bloc seven billion dollars and they just stopped.

• 1:11:20Roger Reaves?

  I think they was ships backed up from here to the mouth of the Mississippi. And I threw my hat in the pot and I went to clean the ships. So anyway, I didn't like that business. It was just, it was all right. It was a million dollars per ship to clean them. But you couldn't make much money by the, people just wouldn't work. Just, they just wouldn't. It was union and they had more than crawled off of the ship than got on. It's just about it. So, uh, I, uh, there was a fellow there and he had, he had a boat that had been seized by the, uh, the bank. Blackamobile, a brand new, beautiful shrimper. Needed sixty thousand dollars to get it out of hawk. I got it out of Hawken, went to Pakistan. And I got three and a half tons of hashish.

• 1:12:03Roger Reaves?

  And went on around through Singapore and through the straits there with Japan and anyhow.

• 1:12:09Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on. How did you make a connection that, did you just say three and a half tons?

• 1:12:16Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 1:12:17Shawn Ryan?

  How did you make a connection in Pakistan? From the US that had three and a half tons of hashish?

• 1:12:23Roger Reaves?

  I flew over there and we rode camels around. Met a guy named Diesel that was a taxi driver that knew the guy to meet the guy. And so I went over there and did that. What a terrible place. That's the only place in the world I never didn't like. I didn't like Pakistan.

• 1:12:38Shawn Ryan?

  I don't blame you. So. I'm not a big fan either.

• 1:12:40Roger Reaves?

  No, I didn't like that place. So anyway, we came back there and got the hashish and then went on around through by Singapore and went on through the straits Magellan. It ran on through and came back and unloaded in British Columbia. And I bought a float plane out of Hood, Alaska, out of Anchorage and cut it out of the ice with some blow torches and took off across the ice and went down there. And I flew that into Washington State. It took me load after load in that snotty weather. In a Cessna two oh six hauling seven hundred pounds at the time.

• 1:13:14Shawn Ryan?

  How many? Okay. Where else did you smuggle marijuana into other than the US and British Columbia?

• 1:13:23Roger Reaves?

  Well, I did a twenty ton load out of Thailand twice, a ten, and then I went back to Pakistan, did a ten ton load. And then I went after I was, later on, you're gonna see that I was in some trouble and I was on the lam and on the DEA's ten most wanted list. And I hauled a hashish in out of Morocco into England.

• 1:13:45Shawn Ryan?

  How are you making, that this is, how are you making all these connections?

• 1:13:49Roger Reaves?

  I met this gentleman. The worst contact I ever met in my life was the famous Howard Marks that wrote the book Mister Nice. You ever hear of him?

• 1:13:58Shawn Ryan?

  I have.

• 1:13:59Roger Reaves?

  Well, he hired me to do all these things and he turned me in so he wouldn't have to pay me.

• 1:14:07Roger Reaves?

  He was the biggest mistake of my life. Really? Really, for sure. Just one thing after the other. So he was the gatekeeper? He's the one that had all these connections in all these different countries? Right, uh huh. And put it all together? Yes. How much did he owe you? I don't know, just everything that you did. Oh, on that last one was two million dollars. But on another load, he put another load with a DEA agent behind us and

• 1:14:35Roger Reaves?

  and the unloaders were supposed to pay us thirty million dollars and they never paid us. Because they said, "You broke the heat on us." Well, we didn't bring the heat on. He broke the heat on us by putting somebody else behind us with the same unloaders. Damn. So, he was just, he was just, he was just bad news. Just everything you touched. Did you, did you like him before you figured out what was happening? I, uh, I liked Howard. I, I, of course, he, he just knew a lot. He, he was a educated person. But he would, I, I don't know it, and I liked him. It was just like, okay, here's somebody, hey, this is somebody that knows you can, can work with. And, uh,

• 1:15:18Roger Reaves?

  on the, of the two million dollars that he owed me, uh, I had carried the, uh, the load from three and a half, three and a half tons from Morocco to England. And it sold. And everything was, and I, I went to England to pick up the money. And, uh, Howard gave me the passport. A British passport, because I'm a British woman, because I've been, had a Brazilian one. I'm kind of a little strange with a Brazilian one, so, uh, he gave me a good English one. So when I got to England, and now I got to Holland to pick up my money, a Dutchman, a tall man, young fella, he just, "Is this your passport?" "Sir?" "Yes." And he just put, get closing, and came around and grabbed me by my arm really hard.

• 1:16:03Roger Reaves?

  "Come with me." Well, I knew the game was up because I'm wanted in the United States too and where else? I didn't know what he's after, but bam bam bam bam. So he put me in a little room and there's uh three or four more agents and he stuck his, stuck my passport under a belief and they started guys in there with the turbans and I opened that door and I ran through that crowd like crazy. I knocked people sideways and stuff off and I went into a room and I looked and I'd bought some books and I still had the books and I threw them on the floor and there was a little window and I crawled through that and there was a wide car a long way and I ran like crazy down that car and nobody in. At the end, there was a big elevator door and it said, you know, forbidden to enter

• 1:16:46Roger Reaves?

  and I pushed it and it opened up and I pushed it down and it went down and there was hanging there a K L M cap and jacket from a captain. Boy, I put that on right quick and I walked out on the time rack and there was a, a crew coming by, about twenty people from a seven forty seven and all of them, they walking along and I, alright, I got right in behind them and we got way down there to the gate and all of them are holding up their badges and there's two police or two guards and I hope that won't work. And I turned around and went back and I got back, I said, they are gonna be looking. They got my passport picture right there, they know who I am. I got to do something quick. So right before I got back to that terminal park, there was a full lane highway that goes

• 1:17:31Roger Reaves?

  under the runway, the, under the airport, uh, skip hole in Holland. So I just, there was a high, high chain link fence there with a, a big barbed wires on the top of it. So I just, I just crawled up that thing and grabbed that barbed wire and pull up and get over on it and I jumped down into the roses on the other side. I screamed bloody murder. I mean, they were there for something, they weren't roses. There was a hedge that, that high with spines that long, they just eat my legs alive, just that, I mean, just tore my clothes up. It was, you couldn't move. So I took that K L M jacket off and I, I started stomping and here comes a blue van

• 1:18:13Roger Reaves?

  with the Dutch police and they were right there and the young fellows with their pistols in the air, halt, halt, halt. And I'm stomping and I had to get ten or twelve feet through that scrubbing. I mean, the big stop thing, it was hard. I mean, you just, I don't care who you are, you couldn't go through it. And so when I came to the, to the highway, it cars was just zipping in like a freeway in and out. So I ran between those cars and I had to slow down on the other side because there's four policemen there. I remember the one woman had a lot of cleavage and a cross between her, she had to twist. You just see things like that when you just, and I just walked calmly by them and went back into the terminal where it looked like five hundred people waiting for their loved ones to get. And I mingled with that crowd and then I got on the, a little escalator that went down.

• 1:18:58Roger Reaves?

  It says Nardi trains, two of the trains. And I said, there's one to Amsterdam and there's one to Rotterdam. They looking for me, I'm going to get on one to Rotterdam. So I went, I went back several cars, there was nobody there was waiting. And I went into a bathroom and took that coat off, oh, I took that coat off. I probably had, I shoved it in the thing. And I mean, I went to pulling thorns out of me and I sat down on the toilet and I just closed that door and went and I said, my feelings exactly.

• 1:19:28Roger Reaves?

  Oh, man. So I went to where I was supposed to go, to the train station and of course, nobody showed up. So Howard comes to Murray, says, oh my, my, what happened? That passport, oh, it was nothing to do with that. I got the two million dollars for Roger, tell him to come see me. So I went back to, I disguised myself and went on the ferry back to Mallorca, Spain and to meet him. And I go to one place and, uh, we go to breakfast and he said, do you have the plate? Still have the Andorra plates on your car? And I said, yes. He said, well, they're looking for them really hard in Holland here, in Spain here. So he said, but I'll get you the money later today. So I went back to my car and there's four policemen there with a gun, boom.

• 1:20:13Roger Reaves?

  Take your keys out of the car when I went to open it and put your hands on the car. And I turned around and looked and they was all old men. One of them was big and fat and the other two just looked like they wouldn't be. Well, the one that looked like might be something, I got him right on the nose and went over him.

• 1:20:32Roger Reaves?

  Through the crowd I went and there was tourists everywhere and they didn't last long. So I went into a hotel, jumped out the window on the other side and went across the little creek, went back into another hotel and I stayed hidden there for an hour or so behind a stage and a curtain. So I went out and there was a fellow there with kind of glassy eyes and he said, hello, hello. And then I looked, it was that fat policeman that was from the first and I had to go back through the hotel, back across the place and I went into a place that had a little workshop for wood. And they had a little three-wheel pickup truck with the little front one on the front that they have in Spain and France. And I said, I'll give you a hundred dollars to take me Magaluf.

• 1:21:14Roger Reaves?

  And so we jumped in just right then and back out and go and police cars were sliding in from everywhere. He said, I wonder what's going on. I don't know.

• 1:21:24Roger Reaves?

  So I got away from Howard that time. So he cried and begged Mari, oh Mari, I don't know what's happening. It's those Andorra plates, there's nothing to do with it. And they got a lawyer to tell Mari, tell Roger I pay him and do this. And so we had lunch with him and Mari told him we got, my son was having a little play. And I'm kind of believing, I know better, but still, I couldn't believe it was him. We've done 10-ton loads, 20-ton loads with him.

• 1:21:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Roger Reaves?

  So we go to the school and of course I'm the only father there. And here they come with their machine guns and all those children there. I just put my hands up, took my watch off and took everything I had to Mari. And they still mocked me down in front of all the people and my children couldn't go to the school anymore. And they put me in prison.

• 1:22:11Shawn Ryan?

  How long did you go to prison?

• 1:22:12Roger Reaves?

  Well, I didn't stay there very long because they took me to Cartel in Mallorca. And for the extradition, I found I was to be extradited both to Germany and to the United States. Double extradition. So they handcuffing me now, this way, everywhere I go with my hands over my back like that. So I can't get handcuffs. So that's rather painful when they leave you that way overnight somewhere. Anyway, they took me to court and they had to take and put the handcuffs in front of me. They can't have me that way. So they had four policemen now on me after I've escaped from them that many times. So we're waiting on the judge and it's high. It's the third floor.

• 1:22:55Roger Reaves?

  I heard later on it was thirty-one feet from the bottom of that window to the, to the ground. So I asked that lawyer, how, how high is it? And he said, you'll kill yourself. I said, I'm dead anyway. So I said, when two of those policemen go to smoke, I'm, I'm going out of here. He said, you're gonna kill yourself. And I said, is it higher than the palm trees? And I could see the top of a palm tree below the window. So when two of them went to smoke, I bound across that, that courtroom and jumped up on the stenographer's desk. It was like a grand piano. And she was nine months pregnant, said she almost had that baby. And I kicked that window out. It was a big window and you could hear that courtroom going.

• 1:23:40Roger Reaves?

  And I looked down and there was a station wagon on the street down there. And it was parked kind of on the curb and I bailed out on that. And I, I hit the top of it, kind of like you do when your fireman hit the bank. And it went all the way to the floorboard, all the way to the drive shaft. I already had to pay four thousand dollars for that car. I got up and got away, but they caught me down the road. Holy shit. They beat the crap out of me. You're the master at escape and evasion. Yeah, and they, they beat me up so bad and cut my chin and now you're blood all over me. And I wouldn't clean up. So then the man from the German embassy came and so when they, I stayed there a year and a half in prison. They sent me to Madrid, to the big prison. And they extradited me to Germany with my hands over my back like this.

• 1:24:25Roger Reaves?

  And I got up there and, uh, uh, because of the, the brutality of the Spanish police where they saw that blood on me. I got three days jail time for every day I was in Spain. So I didn't have to, and then I escaped from the German prison too after they put me in there. Why were you going to German prison?

• 1:24:43Roger Reaves?

  I'd never been to Germany, never made a phone call to Germany, never thought about Germany. But I bought a ship in Holland that they, that was under bank seizure. That was usually the cheapest ship you could get. And there was a really jolly feller on there. And he was from, he was a German. And I asked him, would you like to, would you haul some hashish? Where? I said, from Morocco or, or anyhow, Middle East, somewhere. Oh, yeah, how much you paying? I said, I'll give you four hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, I'll do it. So he hauled a load. And I paid him the four hundred thousand dollars. And he bought him a long BMW and a cigar and was bragging. And they found him and arrested him for having the money.

• 1:25:26Roger Reaves?

  And they said, if you'll tell us who gave you the money, you'll be home by Christmas. But they forgot to tell him which Christmas. He got seven years and no evidence whatsoever. So they extradited me out of Germany. And I got nine years in Germany for using a German citizen in an international crime.

• 1:25:48Roger Reaves?

  No evidence whatsoever. We didn't ever do anything. The hashish went to Germany, it went to England. So after one year at the maximum security prison in Lübeck, Germany, I, I escaped. Went between the bars and almost got killed and skin off my chest. And I went, went, got on, climbed on the roof where they was doing some windows changing or scaffolding and got above the guard tower. There was towers ever, everywhere, ever, every hundred feet, there were machine guns in it. And I got right up on the fourth floor and there was a machine gun nest on the second floor sticking out. And I waited until a guard was coming with his wife and a little boy and it's pouring down rain there. I am all bloody with my chest skin up.

• 1:26:32Roger Reaves?

  And I jumped right on top of that, that tower with the machine gun. And he go, hey! And I bailed over the wall and they was doing some digging on the other side. There was a pile of sand. I'd, I'd seen it. And I jumped on the side of that sand like he would his skin and, and, and broke my fall. It was fourth floor up. And so, uh, uh, uh, uh, fourth floor and then down to the tower and, and then across. And I got away and, and got to Holland. And Mari had buried a hundred thousand dollars for me there and give me two hundred dollars and it was in my shoe. And when I, when I was going, when after I got away and went to the man and his wife, he went in. Hold on, so your wife buried a hundred thousand dollars somewhere where out in Holland? Uh, uh, she's from Holland, she buried it on her cousin's farm. When?

• 1:27:18Roger Reaves?

  Oh, before I escaped because I told her I was getting out of there. No shit. And she gave me two hundred dollars in the, in the prison. And even I had that in my socks. So when, when that woman got after me, the one that took her up, I heard blam, blam, blam behind me. I'm going down a real steep hill. And I got, I'm just laughing wide open. It's a maximum security prison. You don't escape from there. So I hear blam, blam, blam, and that fool woman's up on the sidewalk knocking, parking meters over trying to kill me. And I jumped behind the car and she tears the fender off of her car and the fender off of another car. And she has like a devil face screaming at me with a little boy standing in the seats. So I jump over a fence, a wall, and it's got cut, it's got glass sticking up.

• 1:27:58Roger Reaves?

  I cut myself all up on my hands and I jump over and it's piled dirt on the other side and I bog up halfway to my knees and it's raining. And I lose my shoes and my two hundred dollars in that. Anyway, I get away and I get to Holland and then, then I dig up. Mari had told me, she says, you go to the haystack and then you turn right and you go to the linden tree and it's ten feet from that linden tree. She didn't tell me that there's twenty linden trees in that pasture. Oh shit. So we had to get rods and poke in the dirt till we found it, found it pretty quick, but it was kind of funny. So you got the money? Got the money. And then what?

• 1:28:40Roger Reaves?

  Got me some clothes and then I, I stayed there till I could get a passport. And, uh, then I went back to, uh, South America to see the Colombians. They owed me three and a half million dollars and I thought they might pay me. Hold on, how did you get a passport?

• 1:28:56Shawn Ryan?

  Are these look?

• 1:28:57Roger Reaves?

  My daughter lived in England and she went to a graveyard and she found a kid, a baby that would die at about 1943. It wasn't registered or it was registered but no deaths. So she went in and got the birth certificate. And with the birth certificate, you go and you apply for a passport and you get the doctor and you get the dentist and you get the baker and they sign that they've known you and you a good, a good character for those many years and the passport comes. That's the way it used to be. It's not that way anymore. I got a beautiful British passport.

• 1:29:31Shawn Ryan?

  Incredible. So then you flew back to?

• 1:29:34Roger Reaves?

  I flew to, I flew, I took my train, I disguised myself and went to Portugal and I flew out of Portugal to Venezuela and from Venezuela I went across the border and went on to Medellin, Colombia to see the Colombians.

• 1:29:47Shawn Ryan?

  How did you disguise yourself? Do you remember?

• 1:29:51Roger Reaves?

  I don't remember really. I did the clothes and the hat and the-

• 1:29:55Shawn Ryan?

  Clothes and the hat?

• 1:29:55Roger Reaves?

  And maybe a phony beard or something that I got. You, you can buy all kinds of little stuff that you get and sun visors and shorts and you look like a tourist.

• 1:30:05Shawn Ryan?

  So you go to Colombia and you're starting to get into cocaine?

• 1:30:08Roger Reaves?

  I backed up some of those years. I skipped some years way in the middle of it.

• 1:30:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:14Roger Reaves?

  After the, after the policeman, I hit him in the head with a rock. I started flying a few loads out of Colombia.

• 1:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Well, before we go into Colombia, let's take a little break.

• 1:30:26Roger Reaves?

  All right, let's do that.

• 1:30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 1:30:33Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:31:00Shawn Ryan?

  So I invested in some long-term emergency food.

• 1:31:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:31:52Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:32:28Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Roger, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to hit Columbia. But in the break, you told me you had a couple more stories of marijuana smuggling.

• 1:32:38Roger Reaves?

  Yes. Rather lively ones.

• 1:32:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well. We like hearing the lively ones.

• 1:32:46Roger Reaves?

  Oh, my goodness. I got to tell about my sister going down with me. A DC-3, you must have two pilots. I didn't have a pilot wanted to go with me, and I didn't have one I wanted to go with me, so. But I got a, I got a wild sister.

• 1:33:01Roger Reaves?

  And so she'd put her hair up, and she'd fly down with me, and then I'd put her out on the loads, and she'd fly back, so. But she's an alcoholic. She was then. So we landed in Houston, I believe it was, in the big old DC-3. I had two tanks inside that, I don't know, 1,000 gallons, I guess, that they held. And so. The guy's pumping it with little hose like you have at the gas station there from a truck. And I'm pumping it from the main tank back into those to the tanks inside. And he's just like, wow, how much is this thing?

• 1:33:37Roger Reaves?

  Anyhow, Kay says, I'm gonna go get some sandwiches. Well, you stay sober, Kay. Uh huh.

• 1:33:45Roger Reaves?

  See, after a few hours, we're all filled up. And it's raining and I go over and there's Kay at the bar. She's got the sandwiches, but she's got her foot up there entertaining the cowboys.

• 1:33:58Roger Reaves?

  Kay, it's time to go. So anyhow, we go get in the plane and she's sitting there just fine. I get up about eleven thousand feet. Uh, and she's, I'm cold, I'm cold. I said, well, go back and open my suitcase and put some clothes on. So anyhow, there's, there's two big tanks. I think there's five hundred gallons strapped on this side and five hundred. And these big hoses, it goes in the middle and there's a lever that I can turn it to either side of them. Well, we're out there about half, about four hundred miles south of New Orleans over the Gulf of Mexico at eleven thousand feet and pretty good rain bouncing along and both engines stopped, bam.

• 1:34:41Roger Reaves?

  Got my attention. I looked and everything looks right. And I think, what in the world? Now we're plummeting towards our death. Ain't no way we can live through a crash in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico at night in a storm. And I think that fool has turned that gas off.

• 1:34:59Roger Reaves?

  So I shine my light back there and there she is wrapped up all in my clothes, all wrapped all around her and she's got her foot on that lever. Are you kidding me? Both engines. Well, I jump out of my seat and run back there and I forgot to pull the throttles back as I run back. Like they still wide open at that altitude. And I push her out the way and turn that thing on and it goes bam and both of those engines take off and throw me all the way to the back.

• 1:35:27Roger Reaves?

  And here that thing's turning up, they just, they know, they just turn it up going up on its side and I run up to side trying to just ramble back in there to get that thing level. Anyway, that's, that was one of just, just the funny that I tell about Kay and, and my trip going down there. Are you and your sister, is she still alive? Oh, she's just wonderful. Yes, we, we. You guys are still close? Does she go down there with you a lot? No, a few times, yeah. Yeah. I remember on that trip, I was so upset that I, I'd forgotten to give the, the people the money for the load.

• 1:35:59Roger Reaves?

  It's a minor detail. That's right. They let her go in there. And she had, they put her on a plane, flew her back.

• 1:36:08Roger Reaves?

  So I, I, uh, was flying out of Columbia and, uh,

• 1:36:15Roger Reaves?

  I, I went down and, uh, had, had a fellow that, uh, wasn't telling me the truth. He told me the, he had three tons waiting at certain, certain place. So we left San Jose and he was just adamant that we go further now. We gotta go now. I said, listen fool, this thing flies a hundred and fifty miles an hour and it's nine hundred miles, it's gonna take us six hours to get there. What can't you figure out? Oh, we need to get that. I'm not gonna sit there with my plane all day long, all afternoon in the plane. But what it was, this was a staging place and he had planned to go me, go four, four hundred miles further. And he had all kind of pipes. So anyhow, we landed there just about dark in the rain, filled it up. And he said, well, this is not where you're gonna get the marijuana. It's gotta be four hundred miles further.

• 1:37:00Roger Reaves?

  So you were, you were flying cocaine out of Columbia, or I'm sorry, marijuana out of Columbia as well? Yes, I flew quite a lot of Columbia, out of Columbia. So, uh, uh, he, uh, we, uh, I said, all right. He said, we'll just lighten the load by, and bring out two tons. You know, that's a lot of money because that stuff was, I say, it's three hundred dollars a pound. So six, six, uh.

• 1:37:23Roger Reaves?

  A million, what is it, four times, uh, one point two million would it would have brought. So it was worthwhile doing, but he was deception that made me go that far. So I wasn't on time. So the next morning about daylight, we were three or four o'clock in the morning. We took off to going to go and we had to find some forts in the river and finally found the place. And we landed there and out of the bushes, there was termite hills all along. It didn't even look like a runway, just a little bit of thing in the grass. Here's these white irate Colombians come out of there and man, they have shotguns with banana clips and they pointing out, get the hell out of here, get out of here, get out of here. This is where they live and it's a guerrilla group farce. And they didn't want an airplane there.

• 1:38:08Roger Reaves?

  This they they've been patrolled every day by Colombian jets. They want us out of there. We had the marijuana here last night, you should have been here. Damn. Come back tonight. So we went back four hundred miles to the same place for a staging place. And that's where I'd give the the old man would that was hooting the load together. I give him eighty thousand dollars. And he was surprised to see us and like, well, what could he do? What could we do? Either go back and leave it or but I'm done down there, done all all this. So I, uh, uh, there's a woman killed, old rooster, and she boiled it a while, but not long enough. And we got a little bit of something to eat. It was bad.

• 1:38:53Roger Reaves?

  And I went behind the house and I was in a hammock and I went to sleep in a hammock. And I looked up in the ass and the two military jets going straight up. And the other one just peeled off and he came back in front of my airplane with fifty caliber machine gun. Just tore that runway up, just dirt flying everywhere and come right up by the house. I damn. So it looked like ever Colombian in town running, got on a flatbed truck, took off my eighty thousand dollars. And I thought, well, they won't really shoot me.

• 1:39:25Roger Reaves?

  So I took off and ran to the airplane. And I got in that DC three and I fired her up and took off without even warming up a bit. And the two jets swarmed right on me, one on each side. They just come right down. I think their wings was on top of my wings nearly. And they were just telling me going, I knew where the airbase was. Via Vincentia, go there. And I said, uh-uh, give them the old peace signs. And I

• 1:39:49Roger Reaves?

  I kept slowing slower and slower and they just slowed down so they couldn't go no further. Now my gear is hanging down and those tires are bigger than a truck tire. So I wasn't going nowhere. So I said, I got to, I got to stop. Uh, there's a pin that you put in them with a big red flag so you won't forget. So when you take off, cause if your hydraulic fluid goes, it won't let it, won't let it go down to the ground. So there was a big pasture ahead and I put it down. That thing was rough. Oh, it was way rougher than it looked. It looked smooth when I looked. And those hundred and five foot wings were just flopping up and down like this. As I landed in the, and the gas cap popped off and gone. So I jumped out and took the pins out of the struts and run back, jumped in the airplane.

• 1:40:34Roger Reaves?

  And I guess one, one plane was low on fuel and the other one stayed with me. And anyhow, he got under me. And he's shooting those tracers and he must've been just under the airplane because they looked like they were coming up like in an arc. Right under the windshield, just red streaks up. And of course, some of them was live, you know? So I, and then, then the 50 caliber cannon, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I thought, hey, you gonna shoot me down? And then he come around and he just tore the tail of it up with a 50 caliber. And I got like 10 or 15 barrels of high test gasoline in there. It got me on my attention. Then he started off on the wing and just eat it up with a machine gun. Uh-oh. So there was a thunderstorm straight ahead.

• 1:41:18Roger Reaves?

  And they hang close to the mountains down there in the tropics. And I thought, well, I get in there, I'll get, I'll lose him. He, he ain't going in there, but I'll go in a little ways. Well, I must, I climbed up, I must have been twelve, fifteen thousand feet when I went in. And I got in an updraft and it just popped my ears like crazy. You know, something about a thunderstorm pilot. It took me up and I don't know how high I was, but I had ice on the windshield and I think on some of the leading edge. And I went back out, it was thundering and lightning there, boom, boom, boom. And I went back out and there he was, boom, boom, boom.

• 1:41:51Roger Reaves?

  I said, all right. So I went back in and I got, just as soon as I got in it, I put it in a spin. I put that thing up on its wing and put it on a spin. Went all the way down and I got down about two thousand feet and broke out. It was so pretty down there. I blew it and I lost him. So by now I'm bulletproof. My adrenaline's done gone up. He done shot my airplane up. I got eighty thousand dollars going off through the jungle. I'm going to get that load. Holy cow. So I'm on, I'm following the Guaviara River. And down there, it's way down and close to Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, anyway. And I saw a spot that looked like it was miles long of just grass, high up on the bluff above the river.

• 1:42:36Roger Reaves?

  And I'd seen it, it'd been smoothed out by the freshest in the river when it comes up that high. And I put the wheels down and I must have went a mile and the propellers are just cutting the grass like, like lawnmowers. And I go around, I must have went five or six times. I had a co-pilot in there named Dan. I said, I know Al. And I said, Al, we'll put it down this time. So it was just smooth as glass. Went to put, and then as it went to slow and I said, get your, get your feet off the brakes. He said, my feet not on the brakes. And those airplanes weigh thirty thousand pounds and they just own two tires. And that was breaking through the crust. And that plane, that thirty thousand pounds broke through that crust. And that plane started coming to us up on its nose.

• 1:43:21Roger Reaves?

  And it came right up, right up, right up, slowly right up. And it crushed the nose right in on us. And I fell between the seat and it stopped right at me.

• 1:43:29Shawn Ryan?

  You're not, you're kidding.

• 1:43:31Roger Reaves?

  Pardon?

• 1:43:31Shawn Ryan?

  You're kidding me.

• 1:43:32Roger Reaves?

  No.

• 1:43:33Shawn Ryan?

  All right there.

• 1:43:34Roger Reaves?

  Right, I mean, the whole nose, the, the, uh, the engine stopped it. The propellers and the engine are in the mud now. They're sliding along and it stopped absolutely ninety degrees, just like that with that big tail, a hundred foot in the air. Beautiful airplane stuck up in the nose. Now then, the hatch is, is over your head and now it's right in front of me. So I just undo the bolt, step out, get my little satchel.

• 1:44:00Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, the co-pilot gets out with me and they, they had two guys in the back, the ones that were ranging that load and there was all that fuel and they got some hoses and they opened that back door up there and they was alright, I knew they would be. One of them broke his finger, I think, and all them drum turning around. And they skimmed down and that big fella that had the load, he was nearly seven foot. He was too, so big, he couldn't get in the cockpit and had stretch marks on him all over. And he was crying, so he couldn't even tote his suitcase. Shows you what's

• 1:44:32Roger Reaves?

  We took the suitcase down the, down the, uh, pathways. Oh, man, it was hot and they would bug just all over us and the grass is about that high. And, uh, so we had the suitcases and, and met a, a little boy and girl, they might've been twelve years old. And one of them was riding a little ox and the other one a little mule. And we asked them, uh, can you take these suitcases to the village for us? I knew there's a village about ten miles a day. Yes, yes, they can take it. So we put, tied them on and they run alongside us and we chatted along going down the little trail through this, uh, savanna type thing, it wasn't much trees. And so I, I knew it was going to the village and, uh, I said, are there any police there? No, no, senor, no police there.

• 1:45:17Roger Reaves?

  Oh, good. So when we got close to the village, I gave them the money and told them, go home, go home. No, no, we don't want you to go with us. I didn't want them to tell about the airplane sticking up. So they went back and we went to a village and, uh, wow. We pulled around, when we got to the villages, like a thatched roof place and a little store and we ordered some Coca Colas and we're standing there, the four of us having Coca Colas, when a bunch of soldiers surrounded us with, with guns. There's no police there, this was a military base.

• 1:45:51Roger Reaves?

  Oh, boy. San Jose did Gravieri up the river from it. So, uh-oh, what are you doing here? We had passports, but they didn't have the stamp in them, but they didn't notice that. And they said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm a doctor of, uh, and we're looking for cures for medicine. And when we were studying the plants of the Amazon and our boat broke down 20 kilometers down and we walked here. Okay, that sort of satisfied them, but they weren't too satisfied with it. So I looked and there was a big dugout. That thing must have been 40 feet long. The Yamaha engine looked like it had a shaft 12 feet long. It was, that thing was big. So I'd noticed that and found out where the man lived. So they put us in a house. We ate supper there with them.

• 1:46:35Roger Reaves?

  And they put a guard on the door. And before daylight, I got on the big fella's shoulders and I removed one tile at the time from the roof. And we crawled out of that roof and got dropped down on the ground on the outside. And I went to the house of the man that had the, on the boat. And I don't know what we promised him, but a lot of money to take us down the river to our boat. Let's go, but we gotta go now. Let's go now. So, boy, with the money, I handed it to him, I think a thousand one hundred dollar bills or, or, or a thousand dollars. And so we jumped to that boat and took off down the river. And I guess after about an hour, how much further, just, just, he just put it up on a sandbar and said, I'm not going any further. We said, mister, you gotta go. We got to get down the river.

• 1:47:20Roger Reaves?

  He said, this, this, this is the official boat, like the, for, for the village. We, I, I carry the mail. I'm, I'm it. I said, I, I don't know how much we promised him, but we gave him a lot of money. And he takes us on down there all day long. And before we got to San, we had to run, empty the boat because there was some rapids, some really good stuff, like Yeah. 10 feet high. I stayed in the boat while, while a young boy that lived there ran it. And then he wouldn't even ride in it. I don't know how he got back up over those rapids. But we went on down and we got out and, uh, we went to a poor place. And that was where a little trail went in. And, uh, we spent the night and, oh, I got eat up so bad with bugs. It was just terrible. I noticed that the, the man and woman had two little children. They got in a wooden box.

• 1:48:06Roger Reaves?

  And spent the night, the next morning they got out, they were just wet with sweat, stuck to them. They stand out the bugs. And I remember the man, the chickens and the pigs rooting on the floor, and he knew three words in English, "I want more." And I thought, huh, he knew that, "I want more." So, we got something to eat, and I walked about, I guess, close to fifty miles that day. They had put me in with a young man, and he threw his hips back and he could walk. Oh, I almost had to jog, stay up with him like twelve hours. I believe I was doing at least four miles an hour. So we got to a sawmill, and I rented a Jeep and came back and got, got the other guys that was there.

• 1:48:49Roger Reaves?

  And we started out that night about midnight, and we was going out the road to get out of there. And the road would be out, and we'd have to go off and around it, and those, all those people, they were just sitting in the Jeep, they wouldn't get out. I'd have to get out and jack it up, hook a winch to it. I was, I was as muddy as a hog, I mean, laying in the waller. I was mad with them, too.

• 1:49:16Roger Reaves?

  And they sitting right there. So, just as it was just getting daylight, the guy that was driving, he was the, he says, "Get all your passports in order and everything, don't have anything on you, because we're going through a big roadblock up here. This is FARC guerrilla territory, and everything comes out of here is scrutinized big." And I said, "Boys, we can't go through a roadblock here after what we did yesterday." "Oh, yeah, we got eight hundred dollars, and you got a credit card? We can get through. These people only make fifty dollars a month." And this guy, Dan, and I said, "I'm not going through. I'll, I'll crawl on my belly a month, a year, and eat snakes before I'm going through a roadblock. I'm sticking your head in a noose, man." "Well, uh, we tired, we gonna go on through, and..."

• 1:50:02Roger Reaves?

  "I get out of there, Al, come on with me, man. You work for me, I know I'm going with Dan." And had big muscles. So I got out, and I watched the taillights of that Jeep going down the road. They spent five years in prison in Bogota.

• 1:50:20Roger Reaves?

  And I went on down the trail. And I come to a yard and there was an old woman there, real old woman, she was peeling, peeling oranges. And I says, and there was a well there with a curve of bricks around it. And I said, can I use the, use your well to wash this mud off of me? The water belongs to God, use all you want. So I drew bucketfuls of bucketfuls and I put my clothes over a bush and I scrubbed and I shaved and I cleaned up, put on clean clothes out of my satchel. And I had brute aftershave lotion. I put that all over them bug bites. I must have had a thousand of them on me. That felt so good.

• 1:51:02Roger Reaves?

  I thanked the, the old woman and I went on down the road and I found me a mossy spot under a tree and I slept for most of that day. And then I went on down the trail and I came to a little house on the ba- high banks of a, of a river. And they were so nice to me, a man, a woman, they didn't have any children. And she, I don't know where he called, he must have had a net because he had a, a tub full of little fish fried up. And she had mounds of them. Those things were delicious. And so I slept in a hammock that night with a mosquito net over me. The next morning, a beautiful breakfast and wished me luck. And I went on down the road with my suitcase and got in a canoe and went down the river. I was 11 days going through the jungle and I kept asking the Indians,

• 1:51:46Roger Reaves?

  donde están aviones? Where's airplanes? Loma Linda, Loma Linda. So I kept going to Loma Linda and in one of the dugouts I was standing in, I think I was just, just trying to communicate with Mari and I said, I'm all right, I'm all right. Cause they thought I was dead. Yeah. And Mari said she was taking a shower and she heard me say it clearly and she had less worries about it. So after the 11 days, I finally came in all kinds of ways getting, getting across that country. I came to a place that is pretty as Hawaii in World War Two, shipyard buildings, low. A runway there and a tower for a radio antenna, a bunch of little airplanes, Cessnas. What in the world is this place?

• 1:52:31Roger Reaves?

  And I went up, hello, how did you get here? And I went, my name is Katusu, welcome. You don't know what this is? This is Loma Linda Headquarters for Missionary Aviation Fellowship for the Amazon. Wow. And I stayed in a cabin that night and there was a redhead electrician that worked for the same electrical outfit I did that come down there to do work. And what a, what a witness for the Lord he was to me. I mean, he, he was on fire. And so the next day I got in a taxi, I got in an airplane with an old missionary from Canada that had retired and they flew him out and I flew with them. And they flew to Villa Vicencia Military Base where the planes had tried to get me to go.

• 1:53:13Roger Reaves?

  And a military policeman reached in the airplane and took my bag out and put it in a taxi. You got it. God did tap me on the shoulder. So I was a, I was the first plane that was shot or shot up or shot down in Columbia. And they, they interrupted the World Series baseball game in 1981. American DC three has just been shot by Colombian jets. But he's up, he's up and away, ladies and gentlemen. That's when I stopped to take the.

• 1:53:42Roger Reaves?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, we'll keep you posted. So that was my, some of my marijuana smuggling out of Columbia. They, they interrupted the World Series. They interrupted to tell about that. Wow. So then I hooked up with some big boys. And we went to, I, I met up with the Davilas out of Santa Marta and they just had endless supplies of marijuana at, at $300 a pound. And they would give it to you on a credit and you give them $50 a pound after it was over. So we went and bought a DC seven. I went and bought it in Hollywood Burbank. Of course, I never flown anything that big, but that guy says, I'll have you flying in in a week. She's us sweetheart, come on here.

• 1:54:27Roger Reaves?

  I just flew it out of Mozambique. Bullet holes was in that thing and they had one engine missing. And he had a great big dagger on his desk, paperweight. And it says, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil because I'm the meanest son of a bitch in the valley."

• 1:54:48Roger Reaves?

  So I thought what a blasphemous time that was. But anyway, I remember the fella is big South African and I bought the plane. And there's four of us gonna, you know, I was gonna fly it and get a help pilot. So the next morning, I, I start to go down the stairs and my daughter, Maria, she's about twelve years old at the time, and she's there in a nightgown and she's just crying her eyes out. Maria, what in the world's a matter of baby? And I said, Daddy, it's just, I did the worst dream, but it wasn't, it wasn't a dream. I, I saw it. It was just, you were there, you were driving your train and the bad people had taken the

• 1:55:31Roger Reaves?

  rail out and it was on fire and Aunt Kay was drunk and we couldn't get you out. And so I just shook her, I hadn't drove a train in ten years. I used to work on the railroad. So she said, yes, but before that, it looked like your DC three. It had, it had the same smiley face, but it had four engines and one of them was off and it was all greasy inside and the inside looked like a tube and it was on fire. Well, my blood run cold. That's exactly what that airplane that I just bought. No kidding. So I said, oh, I'm not about to fly that thing. So I went and told the other guys and they said, that's all right, we, we get somebody else. And so I got my money back and it was no problem.

• 1:56:13Roger Reaves?

  Anyhow, they hired some guy to fly it and he landed in, at Rio, I think called, oh, anyhow, in, in Santa Marta, he landed on the salt flats and I think it was on four thousand feet. And those big, big propellers have to be put in reverse at seventy knots to blow them back in position. So he held it in too long and they stayed in reverse. So they, they had to hire a mechanic to come from Miami to fix it. And that plane sat there for two days for all the world to see. I wonder how much that cost? That thing's huge. It's like seven forty-seven sitting there. So. When, when they got it loaded with thirty tons and they started left one, engine one

• 1:56:58Roger Reaves?

  fired right up, engine two fired right up, engine three, engine four, yah, yah, yah, yah, and then it caught on fire. Uh, they turned the fire extinguisher to that engine and pulled it, cause the canister that holds the chemicals is under the pilot's seat and the co-pilot, and it, the hoses blew out in the cockpit and asphyxiated the pilot, the co-pilot and the flight engineer. And that plane sat there and burned and they had to go in and break in and pull those men out of there and they were hurt really bad, broke their arms and legs. They had to throw them down, down the ladders twenty feet to get them out of there on that burning plane. And it burned right there on the, on the salt flats.

• 1:57:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:38Roger Reaves?

  So, I know my daughter saw that.

• 1:57:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's interesting, cause we had spoken a little bit about visions.

• 1:57:45Roger Reaves?

  Some of these things, yes.

• 1:57:46Shawn Ryan?

  Before, and during the break. Whew. What do you attribute that to?

• 1:57:52Roger Reaves?

  I don't know, but people's had them, the Bible's full of them.

• 1:57:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:56Roger Reaves?

  You look at them, they're just there. You look at, I, I just think, I'd like the people to look at Ezekiel, like thirty-eight, thirty-nine, we're facing a war, we're gonna have a war with Russia, Israel. Don't believe it, just read it. Where people have to go out and mark them bones and clean the, clean the land.

• 1:58:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Roger Reaves?

  And we'll burn the fuel of this invading army. What could it be? It was written nearly twenty-seven hundred years ago. And you see, the people have them and I certainly have them.

• 1:58:25Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any other ones?

• 1:58:28Roger Reaves?

  Yes, I, uh, I was arrested in, in Australia and I, I had the vision two weeks before it happened. It happened exactly like I saw it. And then I was up in Lawn Park Penitentiary and Mari was visiting, she visited me every, every, every Monday. She brought, brought color to that place. And it was a maximum security prison, somebody killed there every month. Or, or one, twelve a year, so it was, it was a bad place, just a bad place. I saw guards get killed, I slipped around in the blood, people got killed in front of me, men cut another man's heart out and ate his heart and then they moved me in that cell. It was, it was, it was vicious.

• 1:59:13Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:14Roger Reaves?

  But.

• 1:59:16Roger Reaves?

  I saw, uh, I saw my friends laying in glass and blood and all the windows blown out. And I told all of them, it's coming. I told, they had a chaplain, I told him, I said, it's coming, I have seen it. And so I saw the guards on the back putting handcuffs on people. And we was in the visiting room and, uh, uh, the blacks had a rapper to come in and she had a slit all the way up the side of her skirt and she was black, wrapping black bondage, black bondage. And those boys tried to get on the stage to touch her and her bodyguards was getting them and they coming to me and a white guard came up to stop it. There was only one in there and they put a microphone in his head, down he went and

• 1:59:59Roger Reaves?

  it was, it was on. So we was in the visiting room and here they are helicopters overhead, they coming through. They must have had highway patrolmen and policemen all over the state coming in, fourteen hundred men fighting. They, it was, uh, uh, some of the, the guys that had blown up, uh, tried to blow up the trade center there back in ninety-one, they were five or six of them in there. And they grabbed a little guard and drug her in a cell and they said, she broke those windows, screen. They dropped cans of boiling water on the guards and there was a, uh, um, table, a

• 2:00:42Roger Reaves?

  pool table and they'd take those and pool panels and throw them and they'd bounce off the wall and they'd get them again. It was going on. So anyway, they came in with concussion grenades and all kinds of stuff. They blew ten thousand windows out of that place. So I guess nine to ten o'clock, they, uh, they let me go to escorting Mari out as long as, we, we had a visit, I guess fourteen hours. I don't know how long, we, we couldn't leave the visiting room. Those guards would come in there to resuit up and it was all bloody. Oh my god. So we, uh, and so they put two guards on me and handcuffed me and took me back to M unit, maximum unit or where, in, in the maximum unit. And there, there laying in the glass and the blood was exactly the same people, my friend Bill, Big Jim. No kidding.

• 2:01:26Roger Reaves?

  Just exactly like I'd seen it in the vision. Where, when would you have these visions? Usually about two weeks before it happens. What would, what would you be doing? Middle of the day, nighttime, dreams? I'd be, I'd be sleeping. Dreams? Dreams. It wasn't dreams though, for sure, I have dreams, but wasn't dreams.

• 2:01:45Roger Reaves?

  But uh. What would you?

• 2:01:49Roger Reaves?

  What would it be like when you would come out of the vision? You just wake up and you know, you've just been somewhere, you've seen it. You definitely been through, the scientists call it a wormhole, but it's not as prophetic, prophetic visions. Well, sure, we can. I, I'm, I'm sure that there's people that meditate, do that. Yeah. And uh.

• 2:02:10Roger Reaves?

  The strangest thing that ever happened to me in my life, in that sort of thing. I landed at uh, Orange County Airport. And I had a business there of land development. But I wanted to see somebody at the airport or in, it's a five star hotel across the street from the airport.

• 2:02:28Roger Reaves?

  And uh, I walked across, it was a rather cold Wednesday morning, let's say. And I went up to the uh, to the desk. And there was a nice looking woman, about thirty years old, blonde hair and page boy cut. And she had kind of powdery skin and I thought, I think that book was out. Women are from Venus and men are from Mars. And I thought, boy, she looked like she's from Venus. And I went on and uh, spoke to the lady behind the desk and it was a cut glass bowl of apples and I wanted one, but I wasn't a guest and I was ashamed to get one. But when I turned around, I spoke to the pretty lady and I said, I said hello and she said hello. Excuse me, sir. And I stopped, she said, I know you. And I laughed like I do and I said, I don't believe I've ever met you, do I? No, I'd remember.

• 2:03:15Roger Reaves?

  So she said, no, and tears come out of her eyes. He said, no, I know you. And I said, perhaps if it, if so, I, I've forgotten, I'm sorry, I, but my name is Roger Reeves. And we shook hands, so she's flesh and blood. And she said, will you come across the lobby here with me? And I thought, this is strange. And we walked across together and there was a large lobby, nobody there. And there was a, a little ensemble with leather sofas and a green hood and a little fire. And she sat down and she says, just sat on the little thing and she said, will you take both my hands and close your eyes and tell me what you see? Ooh, I get cold chills all over me when I tell this story. Wham, I'm in war.

• 2:04:01Roger Reaves?

  I'm in another dimension. I'm a, I'm an officer and I'm in a cage as big as this room and it's all been from mining. It's, it's, it's a cave with rocks and there's rough tables, there's lanterns. So it was maybe World War One, I don't know, World War Two. And there I am with a, with a hat on, like the cap. And I, I can't see my eyes, but I have a grease coat on and I can see where the epileps were in, in sigma had, I was certainly an officer, had been taken off because those were snipers targets. And I remember I had boots and the thing came down and yeah, I had a good look at it and there was sandbags out the front of it and there was a long row of them and some

• 2:04:45Roger Reaves?

  kind of metal across the top and it was like eight feet tall. And just outside the door of it there, a shell hit and it was hit so hard to the sand almost looked like got in my eyes and the cordite, cordite flew, I could smell it, it was all in my nose. And I walk there as it clears up and there's a young soldier in that rubble and I pick him up and I'm walking on air and I'm just taking one step at a time and I'm saying, medic, medic, medic. And I look at the young soldier's face, he's dead and it's the face of the woman that I'm holding hands with. And I have no memory of that day from that, it was erased. Otherwise I'd ask her, what is your name?

• 2:05:29Roger Reaves?

  Who are you? Wow.

• 2:05:34Roger Reaves?

  How did that happen? That. I'm eighty years old and never before after anything so unbelievable happened to me.

• 2:05:47Roger Reaves?

  That's incredible. And it wasn't long ago, I had another thing that happened to me and I would like to, if anybody knows, to tell me that, how to do it if it's possible. I had a, a daytime vision and it was a vision of a physics formula. And it was on a grid and it kept sliding down to the left bottom quadrant and I kept pushing it up. And whatever it was told me to memorize this because this is extremely important. It's what physicists are looking for all over the world.

• 2:06:18Roger Reaves?

  And I turned to get a pen to write it after I memorized it. And it vanished like a dream. So I've been to two supposedly, well, certainly good hypnotists. And neither one of them, I want to know, is it possible to take me back to look at that again? And neither one of them could hypnotize me. So that's, that's the strangeness other than my endeavors of life that I've, that's happened to me.

• 2:06:51Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, I've had visions, well, I wouldn't say visions, I would say intuitions before.

• 2:06:57Roger Reaves?

  You gotta kind of, if you're there and you see it and it's bright and you're there.

• 2:07:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:02Roger Reaves?

  It's a vision. Intuition is I think I've been there, I see something, oh, I've seen that before. That's, that's that. But when you're there.

• 2:07:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:11Roger Reaves?

  It's bright and you're there, you can smell it and see it and taste it and feel it.

• 2:07:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I haven't had anything that vivid.

• 2:07:18Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Shawn Ryan?

  But I've had, I, I can't make sense out of any of it. I've had it where I'll mention somebody's name and then they call. Like, right away, several times. People, and when I say I mentioned somebody's name, it's not like I mentioned my wife's name and then she calls me because she calls me 50 times a day. You know, it's, I'll mention somebody's name that I haven't thought about, I haven't talked to, don't even have their number, maybe I haven't seen them in 10 years. And then bam, we'll get an email in through the website or a text, a phone call from a mutual friend, it happens all the time, you know.

• 2:08:00Roger Reaves?

  There's something to it, we, we are spirits in flesh, I know that.

• 2:08:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Roger Reaves?

  And we, we may be eternal. And Mary Wheeler Wilcox.

• 2:08:09Shawn Ryan?

  I, I believe it.

• 2:08:11Roger Reaves?

  Beautiful poet, many years ago, she had the same thing. And just one, one line of her thing, she said, and you never can tell what your thoughts will do in bringing your love or hate. For thoughts are things with airy wings, they're speedier than carrier doves. So they, they speed over the track to bring you back whatever went out of your mind. How very true.

• 2:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:08:36Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned something about, have you ever looked into psychedelics?

• 2:08:41Roger Reaves?

  No, I never have. I've never taken any drugs. I don't do drugs at all.

• 2:08:44Shawn Ryan?

  You've never done any drugs?

• 2:08:46Roger Reaves?

  No, I've tried a little bit, but I'm like Clinton, I didn't inhale.

• 2:08:54Roger Reaves?

  No, I don't like them. I like myself like I am. I smoked a little pot one time. I did cocaine just to see what it's like. It's a nice feeling, but I don't want to be that way.

• 2:09:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, they say psychedelics, you know, you really tap into your inner self.

• 2:09:08Roger Reaves?

  They tell me that. And I read those books, a really good one, A Chemical Love Affair, I believe it's like those boys up there. It's good. And a peyote, I know people see things. Yeah, certainly they do.

• 2:09:23Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe you could get that vision again if you...

• 2:09:30Roger Reaves?

  I'll try. I would try it with that. Somebody chain me to a cactus and...

• 2:09:35Roger Reaves?

  So I can't do no harm to myself, whatever. I'm scared of that stuff.

• 2:09:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I am too. I did it. But I did it for some healing stuff. But about six months ago, changed a lot of aspects of my life for the better.

• 2:09:50Roger Reaves?

  Did it really? Okay, I've heard that too, really. And Washington State, I believe, is opening up. And people said, Roger, go up there and grow that stuff.

• 2:09:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well, yeah, it cleaned me out. I haven't had a drink in six months since that. And a lot of self-healing stuff, learned a lot about myself. And you will have visions on that. But anyways, moving on, you kind of had mentioned some reincarnation type stuff too.

• 2:10:21Roger Reaves?

  That was the one where I met the woman. That's the only thing I ever had. It was just, God, that was so profound until how can you... You can't dismiss it.

• 2:10:30Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:10:31Roger Reaves?

  It just was, it just, something happened to a person that never even thought about such a thing.

• 2:10:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:36Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, it's just, I've had two out of the body experiences, completely out of the body. Like I'm just come up and walk over here and go over there and come up and look in your ear if I wanted to.

• 2:10:46Shawn Ryan?

  You see yourself?

• 2:10:47Roger Reaves?

  Yes, I watch myself breathing.

• 2:10:49Shawn Ryan?

  All right, I gotta hear this too.

• 2:10:52Roger Reaves?

  Okay, I've done it twice. And Bill Monroe writes a book about it called Out of the Body, I believe. I don't know what it is, but anyhow, it's a real good book. And if you're asleep with your... Head turned due north, he says you're five times more likely to have one. So I had. Hold on, if you sleep with your face. We had due north, you're five times more likely to have an out of the body experience. And they they do it now with with a sound in your in in water and they got sound for you to help you do this. Mine mine happened naturally. Okay. I tell you, I'll tell you the most vivid one that lasted a long time, I guess it lasted

• 2:11:33Roger Reaves?

  as long as I wanted it to. I was working on the railroad. I was a fireman on a diesel electric. It's just me and the engineer up in there. And I think we had two hundred seventeen loads of stumps, them gondolas, going from way across Georgia to to Brunswick to the big Hercules Powder Company. They made gunpowder out of those things. It was the lightered stumps with the pine stock left. Pine stumps are left there from thousand years ago. So I had taken a car out to a cousin of mine in Oklahoma. And I drove it out there and then I had to get back and I get to work. So I'd been been asleep for been awake except

• 2:12:14Roger Reaves?

  for a nap here and there. But I had to go to work. So I mean, I had that job as a good job on a railroad. When the trains run, you men, you got to be there. So I showed up. And I remember my engineer was Mr. Wendell Davis. He was a sport, the nicest fellow. Anyhow, we hooked seven of those great big diesel engines together and started off with that load of stumps across the Ofganoke Swamp. And it was raining. And I believe there's a million candle power on the front of those engines and they go in a figure eight to warn opossums or deer or people or cars. And they go like that, just in almost enchanting, you know, just and the rain was coming down at an angle and it was just hitting the windshield

• 2:12:59Roger Reaves?

  like diamonds. And the windshield wipers is going.

• 2:13:03Roger Reaves?

  And then when that thing was going like that, and I just came out of my body. I mean, completely out of it. And I thought, wow. And I went up to look at myself and I look at myself, I had my eyes open and I was still looking. And I looked at myself, I was breathing. And I floated across the engines, ten, ten, twelve feet wide. Went up there, Mr. Davis, I looked right at it. I could see the pimples where he dug them out of his face when he was a kid. Could see all that. I went up and I looked outside, I looked at all the gauges, kind of red. And I knew that I could just go wherever I wanted to. And I went up, sat on the radio and I thought, I'll watch this scene for a while, I'm out of my body. And then I, after a while, I mean, I thought, I wonder if I'm dead.

• 2:13:46Roger Reaves?

  And when I did, bam, I was right back in my body. So that's, that's happened twice to me. And that you can do, you can have out of the body, you can work at it and have that for sure. And you can learn to travel, I understand. What was the, what was the other one? Another time that I was, uh, me and another boy was, had a log truck. And the fuel pump broke on it. And so I laid across the chassis. And I'm blowing into that fifty-five gallon drum.

• 2:14:17Roger Reaves?

  And I'm breathing that gasoline fumes. And he's, and if my, I had to keep a pressure on it to keep the, make that thing, it's an eighteen wheeler. With all them wheels behind me and I'm laying across, thing's going eighty miles an hour down the, down the highway. And the back window was out of, that thing must have been nineteen thirty-eight or something, it was old. It slowed down, blow, Roger, blow, blow, and the wind blowing. And I, I became, I came out of my body. And I just got to just come right up there in the cockpit, just then I, I read the signs as we came by. Then he stopped. I was unconscious and he pulled me off of that. I could see him doing it. Wow.

• 2:15:05Shawn Ryan?

  You gotta look into psychedelics.

• 2:15:06Roger Reaves?

  All right.

• 2:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  You gotta look into it. I'm gonna send you some information. A lot of people have those type of experiences on psychedelics. And I swear, it's like a veil. It's just lifted up and you just see so much more than what you normally do. And everything makes sense. It's really, it's, it's, my psychedelic experience is one of the most profound experiences of my life.

• 2:15:39Roger Reaves?

  All right, that's strong.

• 2:15:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and I don't, I don't say that lightly.

• 2:15:43Roger Reaves?

  No, and, and mine, these visions I have, I certainly, I, I certainly just like honor them. It's just like, all right, I'm blessed.

• 2:15:52Shawn Ryan?

  Sacred.

• 2:15:53Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 2:15:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wasn't expecting to have that conversation.

• 2:16:00Roger Reaves?

  I wasn't either.

• 2:16:01Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, yeah, I gotta, I gotta send you some stuff on psychedelics.

• 2:16:05Roger Reaves?

  Oh, good.

• 2:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  It's, uh, the stuff that, yeah, it's not the, it's not the party drug that, that, that was going on in the sixties and seventies. It's, it's, it's, there's some real benefits to that stuff. But, um, but anyways, let's, let's move back into Columbia.

• 2:16:26Roger Reaves?

  All right. I've, uh, I was at my house and there's a wonderful old airplane salesman, sale me named Cameron. And he came to my house with a really nice looking lawyer from Bogota, Columbia. And they wanted to know that if they sent a ship up, if somebody wanted a ship, would I unload it? And how much was sixty-five tons? Well, how much were you paying? I don't know, we made, and so they said, yes, but, so I made an agreement. Of course I unloaded, I'd be happy to unload it. You have to go out with smaller boats and get that thing twenty miles over the horizon where up you. So, uh, they said, but nah, he came up once before and the people didn't unload him, so he's shy. He wants the gasoline money for the diesel to come up.

• 2:17:12Roger Reaves?

  And so you have to put up sixty-five thousand dollars for a guarantee that you'll be there. And I thought, that's strange. But my airplanes cost more than that now on every trip. And I said, well, I won't be risking any more than the normal risk. So I gave those two shysters sixty five thousand dollars and they left.

• 2:17:35Roger Reaves?

  And of course, I didn't hear from them anymore.

• 2:17:39Roger Reaves?

  So I had the card for the lawyer's address in Bogota. So I got on a flight, sixty five thousand dollars enough to go look about at that time. It still is today, but uh, so I went and he was the nicest, oh, I give it to the Mayan and some big tail. So uh, he says, but I'll tell you what, I have a, that, you can make so much more money with the cocaine. I said, I don't want food with cocaine. Man, there's so much money. I said, how much money? He said, oh, a million or two dollars, two million dollars a trip they'll pay you. I what?

• 2:18:13Roger Reaves?

  I said, let's go talk to these folks. So we, his wife was a, worked with Avianca and so we got on a flight and went to Medellin, Colombia. And at that time, that airplane landed right downtown. I mean, the wings almost touched apartment buildings on both sides. Woo, the old seven oh seven, it just shook terribly. What year is this? Nineteen, nineteen eighty. Nineteen eighty? So uh, we go to a beautiful condominium and we go to the top and it just looks out on Verde Jungle and just across the whole city and then I, you never could see a scenery so pretty. And there was a man in there. I'd say that he was a modern day Winston Churchill, just a pure genius, sloppy drunk.

• 2:18:59Roger Reaves?

  And he could talk, talk any language you wanted to speak with him. And he slur, yeah, and he said, yes, I got, I got all cocaine you wanna, oh, any, anything. I pay five thousand dollars a kilo. Go see Martha, that was his wife, go see Martha. But anyhow, while he was in there, the most strange thing happened, there was a woman came in with her two bodyguards, muscled up little fellows, and she was wearing a rabbit. Fur hat and rabbit fur jacket in the tropics and boots rabbit fur and a miniskirt. She kissed him on both cheeks. She ain't paying us no attention. And she's Sonia Diatila from Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

• 2:19:42Roger Reaves?

  High cheekbones, was Indian, looked kind of a pretty woman. And so Fernando asked her what she's doing. I'm on my way to Miami to buy an airplane. Well, that lawyer, Roberta Davila, he was rather smart. And he said, Roger has an airplane for sale. Oh, now she sees me. What kind of airplane do you have? And I thought, I had several airplanes. I said, I have a Queen Air. Queen Air. Oh, Queen Air. She liked the idea of having a Queen Air.

• 2:20:13Roger Reaves?

  She said, how much you want for the airplane? And Roberta's going laughing.

• 2:20:20Roger Reaves?

  So Queen Airs is a really pretty nice airplane. Beechcraft, but two or three of them, the wings burned off all at one time within a few months or a year or so, and they just grounded them. So I bought several of them, about fifty thousand dollars a piece, and it's a three hundred thousand dollar airplane. And I had a mechanic, there was just one hose that was giving trouble. And so he'd had tanks in the inside. She said, okay.

• 2:20:44Roger Reaves?

  If I like it, I buy it. Bring it to me. I said, listen, you give me five thousand dollars, I have somebody bring it down today. Give the man five thousand dollars. So her little bodyguard came, oh, give me five thousand dollars. And I called my friend David and he flew it down to Panama. So we went to Panama to see it. And there it came. Oh, it looked good. You could see it looked like an airliner coming in. And oh, she got in it and she just played pretend driving her Queen Air. And so she said, okay, I buy it. Said, but you got to go to Santa Cruz to get your money. Oh, boy. So we loaded up with a whole bunch of her people and we take off way too many for the plane. And we take off and go to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, across the jungle. And we land in Santa Cruz.

• 2:21:29Roger Reaves?

  And the policemen were there and they put the flags on their old cars and they lead there through the streets. She is, she's a black widow of Bolivia. Wow. She's a cocaine queen. So we go out under the water tank, I remember. And she had a house made of marble, big old marble slabs. And it was new. And so she'd recently made her money. And there was a chain link fence around the place with a kind of a homemade gate. And all the, all her, she had about ten or twelve servants. And they were all out at that gate crying and wringing their hands and just going on. And she, what's the matter with you fools? What's the cra-? Your lion is eating the baby. What?

• 2:22:13Roger Reaves?

  So she runs in the house and I go in with her and she's got this mountain lion. And he's eating a baby on the floor and he's only left just like a diaper and some shit and a head. And she grabs that, that lion with his blood all over his mouth. Oh, like Tommy, I, I, I. She puts him in another room and she goes out there. Outta here, you idiots, everyone. I don't wanna see your face again. Leave a baby on the floor in front of a lion. She had no sympathy whatsoever.

• 2:22:42Roger Reaves?

  Was it her baby? No, it was one of the maid's babies. She didn't have any babies so, but so, but yeah, the, the mountain lion had ate the maid's baby. Holy shit. So I saw that right in front of me, that mess, what she saw there. So that she was just a terrible person. I got my money and got out of there. I don't ever wanna go back. I'll bet. They offered me to fly a, uh, ether from Columbia. I'm from Panama down there to where they make it. Ether was extremely dangerous, but they was paying a huge amount of money. A million dollars a load just, and that was just legal. But that stuff gets to leaking and it blows up and it burned a lot of people to death. Damn. But I'll let you tell you another lion story. What? I would love to hear it.

• 2:23:27Roger Reaves?

  We're gonna back up to marijuana days. All right. I, uh. Mexico? It's Mexico to Juan's, Juan's ranch. All right. The goat ranch. Uh, anyway, I, uh. A lion on a goat ranch. Worse, worse than that. He, uh, I, I landed there and I said, Juan is anywhere that we could grow marijuana here in the middle of Baja. That I wouldn't have to go over Oaxaca and Guatemala and wherever and buy it. He said, there's a place maybe where we can go, but you need to spend the night here. So I spent the night in the hammock. Then we got up next morning from fast mules. I mean, them mules would walk fast, young, fast, talking mules. And we went to walking and, uh, we went by Mesa.

• 2:24:09Roger Reaves?

  And he says, I killed two, two big lions here last week. What? He said, yes, I was hunting deer and I rolled the rocks off down into bushes. And the deer run out and I shoot them and that's what we eat. But he said, this day, two big mountain lions ran out. And he said, killed them both? Yes, I killed them both. I said, what'd you do with them? Like I was saving the house. We ate them. You ate them? Yes, it's very good. What? Yeah. So we rode them mules on and we stopped for lunch. We stopped in a mason and it had rained sometime before and it was just a paradise of flowers everywhere you looked. It was just like a, a, riding through heaven. It was so beautiful on those mules.

• 2:24:52Roger Reaves?

  And there's dry cactus stops and we stopped and he had a stack of tortillas and a package of sausage. And he took them tortillas out and there's a great big fly, just made him one of them. He just took it and threw it away and he broke this cactus up and made a little white flame. You couldn't even see it. Whether it dried cactus burn, he put them tortillas on it, heated them up and took that sausage and put in there and rolled it up. Man, we ate them. I must ate a dozen of them. I said, that's good meat, Mike. Uh, Juan, what is it? Leon.

• 2:25:25Roger Reaves?

  So I, I had lion for lunch. Nice. That two lion story. So I guess it is good. It was a story. I guess he put all them peppers in there, whatever, it just, you couldn't tell the difference. Couldn't tell the difference in a house cat.

• 2:25:42Roger Reaves?

  Wow. You got, you've got all kinds of stories. So I'll get back to how I got in the cocaine business. I, so this, this Fernando, Fernando, Fernando, yeah, I can't remember his name. Uh, and I went to see his wife Martha and she said, he'll sober up one day and he's got all you can do. He's got tons of marijuana. So I was in Belize and I called down there and I said, Fernando's having a birthday party over on the Pacific. So come, Aviaca is flying the people over to it. So I flew down and I think I flew commercially, I know I did.

• 2:26:26Roger Reaves?

  And so I got there and they flew me over in one of those island shorts, care about forty people. They used to be around, you don't see them anymore. And they flew over a verted landscape out of Medellin, yeah, Medellin and down. And between, somewhere between Panama and Colombia, it was just that there's no roads over there, wasn't any. And they landed uphill and it must have been a mile long runway. They must have been loading stuff like crazy. And I met a couple on the plane, a beautiful couple, and she spoke English. And so we became friends on the plane going over and we got out. And there was a river running in and there was a log house there.

• 2:27:11Roger Reaves?

  And one, they would barbecue and hogs and goats and cows and all kinds of stuff. And they had little houses on stilts, ten feet up to get out of the waves. But I didn't get one of them, I got the, I got the, where the workers stay, bunking that. But anyway, I, I'm walking on the beach with a woman just come up to me and she was in poor clothes, like she was from the slums. But she was very nice and very quiet. And she said, I have no idea, I've never been in a helicopter before, the man invited me to come. And I, no, I don't know. How I know?

• 2:27:56Roger Reaves?

  So, so then the couple are coming in, this Matilda, she said, Roger, Mario says that you're walking with the girlfriend of the most vicious killer in Colombia. He suggested you get away from him. Oh shit. So we kind of come to the end of the beach and I excuse myself and she went on her way. Anyhow, that night, uh, the people came there from all over. That was where the Medellin cartel started. They decided that there's so many people were killed, so they all got together. They had a huge party and said they stopped killing each other. Ten thousand people were killed there a month. If you had ten kilos and you gave it to one and he's got some pilot gonna take it in New York

• 2:28:40Roger Reaves?

  and well, ten kilos or forty kilos got busted in New Jersey, so sorry, bang, bang. That was what was happening by wholesale. So they said, all right, uh, particularly the Ochoas and Escobar and Gacho, uh, Carlos later. They said, we're gonna make a, um, insurance policy in transportation. Uh, the price of cocaine at that time was fifty thousand dollars in New York. It was ten thousand dollars in Colombia. For what, a kilo? Cocaine, per kilo, for two point two pounds. So you give it to us here, we will deliver it to your man and my man for ten thousand dollars.

• 2:29:21Roger Reaves?

  If it gets busted anywhere, any, for any reason it's lost, we will replace it here in Colombia. You can't lose. So they got a hundred tons put on them real quick. So that was the beginning of it. So I was there. Anyhow, the, the, the, the pretty girl got shoved in on me, bam, that night, about midnight. Uh-oh, here come this guy and he's angry. I guess she won't sleep with him and he's telling her to sleep with me. Uh, so anyway, that was, uh, that was the beginning of that. And, uh, I, some, his friends got around him. I'm like, whoa, man.

• 2:30:04Roger Reaves?

  Uh, so, but anyway, that's when I met the people with the, uh, Mar- Mario that, that knew all the people. So we went back and I think that kind of seemed, it's old. So all the important people with their planes and helicopters left. It was about two days and we had stand-up comedians, police chiefs from all over the city. And I mean, they, they were skits and it was, it was big. So they left and I think it was only four men there and, uh...

• 2:30:37Roger Reaves?

  Uh, I was, I was laying behind the house, again, just like the other, and I was reading a book, the MMKs, and I was in a hammock, having some barbecue goat. Pow, pow! And blood spattered on me and all on that book page. I rolled out of that hammock, must've rolled twenty feet because it was real close, and it was a big pistol. And I looked up, and there's a young black man, look at about twenty-five years old, handsome fella, and there's a white Colombian there, about fifty-five or sixty years old, and he's got a big thirty-eight, and that black young man tears that pistol out of the man's hand and just, just tears it out of his hand and puts that gun between his eyes, he goes click, click, click, click, click. There was no more bullets than he two.

• 2:31:20Roger Reaves?

  And I looked, and there was a dog that had been shot in the head, and I guess he was turning, and the blood was flying, and that's what got on the book. But then I looked at the, the young black man, and he's done ashen, he'd been shot right there, and his femoral artery's been cut, and the blood was just gushing down, he's holding it. Yeah. And I, and I, I have some training in first aid, on the fire department, and I said, "I'm a doctor, I can, I can help you," and he put that gun at me. So anyhow, he went hobbling on back, and I had my friend Mario, we went and tried to talk to him, and he went on back down there and died. And, uh, so then, oh, you could hear those people back there onto those trees, la la

• 2:32:01Roger Reaves?

  la la la la la, screaming and crying, and so the night got there, and there was only four of us men, and one of them was a tall airline pilot, and he just went to crying. I've seen some cowards in my life, so he, he was one of them, and I, and Matilda had a pistol, so I stayed kinda close to her. And so, we was at that old log house, and just, just four men and those women, and the lights went out. And, uh, I went back in there with flashlight, and the, uh, the generator, the gas tank had been filled up with water and salt, sand, they had, those black people had come in, and they said, "There's gonna be, there gonna be some killing before daylight."

• 2:32:41Roger Reaves?

  Well, we got little cans and put kerosene in them, put twisted little wicks, put around there and the bugs, what a buggy night we spent. Anyway, they, uh, soldiers came and rounded us all up and got the guy that did the shooting and he went to take us, take a shower and he took, escaped out the back. The runway's covered with logs and drums and airplanes flying. Anyhow, they finally get it worked out and we get out of there. But, uh, I get back to Medellin and I, I meet up with Mario Matilda and he said, "Listen, I want to introduce you to some people." So, he took me, uh, up, uh, to a little town called Invegada, that's where he lived too.

• 2:33:25Roger Reaves?

  And we went up a, a mount, a winding mountain road, real pretty, with the old bromeliads in the trees and a gate open and he was allowed in and we went up a stony road to a little, they call them fincas, a little farm. And, uh, there there was people out there in the old fedora hats, there was like a hitching rail and an old house, I bet it's two or three hundred years old, hacienda. And it, it was sagging, but it was beautiful, like a museum. And we were ushered right in amongst all those people and there was a really pretty woman and they asked us if we wanted coffee or tea and she made us a cup of coffee in a pretty little cup. There was a hole in the floor, we had to walk around that and it was just shiny.

• 2:34:08Roger Reaves?

  And went in to see Jorge Ochoa. And a mighty nice fellow, spoke English and, uh, he had twelve telephones on the big desk. And he was proud to show them, he said, "This is New York, this is Seattle, this is Chicago. When they ring, I know what's happening." And so then after he asked me what kind of airplanes I had and I told him and what kind of experience and he was happy, he said, "Well, I got all the work you can do." And we pay five thousand dollars a kilo and, uh, first load we'll put three hundred in, so that's one and a half million dollars for an eight hour flight. So, uh, he said, "Let me call my partner over." So, he sent the pretty woman next door in that old house and in come Pablo Escobar

• 2:34:49Roger Reaves?

  and he asked the same things and he, and did the same thing, shook hands and said, "Got all the work you want."

• 2:34:56Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have any idea who these guys were at the time?

• 2:34:59Roger Reaves?

  No, they, they were just regular people and Jorge, I mean Jorge Ochoa still is, he's, he's a gentleman. He owes me three and a half million dollars. He don't want to talk to me, but he's still alright. Goes, "His people in Miami said I was paid," so he's saying, "I'm clear." But he's not. He owes it. And it wasn't him. I went to prison and he owed me. He should pay me.

• 2:35:22Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we get into recovering your three and a half million dollars, let's take a quick break.

• 2:35:26Roger Reaves?

  Alright. Real good.

• 2:35:32Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:36:19Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:36:59Shawn Ryan?

  which actually tastes so damn good that I ate all 60 of them the first night I got them. They taste amazing, and man, I got a lot of energy now. Anyways, go to bubsnaturals.com, use promo code Shawn to take 20% off your order. Thank you, Bubz Naturals, for being a sponsor of the Shawn Ryan Show.

• 2:37:27Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Roger, we're back from the break. You had just met Ochoa, and he's bringing in his business partner, El Jefe.

• 2:37:37Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, Jorge was a spoke English, and he called the pretty woman, I mean, she was pretty, and called her in and spoke in Spanish. And so she went next door and come back with a gentleman, plaid shirt and khaki pants, all iron, very nice. And Jorge introduced me to Pablo Escobar. And Pablo Escobar is a guy, five foot eight and 180 pounds. And so he asked me about what kind of airplanes I had and my experience flying across the border. And I told him that I had a DC-3, a Beech 18, a turboprop Aero Commander, and that I'd done over 100 loads of marijuana.

• 2:38:19Roger Reaves?

  So he seemed pleased with it and said that they paid $5,000 a kilo and that I haul all I wanted to. So we just had a nice little chat there and just, he didn't seem anything unusual, except a businessman that was next door.

• 2:38:36Shawn Ryan?

  Who was Pablo at the time?

• 2:38:38Roger Reaves?

  It was just nobody ever heard of him.

• 2:38:42Shawn Ryan?

  So this is very, very beginning days?

• 2:38:44Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 2:38:45Shawn Ryan?

  He hadn't made a name, he wasn't the richest man in the world.

• 2:38:48Roger Reaves?

  No name whatsoever, I'd never heard of it.

• 2:38:49Shawn Ryan?

  Were you nervous?

• 2:38:50Roger Reaves?

  Not a bit. Why would I be? I mean, I just, people ask that, but it was just like if I was a, owned a truck and I went into a trucking company and asked, let's get a contract, meet a haul some stuff across country. It wasn't, it wasn't anything. And I was looking for cargo. Before, I'd been looking for marijuana, and it got hard to find in Mexico with all the heat that was there. So I had to move further afield.

• 2:39:12Shawn Ryan?

  Did it bother you that you were getting into stronger narcotics than marijuana?

• 2:39:20Roger Reaves?

  Not so much. At that time, back in 1980, the cocaine was pure. It was made with ether and rather fluffy, big, looked like big footballs, twisted on the end. And only the rich people were doing it.

• 2:39:39Roger Reaves?

  And I don't know if you know that up until not long ago, it was considered a non narcotic controlled substance. So they didn't consider cocaine a narcotic. A narcotic, it has to be something like cigarettes or heroin that you want, your body craves. Okay. If it's mentally addictive, like a lot of things, gambling, sex, all these things. But they're not narcotics. So I understand that the CIA invented crack. I don't know that they did, but in the book, The Big White Lie by Clavel, James Clavel, he was a top DEA agent.

• 2:40:24Roger Reaves?

  He accuses them of it. And so they put it in every, every city in the United States in the black communities to sell their cocaine because they're bringing in 10 ton loads. And so at that time, it become the most narcotic substance in the world. They said, you take a few, few hits of that and you addicted it, put self the endorphins in your brain until you want it again. Why does he say that they, why does he say the CIA got involved with that? What's his reasoning? To, there was a group of people in CIA, I don't believe it was a whole group of them, but they, they wanted to sell cocaine. And that, boy, I mean, it just went rapid. And now then, now it is a narcotic.

• 2:41:09Roger Reaves?

  And I don't know until that time if anybody had ever died of cocaine. And even today, with all the people that are in prison, I'd like to just say that for cocaine, compared to cigarettes or alcohol, it doesn't even register. If you looked at a chart, it might, yeah, there's some people and anybody, one person dies. I don't want any person to hurt anybody. But if you're talking about doing the greatest evil, things on the, on the earth, it just like, look what's doing the evil. Yeah. Look at the sugar and all the people and the trouble we have and the billions and trillions of dollars in healthcare

• 2:41:53Roger Reaves?

  that we have just from the sugar industry and the things that's mislabeled. Do you realize that up to four hundred thousand people die each year in the hospital? From misdiagnosed drugs?

• 2:42:07Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:42:07Roger Reaves?

  Mistakes? That might be somewhere between two hundred fifty and four hundred thousand. Now, that's a lot of people. You look at a half million people from cigarettes. And here it is, the government's getting their money in. Look at the devastation that alcohol does. I don't want to take away alcohol, but if alcohol kills a hundred people and something else kills one in a million, why in the world don't you go after the cause? And it's just educate people is what's happening in this business.

• 2:42:39Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I saw on the news that cocaine, Colombia is trying to legalize cocaine right now. Or at least it's.

• 2:42:48Roger Reaves?

  It's devastated their country. Ten thousand a year being murdered over it back in nineteen eighty.

• 2:42:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I was surprised to see it, but yeah, I've seen it. I've seen it in a couple of different headlines now. And over the past week, they've been saying that they're trying to legalize cocaine down there.

• 2:43:05Roger Reaves?

  They did in Bolivia.

• 2:43:07Shawn Ryan?

  Did they really?

• 2:43:08Roger Reaves?

  Making lipstick and face cream and all kinds of stuff.

• 2:43:12Roger Reaves?

  Yeah. So I went, I'd like to tell you how the.

• 2:43:20Roger Reaves?

  I think I might have already told you about the insurance company that they formed down there. And those fellows did and started. So they had just, so I went and got my airplane and flew down and. They, I landed at a banana plantation. And it was a long clay strip and it was raining. And they put three hundred kilos in there. And then they put the ugliest man you've ever seen, Neymar Naldo. And he got in the backseat of that airplane with a MAC-10 pistol. He gonna make sure I went to Louisiana. Well, I took off. That fool didn't know, I could have went to Argentina. He didn't know which way was north and

• 2:44:01Roger Reaves?

  south. There was no doubt in my mind. But anyway, we took off and the little wheels on that airplane kicked up the mud and the wheel wells are large and it filled completely up with mud. I mean, I was weighted down with a load of mud and the wheels wouldn't come up. So here I'm dragging along a hundred miles an hour slower than I supposed to go. We are not going to make one again. So we got it for about a thousand miles with the wheels hanging down and I says, I told him, I said, we've got to land. I got a strip in Belize that I can stop and clean this out and get some fuel. And boy, he put that Mac Ten pistol to my head. No, no, I'll kill you. You're going to Louisiana, going to Louisiana. I said, well, go ahead and shoot, fool. You're gonna die too, right now.

• 2:44:47Roger Reaves?

  So we landed and he was all upset. And there was a farm that had a nice long runway, Carter Ranch up in the Orange Walk. And old Mr. Carter there, he was a friend of mine and he sent the boy out and washed the plane and we went in with this guy Ronaldo. And I remember we had a nice big meal and they cleaned the plane, filled it up with fuel. We took off and went to, went on in New Orleans and went on into Louisiana and landed. I landed on Interstate 10. That was the best running strip ever made. They were making that thing all the way across country and it took them 10 years going across Louisiana and Texas. And at Mississippi River, there was a counter river

• 2:45:30Roger Reaves?

  bridge and about five miles from it, they had a detour, big red flashing lights, just like at the end of runway. I'd come over those and land on that runway. It was five miles long.

• 2:45:43Shawn Ryan?

  Holy cow.

• 2:45:44Roger Reaves?

  And had the guy there with a truck to unload me.

• 2:45:46Shawn Ryan?

  How fast would it take to unload?

• 2:45:49Roger Reaves?

  Five minutes, something like that.

• 2:45:50Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 2:45:50Roger Reaves?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:51Shawn Ryan?

  So from wheels down to wheels back up, what much time?

• 2:45:55Roger Reaves?

  I would come in like a hawk. I mean, just silent and touched down. And then the truck would come out to bushes and we'd throw it in. And the truck would leave and I'd give him plenty of time before I took off because I'm gonna make a lot of racket when I leave. And then I would go over and across Lake Pontchartrain land. And then I'd get in a car and go back over there and scrub the tire marks out where that I had landed. Because I wanted to do it over and over again. I didn't want the police sitting there waiting on me.

• 2:46:26Shawn Ryan?

  So, so you would be wheels down for a little bit?

• 2:46:29Roger Reaves?

  Yes, maybe fifteen minutes till he got out of there.

• 2:46:32Shawn Ryan?

  Fifteen minutes till he got out then?

• 2:46:34Roger Reaves?

  Then I'd take off. And as soon as he got back on the freeway, I knew he'd be back on the freeway five, ten minutes.

• 2:46:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:40Roger Reaves?

  So as soon as he got back into traffic, I'd be all right. I'd take off and make a lot of racket.

• 2:46:47Roger Reaves?

  And I did that all the way across Texas. I just landed at Interstate 10 as they built it. I had a big old truck that was doing marijuana. And it was cause antiques unlimited down the side. And halfway down the truck was, it was packed with nice antiques. He opened that back door, slid it up. The chairs and stuff would just try to fall out on you. We had bungee cords on them to hold them in. And then we had a, a wall built across there. I did it. And, and it was smell proof. It was sealed. Right up to the top. And then underneath by the driveway, I had cut four boards out and made a plate on the floor. And then I had a, a rack over the top of it so the marijuana couldn't fall on it. And we'd get under there by that driveway and shove that stuff up in the truck.

• 2:47:31Roger Reaves?

  I could put three tons in the front, front part of that truck.

• 2:47:33Shawn Ryan?

  Holy cow.

• 2:47:34Roger Reaves?

  All over the country. Didn't matter. If you, we never even got stopped. But if you did get stopped, they're not gonna take all that, unload all that furniture, not unless they already know. They're not gonna, just gonna do it just as a normal dock.

• 2:47:47Shawn Ryan?

  When would the payment happen?

• 2:47:49Roger Reaves?

  They'd wait about, okay, on the cocaine?

• 2:47:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:47:52Roger Reaves?

  It'd be about, marijuana and all was a week or two. Cocaine was usually about two weeks. So after I did the, the first three hundred load, I went back and I said, it'll hold five hundred. No, no, senor. Your good luck is three hundred. So they'd only, only put three hundred on my, me. And so I was making, it was an eight hour trip in a turboprop aerocommander. I was making one and a half million dollars for an eight hour trip.

• 2:48:14Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:48:15Roger Reaves?

  And I said, when you want me to come back? We waiting on you, senor. Just anytime I wanted to land there, it was just, I could've gone every day. But they'd get up about seven million dollars they owed me and I'd stop. I ain't gonna go no more until you pay me.

• 2:48:29Shawn Ryan?

  Seven million dollars?

• 2:48:30Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, that's all the credit I'd give them.

• 2:48:33Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so how many? How many loads would you do in a month?

• 2:48:39Roger Reaves?

  Later on, I did about one a week.

• 2:48:41Shawn Ryan?

  One a week?

• 2:48:42Roger Reaves?

  Uh huh.

• 2:48:42Shawn Ryan?

  So making about?

• 2:48:43Roger Reaves?

  About six million dollars.

• 2:48:45Shawn Ryan?

  Six million dollars a month?

• 2:48:46Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:47Shawn Ryan?

  What are you, what are you doing with that money?

• 2:48:49Roger Reaves?

  Piling it up.

• 2:48:50Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you put it?

• 2:48:51Roger Reaves?

  I buried it and I bought farms with it and I bought corn, I like buying rare corns. I bought the, the Brasher de Blume. And right now, that thing's over worth over 10 million dollars, about the size of a quarter.

• 2:49:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:49:08Roger Reaves?

  It was made for George Washington by a guy named Brasher. He was, he was the architect for Washington DC. So those are valuable little coins. That was the best I did and I, I bought land, I bought, I got into real estate investment. I had 21 oil wells, I bought airplanes and houses and mansions and anything else. But I always had to put them in other people's name. And guess what? That money just doesn't come back to you. You give, you give suitcases or to some good investor and it's just like it's got wings on it flying away. I never saw one come back.

• 2:49:45Shawn Ryan?

  How much money? If, if you don't mind me asking, at the height of your career, how much money? What were you worth? What was your net worth?

• 2:49:53Roger Reaves?

  I, I remember 60 million dollars.

• 2:49:55Shawn Ryan?

  60 million dollars? What year?

• 2:49:58Roger Reaves?

  1982.

• 2:49:59Shawn Ryan?

  I wonder what that's, what the equivalent of 60 million dollars today would be?

• 2:50:05Roger Reaves?

  Probably, I don't know, probably at least two times, double that. So probably a hundred and 150 million, something like that, 200 million, I don't know.

• 2:50:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, a lot of things tripled with this new guy in office, so.

• 2:50:19Roger Reaves?

  But it don't buy anything.

• 2:50:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right. But, but yeah, that would be interesting to know. 60 million dollars. Did, did you trust anybody to manage it?

• 2:50:31Roger Reaves?

  I trusted everybody.

• 2:50:33Shawn Ryan?

  You did? That was the mistake, huh?

• 2:50:35Roger Reaves?

  You can't, uh, when Murray and I first went out to California, we, we got a job. We, we didn't, was to leave with my sister for a few months. And so we got a job managing a 40 unit apartment building. This guy, Jack Tripp, was the nicest man. And he said, now Roger and Murray, I got something to tell you now. When you got this job, just remember that people are no damn good and give them a chance and they'll prove it. We thought, how awful.

• 2:51:03Roger Reaves?

  But after a lifetime in this business, I, I kinda think, Jack, I believe you knew something.

• 2:51:09Shawn Ryan?

  He may have been on to something, huh?

• 2:51:11Roger Reaves?

  You give somebody a million dollars and he gonna figure out every which way in the world not to ever give it back to you.

• 2:51:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:16Roger Reaves?

  Particularly if you go to jail, bye bye.

• 2:51:19Shawn Ryan?

  What was the, what was the, what was your most prized, other than the coin? What was your most prized investment?

• 2:51:27Roger Reaves?

  Wow. We had, we had a couple of different homes in Santa Barbara, a place up on Mission Ridge. That was sixteen thousand square feet, count in the basement and all. And it was something. I mean, it was so pretty until it just like, it was almost significant, it was so pretty. And it had been owned by the Catholic Church after a while. It made back in early nineteen hundreds, nineteen hundred to nineteen seven. And that thing was something else, but it had been run down. It was really run down. And I went in and the Catholic Church had had it and they had little cubicles in there for the nuns to live in, little cells. But they weren't even to the floor. They didn't even nail them down.

• 2:52:12Roger Reaves?

  And so I took those out and cleaned that floor and painted that place up and made it. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt had looked at it for the Western White House at one time.

• 2:52:19Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 2:52:20Roger Reaves?

  Yes. And so we lived there and I just went up to the place the other day to knock on the doors.

• 2:52:29Roger Reaves?

  And I took some pictures of it. I'll show them to you. But that was, that was a prized possession. I had to run off and leave that. And I walked out with the, I'm getting ahead of myself, but just on that one little story. I just having the floor redone and we had to go get something. And I got, I had work clothes on. I was working right with the rest of them. And I went out with the, the floor cleaners and got in a blue van and drove out. And about that time, fifty agents stormed through the place, kicking windows and doors in. It was already open. And my wife was in, in the bedroom with, with, with the baby. And they kept her at gunpoint all day long as they tore that house apart.

• 2:53:10Roger Reaves?

  We had beautiful stuff that was over a hundred years old in there. They just took axes to the. To cherry wood interior, just cut it up, just and uh.

• 2:53:23Roger Reaves?

  She said like they just scrubbed a bed, a bed across the floor and just made gouges. Oh, don't it ain't yours no more lady, you know, all that sort of stuff. So it was just awful. It was a sacrilege what they did to that place. Damn. So that was, that was probably the nicest property I ever had. And then I uh took an option to own every foot of land there. What's now the city called Moreno Valley, California. And of course I'd have been a billionaire, a trillionaire if I could have held on to that. But I had to run off and leave all that. Did you sell it or did it get confiscated? And uh, the man I had in his name, he run into the side of a mountain and got killed and.

• 2:54:04Roger Reaves?

  It was just like when that old hairy hand of fate turns against you, it turns all the way against you. Yeah. Ever which way you turn. Damn.

• 2:54:14Roger Reaves?

  Well, back to transport cocaine. Okay, so uh, I uh, I got above the fog one night. I was coming out of Columbia with that uh, like three hundred miles an hour and I got out there and I couldn't get down. Like everywhere, I only had maybe an hour or so fuel left when I got back. And uh, there's fog from New York to Dallas.

• 2:54:42Roger Reaves?

  I mean, it was white all the way up to Chicago, closed, closed, closed. Everything's closed. When the temperature and dew, dew point come together, you will have visible moisture. So there ain't no way to get around it and it was exactly the same. So it looked like it was about five hundred feet thick and full moon on top of it. And I'm sitting up there thinking I'm going to die. I can't get down. So my only thing was, and I I'm not much of an instrument flyer, I'm just more of a crop duster type out in the jungle flying. Anyhow, I had to go out, the only choice I had to save my life was to go out and come down the glide slope to New Orleans International Airport and land on the airport plane at night.

• 2:55:26Roger Reaves?

  While the airport is closed.

• 2:55:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 2:55:30Roger Reaves?

  I sat there on that runway all night long. Got out, I bounced down, when I got down, it was enough visible to see a little bit, so anyhow, I got it down. But to have that nervous to sit there all night, I sat there must have been about 12 hours. And the next morning, the sun came out and I could see the sun through the fog, but you couldn't see 100 feet, 200 feet in front of you, if that. So anyway, I just, I thought that security or anything might come around, check these runways out. And I'm sitting right in the middle, I was kind of off to one side.

• 2:56:06Roger Reaves?

  So I uh, I couldn't stand it any longer, it looked like it was breaking up a little bit, and I took off and and and uh, I went across to, across uh, Lake Pontchartrain, it's 30 miles away. And I had a runway over there, St. Tamithy Aviation. And I could see it through the broken fog. But it was still, I knew when I got into it, it was gonna be blind. So I just got off the end of it, wasn't that long of a runway. And I pulled the power and turned, pushed the nose down and when I got that thing stopped, I knew I was finished. I had enough money and I says, alright. So, uh, the fellow I gave the cocaine to in Miami, Lito, nicest fellow. And I, I just says, I'm it.

• 2:56:51Roger Reaves?

  Y'all pay me up, I'm through.

• 2:56:53Shawn Ryan?

  Oh no, Roger, no.

• 2:56:55Roger Reaves?

  Cause they, they were making this money by when I give it to them, they was probably getting a thousand dollars a kilo or something from uh, Escobar and them, so they, they had their whole uh

• 2:57:08Roger Reaves?

  organization that was just letting them through.

• 2:57:12Roger Reaves?

  I'll back up a little bit and just tell you that how I got it from Louisiana to Miami. I had to deliver it to Miami. So I had two people going to automobile auctions there in Florida, around Orlando and Tampa. And they was buying three big LTD Fords or Marquis Murkrees because they had big trunks. And they put the air shocks on them and they put these tires that wouldn't, couldn't go flat. And new hoses and fan belts. I said, I don't care if they look new, put new ones on there. We do not want this car to stop. So then you could only get a hundred kilos in the trunk of those cars because it was so fluffy.

• 2:57:56Roger Reaves?

  And so had drivers to drive it. And then the Colombians, I would give them the car. I'd sell it to them for $5,000. And they complained. I said, listen, man, you ain't going to get anybody else in the world that's going to get you cars with, that can't be traced with the, all the paperwork on it. It's in great shape. So then they really liked it. I said, I don't want that car going to your stash house and coming back to me. I don't, I don't know who's looking at you. Good call. I suppose we bought hundreds of cars. So over the, over the time that I worked with them. So anyhow, they really liked the car deal. So that was something that I, uh.

• 2:58:41Roger Reaves?

  So they says, don't you know anybody? Anyway, so I had met Barry Seal. And I'll tell you how I met Barry. I was looking for a place for my own about halfway between Colombia and the United States. And so I went to Honduras and I went to San Pedro Sula.

• 2:59:03Roger Reaves?

  And took my wife and the children down there and we went up into the mountains. There's a lake up there called Lake Azul and it's really pretty, really, really wonderful place. And they have largemouth bass. And the largest largemouth bass was caught in Montgomery Lake, right close to my house, about five miles away. And there were some bigger than that washed up when they had an earthquake on that lake. And I liked fish, so I thought, no, that's pretty. So we went up and did look at a ranch and it was just, it was just beautiful. So anyhow, my wife didn't want to live there, so we decided we came on back. And our clothes was all muddy and dirty from being up on that ranch for a few days.

• 2:59:46Roger Reaves?

  And we put them into cleaners and we had a reservation to fly back to New Orleans. So we went to the cleaners to get the clothes and they said, oh, they're not ready. We'll have them in the morning. So our plane's like at nine o'clock. So I said to my wife, you go to the airport and get on the plane, cause it'd be easier for me to get out and stand by. All the planes are full than it will be for all four of us. So I went to the cleaners and got the clothes and there was a big stack of them all in their plastic. And I got a taxi driver and I said, go faster, go faster. And I gave him a hundred dollars to go all the way faster and he just blew the horn faster. It'd go a bit faster.

• 3:00:28Roger Reaves?

  And we got to the airport and I jumped out of the taxi and went around the building. And here's the brand new seven twenty seven taxiing out. And I waved to the, with all the clothes on my back and I waved to the, to the pilot and he waves back. And then I see Maury's face in the cockpit. And so I see the front tire, he puts on the brake and it goes down and he's laughing. And he puts the air chair out for me to get on. And then I come running for it and he takes off like it's a hitchhiker. And he gets up there a few feet and then he stops again and laughed. Anyhow, he puts it all the way down and I get on the airplane with all those clothes on my back. Well, all the people just clapped real big for me when I got on. And I went on back about halfway back.

• 3:01:13Roger Reaves?

  And my daughter Miriam, she was about nine years old, eight or nine years old. She was sitting in the middle and I sat on the seat and after I got those clothes taken away. And there was a man sitting there by the window. Nice looking fellow, clear blue eyes and I thought, oh, I wonder what he is down here. So the plane took off and the wheels came up with a thud and went on a little bit further. Got up about 5,000 feet and they were just a little click, click. And Miriam said, what was that dad? I said, he just turned his autopilot on. The fellow reaches over and he says, you fly these things, huh? And I got a few hours, mister. My name Barry Seal, how you doing?

• 3:01:55Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 3:01:56Roger Reaves?

  So I got talking to him, he said he just got out of jail that morning. I said, uh huh, I bet you D E. Trying to get me to talk, I ain't saying nothing.

• 3:02:05Roger Reaves?

  So we went on and we got to be big buddies. He said he just got out of jail that that morning.

• 3:02:10Shawn Ryan?

  What was your initial impression? Did you think he was?

• 3:02:13Roger Reaves?

  I thought for sure he was some kind of government agent first time. He just looked like, he was princely, he looked.

• 3:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, he was, he wound up being one, kind of.

• 3:02:23Roger Reaves?

  Well, I know he wasn't, he probably was before that too. But he just had, he just had a princely look. He just, he, he, he had a demanding presence. Nice looking fellow and I didn't believe him a bit. But I talked, we talked flying and whatever. And he said he'd just gotten out of prison this morning, that morning. He'd got caught with a hundred kilos of cocaine in Honduras. And they'd taken his airplane and.

• 3:02:47Shawn Ryan?

  He just volunteered all that, right?

• 3:02:49Roger Reaves?

  Well, we just talked, I just, yeah, I reckon he did.

• 3:02:51Shawn Ryan?

  On a flight?

• 3:02:52Roger Reaves?

  Just on the flight over.

• 3:02:53Shawn Ryan?

  A light conversation on the way home?

• 3:02:54Roger Reaves?

  Two or a couple hours, we had a nice chat over across from Miriam. So when he got out, I, I didn't, I certainly didn't believe him. I thought he was just fishing for information from me. Well, they was 15 people or more, maybe 20, meeting him when he got out. There was old mother there and there was a pretty wife and little children hanging on him and crying. Grabbing his by the leg daddy, daddy and this and that. Man, he got tears in his eyes and it's like, that sucker's telling the truth.

• 3:03:26Roger Reaves?

  So I wrote my name on a little piece of paper and I said, Barry, I may have some work for you and come out and see me in Santa Barbara. So I went out to Santa Barbara and he called and he came out and so I says, I told him what I had. I said, I might have some work flying cocaine. Yes, sir. He'd be interested in it. I said, let me see if you can fly or not. So I took him out and I had a six ninety Aero Commander B rather than you. One three Tango Victors thirteen TV. I bought it from Channel thirteen in Los Angeles. And Barry took off with that thing and I mean, he was an ace. I'm just, I can get him from one place to another, but I'm no waste. I mean, he was like a aerobatic

• 3:04:11Roger Reaves?

  Blue Angels fact flyer. Oh, wow. So he just rung that thing out and I told him, that's enough. He was upside down, backwards, sideways.

• 3:04:24Roger Reaves?

  I said, that's enough. He about me, I'd be sick. So anyhow, he said, let me show you something. So he cut, kept, cut both engines over the end runway and he came in and he called a flying leaf. Bob Hoover did them at shows and come in just, so I knew he could fly anything he wanted to. So I gave him a job and he took off with my plane. He said he had it, that he had somebody in Mena, Arkansas that could tank it. See, so I came after a week or something. He called me and said, come to Baton Rouge. So I flew down there and stayed in his house in Baton Rouge and went out to the hangar and that plane was professionally tanked and all the way from the cabin back, back into the, where

• 3:05:08Roger Reaves?

  the luggage and that thing would, I guess, would have probably went from Bolivia to Canada if it wanted to. Wow. So I, I hired him to fly and I, I gave him a thousand dollars a kilo. So then he put now, so then I said, hey, I got, I got a guy, but let's put five hundred kilos on there. So now then that's two and a half million dollars a load that we're getting, but I paid Barry the million dollars a load. So I was still making the same amount that I was before.

• 3:05:39Roger Reaves?

  But I said, no, I got this place in Louisiana and I got the place on her. He said, no, no, my man, he said, I'm not going to land anywhere except in Mina, Arkansas.

• 3:05:49Shawn Ryan?

  Before we go into that, I just want to rewind.

• 3:05:53Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 3:05:54Shawn Ryan?

  You meet this guy in San Pedro Sula.

• 3:05:57Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 3:05:58Shawn Ryan?

  Honduras.

• 3:06:00Shawn Ryan?

  You land and what, a couple of weeks later, he's in Santa Barbara. You're verifying that he can fly. He's doing somersaults, flying upside down, doing all the tricks. Did you ask him, hey, where'd you learn how to do this shit?

• 3:06:16Roger Reaves?

  No.

• 3:06:16Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't?

• 3:06:17Roger Reaves?

  I don't think, no, I know I didn't. He could do it, so I didn't care where he learned.

• 3:06:21Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't care?

• 3:06:21Roger Reaves?

  No, he could do it. I can do most all that stuff, but I ain't no aerobatic pilot like that.

• 3:06:26Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 3:06:28Roger Reaves?

  So it was just, it just normally, but he was exceptional. He was as good as any Blue Angel pilot out there.

• 3:06:34Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ask if he was military or he flew for anybody before?

• 3:06:39Roger Reaves?

  No, he told me that he had been a 747 captain with Trans World Airlines. And that he had got in trouble over a load to, I believe, a DC-6, a DC-7, taking explosives to the Cuban Contras and he lost his job over that. So he was a sport.

• 3:06:59Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 3:07:00Roger Reaves?

  So you're already my friend now with what you've done.

• 3:07:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:04Roger Reaves?

  So, yeah, so anyhow, where were we? I went to his house and stayed with him.

• 3:07:09Shawn Ryan?

  He's not going to land anywhere but Arkansas.

• 3:07:11Roger Reaves?

  That's right, because he said, it's paid off all the way to the top, which is going to cost you $50,000 every time my wheels land. What are you talking about? He says, I can't get caught in Mina, Arkansas.

• 3:07:29Roger Reaves?

  And later on, whenever I would, so he was working with, he had CIA connections, I don't know where he'd flown with, and also Bill Clinton was the governor there, so I ain't seeing nothing more about that. I hear that they call it Arkansaside up there instead of homicide.

• 3:07:52Roger Reaves?

  And plus, I don't know anything. I never met those gentlemen. I didn't fool with it. That was Barry's end of the story. But anybody wants to look, just read about what happened in Mena, Arkansas. And that movie that they made that they called America Made was written as Mena. And when Hillary was running for president, the Democratic Party stopped it. And even the director quit. And they changed part of the script and they changed the name to America Made.

• 3:08:23Roger Reaves?

  The whole thing's about Mena, Arkansas, and Bill Clinton and a couple of boys that got killed on a railroad track and put up there by the sheriff to get chopped up and they some

• 3:08:35Roger Reaves?

  some stories there.

• 3:08:36Shawn Ryan?

  They got Clintoned.

• 3:08:39Roger Reaves?

  They claim it is him. I'm glad I didn't meet him.

• 3:08:43Roger Reaves?

  Looked like he was on a plane somewhere that he shouldn't have been here recently too.

• 3:08:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. He's got a couple paintings down there too, from what I hear.

• 3:08:55Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, and his brother, his brother Roger got caught with cocaine and he pardoned him, but he didn't pardon me. And Roger Clinton says that Bill's nose was like a vacuum cleaner in that cocaine pile.

• 3:09:09Roger Reaves?

  But he didn't inhale. That's just a good point.

• 3:09:10Shawn Ryan?

  That's, yeah, hey.

• 3:09:12Roger Reaves?

  Presidents are just such fine people sometimes.

• 3:09:15Shawn Ryan?

  They are some very trustworthy individuals, aren't they?

• 3:09:18Roger Reaves?

  They'll put you in prison. He went in and he raised the penalty for crack cocaine 100 times. They just say, just political prostitutes is all they are.

• 3:09:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:29Roger Reaves?

  That's the word for them.

• 3:09:30Shawn Ryan?

  I'm on, I like that. I'm gonna use that.

• 3:09:35Shawn Ryan?

  So Barry was tied in with the Clintons, the CIA, and he had free rein to land wherever he wants.

• 3:09:44Roger Reaves?

  He's not gonna get caught in Arkansas. Absolutely. So it was a little far to go up to Mina, so I talked to Escobar and them, and they said, "Well, that's no problem." So I landed there myself to do a loading. They put a feller named Benjamin, Ben, in the plane with me, and we went up to a landing strip there in Nicaragua. And I met the generals and all that, and they said, "You can land right here. Just come in, don't say a thing on the radio, just land anytime you want to, and we'll refuel you, and you get food, whatever you want. We'll wash your windshield, and you'll be on your way." How do you make these connections? I didn't make them in Ochoa and Escobar. They're just giving you direction, "Hey, you need to go to this spot."

• 3:10:29Roger Reaves?

  So that man flew with me up there to introduce me, and he went back and got killed in a helicopter crash. Real nice feller down in Colombia. A lot of people died in this business. I'm telling you, I'm one of the only people I know still alive. So I'm blessed. A lot of accidents happen, huh? And some of them really were accidents. A lot of them got killed violent, and bad people in that business. And I told my friend, I had a friend, later on I hired a feller in California, and I'll just say his name, Jerry. He's still alive, same age I am, and he flew, and so he was flying about once a week, and then Barry was flying once a week. And the Colombians would tell them that your California connections has got more than you are, so there was a little bit of competition with each other.

• 3:11:13Roger Reaves?

  So I had two airlines going, and both of them I bought these Panther conversions. They was called Panthers. They was, oh, they was wonderful, the small 20-inch planes, but you could put 500 kilos in there, and two pilots, and way overloaded, and they'd fly from Colombia to Arkansas. So they were both going. But anyhow. How'd you find out about those, those conversions? I think Barry come up with that. Barry did? They had used him over in Southeast Asia. It was a CIA conversion of some kind of a Piper plane. It was a CIA conversion? Right. They had made it, and that's what they was flying over in, out of Burma and Vietnam, behind the lines over there.

• 3:11:55Roger Reaves?

  They real quiet. They put big, heavy, wide blade propellers on them and put Q-tips, and you couldn't hear the propeller noise. No kidding? So, they were, they were, so I bought, I think, seven of them. They were $400,000 apiece. So, were these, were they open market? Yeah, you could buy them. They still, they out there now. What do they say, what do you, I mean, who do you buy them from? They look like any little executive airplane. They don't look like those old big twin beaches and DC3s. They look, they fit right in. Just, only thing you can tell is that large prop, and with the Q-tip on it, nobody would notice that. Is? Somebody knows. So, the people you're buying it from, are they, do they know what you're doing?

• 3:12:37Roger Reaves?

  I don't think anybody cares. It's all sack full of money, and they want, they don't want to report it either. Okay. So, it was buying airplanes was that, and you could just put them in anybody's name. There was nothing to it back then. Okay. Now, they've closed that loop, but back then, it was just easy to get an airplane. So, I had Jerry flying and Barry flying, and I mean, I was putting at least eight, eight carloads a week into the, to the Clemens there in Miami. And the money stacked up, so I didn't hardly know what to do with it. So, it was, that was... How close did you get with Barry? We were buddies. Yes, sir. Best friends?

• 3:13:21Roger Reaves?

  Friends, yes, sir. We're such good friends. We done staying at Dominique Hotel, Mar and I, and our little boy Rhett was a baby, and, so Barry, we went out to dinner and come back and there was no rooms. I went, so Barry come up and stay in our room. We had big, two queen-sized beds up there, and so Barry come in there and stripped down to his polka dot under shorts and his T-shirt. He put the baby up on his belly and give him the bottle. Ain't that good, Rhett? Mmm, yum, yum, yum. So, we could spend the night in the same room to each other, so that's what kind of friends we were. So, you built a lot of trust? Hundred percent. No way I didn't trust that man in my life. How long was your guys' relationship? About two years.

• 3:14:06Roger Reaves?

  So, um, yeah, Barry did exactly what he said he would do. I mean, just right on. But he was a stickler for his money. He wouldn't fly again until he got paid. So, and he would bellyache in a, in a kind of joking way, but he, he wanted his money. I don't blame him. And he, no way, he wouldn't do another load till he got paid. So I owed him a million dollars. So I got it in a nice big box. And I got, uh, once, uh, there's a store I saw these stay free mini pads, played his feminine napkin. And I put them inside of it.

• 3:14:41Roger Reaves?

  And put a big, big pink bow on it and tied it up for him. He opened that up. He thought it's so funny. He put it, he put those things on his mantelpiece. They stayed up there as long as he lived.

• 3:14:54Roger Reaves?

  Yes, I, I love Barry. He was, he was a friend of mine. I don't have many friends in life. It was real good friends, but Barry was a good friend of mine. So, uh, I, uh. Were you guys ever flying together? No. Always separate? Just separate. Uh, uh, yeah, I flew it a few times. We're just going somewhere, but nothing to do. Not working? No working, no. Is there a reason for that or just too busy? I didn't need anybody to fly with me. If anybody ever I get fly with me, get scared and it's, it's contagious. I'm not scared by myself. I've had some people really scare me on airplanes crying, we're gonna die. It's been a tickle up in Alaska and an ice storm I got into one time.

• 3:15:36Roger Reaves?

  So I, I own something like that. No, I don't need anybody at all. Okay.

• 3:15:44Roger Reaves?

  Well, how does it, how does it develop with Barry? It just developed into a friendship and he'd get his money and go about his business and I, I moved down to Key Biscayne, Florida, where I was closer to the, to the people and, um, I was the only one to meet those people and a guy was Leto was his name. And I would stay at some Cuban shop and sandwich shop in line and we'd meet and I'd tell them where to meet me and I'd point out the cars where they, where they were parked. And so that was, that was how we did it. No, no talking, no phone calls, nothing. Just straight up, here's the keys.

• 3:16:24Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, yeah, so anyway, I was, I'll regress you a little bit in that. Whenever Barry wanted the Panthers, then I had that Arrow Commander that I thought it might be kinda hot. So I had parked it, uh, in a place in Tucan Airport down in Jamaica. So I don't know why I wanted to sell that thing for half a million dollars, making more than that a day almost. But I took a, I wanted to get rid of it, something to do. So I flew down with a, uh, a broker from San Antonio, Texas. And, uh, so we went out and washed the airplane and took the tanks out and put the seats back in it.

• 3:17:07Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, we took off. And just the time we got to the end of the runway, before that airplane went to turning in a circle, it scared the living daylights out of me. What in the world? I thought that plane had got bent. The trucks hit this thing. We ain't gonna be able to land it. We spiraling up, going up. That thing's got a lot of power, spiraling up in circles. Well, anyway, he's up here fooling with the trim tab and somebody had set in that airplane and just fooled the trim tab for the trim. And it, one of them little things that's just benign on your checklist and neither one of us noticed it. And it had trimmed over and it's got that plane flying in circles. Got that thing straightened out, but my knees was knocking.

• 3:17:52Roger Reaves?

  So we landed and, uh, went back to the Pegasus Hotel after our brush with death. And, uh, we had ordered drinks out on the patio. There was a, a table there over, away and there was a grandma and there was mama and dad and two pretty girls and kinda like evening party dresses, pretty girls. And so they was having a hard time. They, they, they was speaking Spanish and they couldn't make the black waiter from Jamaica understand what they wanted. So I went over to the table and I said, I speak a little Spanish, could I help you? Oh, please. And so I told the waiter what they wanted and then they asked us, come, come sit with us. So we, we moved over and sat this table on the balcony with them.

• 3:18:39Roger Reaves?

  And they told me that they was there, that Grandma had come from the United States and brought presents because it was the twins' seventeenth birthday. And that's the reason they had the party dresses on, out on the balcony of that hotel. And they said that their whole family had gone to Miami, had gone to Florida on the Muriel boat lift. When Carter said that the Cubans could, could come and he wanted to, and then Castro did it dirty. He emptied the insane asylums and all the prisons in Cuba and put them on the boats. But they just went with everybody else and all their family went, but Papa was a professor and he was holding back, let's see what happens on this. And then Carter saw what happened and he closed that terrible mistake they made.

• 3:19:24Roger Reaves?

  So this family had gone to Jamaica hoping to get to, to the United States, but they were stuck there and Papa was working in a machine shop for fifty dollars a month. And Grandma had come down with gifts. They couldn't, wasn't he making enough to live? So I said, I asked the fellow that was gonna buy the airplane, I said, would you in for a little, a little adventure? And he said, yeah. So I said, I'll take you to, to, to the United States tomorrow. How? What, what? I said, don't worry about it, I can get you there. Well, they didn't believe me. So anyway, they called all night and had the boss call and somebody else call up to my room. And I said, go to Air Jamaica tomorrow morning and each one of you just bring one bag, one

• 3:20:08Roger Reaves?

  suitcase, don't, don't bring any more than one. And so when I cranked up and filed my flight plan, I filed it to Merida, Mexico, because I didn't know, I certainly had to stop somewhere. So I, I went into Air Jamaica, said I need some hydraulic fluid, and I went in and they jumped in, but they had one little travel case, they had misunderstood me.

• 3:20:31Roger Reaves?

  So they got in the airplane and shut the windows and I reversed it and backed out. I'm going down the taxiway and somebody told that these people had got in the plane. And the Kingston Tower says, one, three, tango, Victor, hold your position. Rather hard. And I, uh-oh. And I nodded to the co-pilot and I says, I said, Kingston Tower, your transmission is broken and unreadable. Good day. From down the taxiway, I went and took off. Nice. Got about thirty thousand feet and the landing gear came down and the wheel and the flaps came into the, I was out of hydraulic fluid. The line had been sitting up, the plane had been sitting there maybe a year and it just got loose.

• 3:21:16Roger Reaves?

  So wow. I had to land straight ahead and I landed at where I took all the money. Anyway, can't think of it right now. What's the island right between Mexico, the British island where all the people go for the money? I just can't think. Anyway. Virgin Islands? Pardon? What did you say? The Virgin Islands? No. I can't think of it and I know his name as I know my own. Where was it? That money place at? Cayman. Grand Cayman. Grand Cayman Island. I landed straight ahead at Grand Cayman. Thank you. My pleasure. I've been in there, I've been in there forty times.

• 3:22:01Roger Reaves?

  I can't think of it. Yes. And anyway, I told them, get out, get out and go around behind and get, get some coffee and hamburgers. They went around and here come the, the British police with their guns and their little pistol, which is unusual, and they search the airplane and my contraband's at the table. So anyway, we get the hydraulic fluid fixed and I get back in and we file a flight plan to Merida. Now then, I can't go into Merida. I don't know what they're gonna do with the Cuban people with Cuban passports. So we stop at Chicaniza. And we get out and we just walk into a wall of rain halfway down the runway and the other

• 3:22:43Roger Reaves?

  pilot from San Antonio takes off and we leave, I'm leaving there with mom and dad and the two girls. So we walk out, we get soaked and we walk back about a mile to the highway. It's a small highway coming across Mexico there and we wave and wave all afternoon and I was so close.

• 3:23:01Roger Reaves?

  The car is way back and I pull out a hundred dollar bill and I wave it and they wave back. And late in the afternoon, an old school bus made in Fort Valley, Georgia stops and they got pigs and chickens and we all sitting there steaming and that. And we get to Merida that night about Mexico and they've, that pilot has stayed up and they got to cook for us and somebody washed and ironed our clothes and I remember we had pepper steaks. And we went to bed the next morning. We went out and he filed a flight plan to New Orleans and we had the, the big truck come between the flight planning office and the airplane and we slipped in, so he filed it for one. So we fly across the Gulf of Mexico. And we land in a cane field there in Southern Louisiana.

• 3:23:45Roger Reaves?

  And we jump out real quick and the pilot takes off and goes on in and clears customs in New Orleans so he won't get in truck. Well, we looked down and it looked like it's a mile both ways of canal with scum on it. And I thought, well, it might be about knee deep. Let's don't walk all the way around. There was a junkyard across, across the way there. And so we get down in that water and pretty soon it's nearly up to the girl's chin. It's got green scum all over them. That little suitcase up over their head. It's wading across the water. Wading away across this thing. It was way deeper than it looked like. Anyhow, that's twice we've been soaked wet and coming. So I'm bringing my charge on. So we come out to the junkyard on the other side.

• 3:24:29Roger Reaves?

  And there's a man with a old Buick with the fender off, front fender off and it's got rusted oil all over the blood tray. And I said, mister, I give you a hundred dollars to take me to Bourbon Street in New Orleans. You got a deal. He opens the door and one minute later we're doing eighty miles an hour through the cane fields of Louisiana with these girls. Anyhow, we come down there and we needed some clothes and we went shopping. Went stayed in the Queen Anne Hotel, one of my favorites in New Orleans. And I took them shopping and they were so meager and they just bring me back the little change. No, no, just go, just go shopping. So that night they called everybody in Miami and that we're gonna come down on a, on a delta the next day.

• 3:25:16Roger Reaves?

  And so, uh, we, we got in there and we landed it in Miami the next, next afternoon. And there were so many Cuban people sitting there, I mean, with cameras flashing and we got off and they, they had so many Chevys Regals till I couldn't tell them the girls was covered in flowers and they took me to Opa-locka out there and they had a street barricaded off and they was barbecuing hogs and goats out there. What a party. They would have put me on my shoulders and, and take me. So anyway, I had some money in my pocket and I took it, took it in the front room and they gave, gave it to mom and dad and they just stood there and cried. So, uh, some years later, I, I jump ahead in 40 years and I, I went to prison after, pretty close after that, I'll tell you. And

• 3:26:01Roger Reaves?

  I lost contact with them. And so somebody read my book here a few months ago and, or they did. And I was in Miami and I went to see them and what a joyous reunion. They hugged my neck. They lived in a gated community. Their children were PhDs and blood spatter stuff for the, for the city of whatever that business is. And, uh, we just had a, a wonderful fiesta there with them here. This is the video you just showed me on the break? I showed you that video. That's amazing. Yes. So, anyway, they said, you have a house here as long as you live. That was, that was 20 years? Forty years ago. Forty years? Forty years ago, almost exactly to the day. Man. So that was it. Well, let's take a little break.

• 3:26:46Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break.

• 3:26:53Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern

• 3:27:34Shawn Ryan?

  about self-defense, home defense, crimes on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping,

• 3:28:18Shawn Ryan?

  all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there.

• 3:28:35Shawn Ryan?

  And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 3:28:51Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Roger, before we get into dropping the money in the Grand Caymans, I want to, we're always going to Louisiana. You're always dropping loads in Louisiana. I'm just curious, why is it always Louisiana?

• 3:29:06Roger Reaves?

  Okay, you know, I told you that I figured out how to get the marijuana into the United States by going way out 300 miles off the coast of San Diego and coming around behind the Santa Barbara Islands.

• 3:29:21Roger Reaves?

  Well, I went down to New Orleans and I would, excuse me.

• 3:29:27Roger Reaves?

  I cleaned the Russian grain ships. And I'd go fishing out there and I saw all those helicopters coming in from those oil wells. There's hundreds of oil wells off the coast of Louisiana. They go out for a hundred miles or so. That Mississippi River flooded that out and I believe it's six thousand feet deep of muck under that gulf there. That's where all those shrimp. And they go out shrimping and those oil wells are there and they just punch it right through that muck, nothing. And then right down into the oil and the gas. And every afternoon, there's a dozen or twenty helicopters going back forth, changing crews. And they just like fireflies everywhere out there about dark coming in.

• 3:30:11Roger Reaves?

  And I said, now that's all right. You get in amongst them, you won't be seen. So when I started flying, coming out from the other way and landing out of Columbia, or I said, hey, I'm not going back across that border into Texas or California. Of course, it's further. So I'm going straight into Louisiana, because it's exactly north. Just put your compass north and that's, it's north. And so I would come over Merida, Mexico. I'd stay out in the Caribbean, off of land, off of Nicaragua particularly and off of Cuba. And I'd fly up with the, in the channel between Mexico and Cuba and cut across part of Merida, Yucatan.

• 3:30:56Roger Reaves?

  And then when I got about two hundred, three hundred miles out from the United States coast, the ADIZ zone where they do have defense, I'd put that baby on the ground, on the water, and slow it down and come in with a way just after dark. And I'd come in slow with those helicopters. And I know they couldn't see me. And those oil wells, some of them are several hundred feet high. And I'd come in, some of them may be higher than I was. Wow. Weave in and come on out there and land. So I knew I wasn't on anybody's radar. They, I guess they could have. Just too much going on. But they would bug my airplane sometime, but I'd always find the bugs. They was mad. That was in the court records.

• 3:31:41Roger Reaves?

  Those things cost seventeen thousand dollars a piece and I had a collection of them.

• 3:31:48Roger Reaves?

  They had to put them, they couldn't put them behind metal and there's only a few places on airplane that's got not metal, like glass or rubber, and that's where they'd put them. And you could see right, right where they'd taken the screws out, put it back in, tried to cover it up. I'll be damned. So that's why I went to Louisiana. Makes a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah. So Grand Cayman. Grand Cayman Island. Money's piling up, I mean, money's piling up by the millions. And, uh. Where are you putting all this? I'm telling you, just, I buried it in the ground a lot of time, just buried it in the sand and paint cans without, without hoops on it.

• 3:32:30Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, so at this particular time, I got up, I had about fifteen million dollars. And, uh, I, uh, it was too, too big for me to carry, so I, I hired a, I believe it was a Falcon jet out of San Antonio. And when I went to California, picked up some and come back to, uh, San Antonio and got some more and then, and then we went to, I had to lay on top of the money. Uh, I'll tell you that, uh, a, um, a bill, a United States bill from one or a hundred dollars, they, they weigh one gram. So, uh, you got a thousand bills is one kilogram.

• 3:33:11Roger Reaves?

  So, uh, so anyhow, a, um, a million dollars in hundred dollar bills is, is, is ten kilograms. So that's, that's a hundred thou, that's, that's only twenty-two point two pounds. But if you put them in hundred, in one dollar bills, it's, it's one ton, two thousand two hundred pounds. I think it's funny that you know this. So, yeah, you weigh your money, you don't have to count it, you just weigh it. And you, you, you just about dead on, if you, you just clip through it and see if it's old twenties or fifties and put it on the scale, it's right there, what you got. Okay. And it's right, it's just about as right as you can count it. Okay. So, uh, got where you didn't even have to, those people, their, their money was correct anyway, right to it.

• 3:33:55Roger Reaves?

  So, uh, anyhow, I'd weigh the money. So I, uh, I had a, I must've had a lot of twenties. Anyhow, we packed that plane so full where the pilots had to get in first and then finish packing it up. And then I crawled and laid up on top of the money and we went to Grand Cayman Island.

• 3:34:14Roger Reaves?

  And they, Van would back up, unload the money in it and then the pilots could get out and we'd go to the bank and, and they'd pretend to count it and there's about 20 people behind it, 20 men and women, all in the starched iron shirts and ties. And if I'd batted my eye, 20 hundred dollar bills had hit the gas. The ground on the other side, you know, they stole, I mean, most every load they'd steal at least forty thousand dollars out of it. There was nothing I could do. Yeah. Later on, they stole it all. Banker just took it and went out of business. Now he's over in Bakersfield, California, counting and says, "The Reverend Stephen

• 3:34:56Roger Reaves?

  McTaggart, he got a house over there with a moat around it, made, made it look like the English style, feeding the deer and the turkeys on my money." Wow. I went over to see him and they said, "We don't know you, we don't want to talk to you." He'd have put me back in prison in a flash if I'd have said something. Damn. I wonder how many people that happened to? I don't know. Most people would have done something to him. That's, that's why I'm asking, you know? Must, just knew I would, he knew I wanted to kill her, so just did it. Yeah. How long was it there for? For all went, went away? About three years and I was making 14% interest.

• 3:35:38Roger Reaves?

  So, I bought, bought gold coins, cougar rounds by the gun, I reckon. Damn. With that, just, that was, that was how I got the money down to Grand Cayman Island. How did your relationship with Ochoa and Escobar develop through the years?

• 3:36:06Roger Reaves?

  My, uh, Ocho invited my family, myself, and we went to his, his, his ranch that was just north of Baranquilla. That thing was a paradise. It looked like Africa. And he had all the out, uh, you know, these, what I was most impressed with was a big aviary with the, all the birds in it. He had birds from all over the world in there. I like birds. And then we went out there and there were the giraffes and the zebras and all this stuff. And then he had, uh, little, little ultralights on floats. I flew that around. He had boats to take you water skiing in. It was just fun. We spent a weekend with them. He had big old, his great old big four hundred duck found father and his mother

• 3:36:47Roger Reaves?

  and his brothers and sisters. His brother put on a bullfight and a real bullfight too. I mean, there's, I could like a Fabio. So that guy got with him and, uh, Escobar, I never had any, uh, real social meeting like that with the family. Uh, I remember we got in his plane and we flew to, uh, I, he must have had a lot of farm, but he had bought someplace to come across it. And, uh, it was just a regular place and house. We had some coffee there. And he asked me, uh, uh, you ride motorcycle? Yeah, I ride motorcycle. So they had these dirt bikes out there. And I think, and so I boom, boom, boom. And

• 3:37:29Roger Reaves?

  there's four, five of them ready to go. And I just took off and yawn. And there's a little ditch out there about knee deep and about that wide. And my front field fell in there and I went skidding across that. They knew I was gonna do it. It was like a trap. It was a setup. It was a setup. Of course it was. I said, well, we rode around the motorcycles a while. And then we got on horses. And he wanted to know if he had a machine gun pistol. You know how to use this? Yeah. Never seen one before.

• 3:38:05Roger Reaves?

  We rounded up some cows and rucks of stumps and stuff and pretended like we cowboys. And I went on back and flew him back to Medellin. And so that was one time with him.

• 3:38:18Shawn Ryan?

  When you're around these guys, what's their entourage look like? Is it, is it you and them alone? Is it fifty guards around them?

• 3:38:27Roger Reaves?

  Ochoa had one pistolero. Kind of stout fellow. I bet he was a crack shot, though. And that was only one when he was driving, whatever. I went with him sometime and I went to a funeral with him. And, but Escobar had several bodyguards.

• 3:38:44Shawn Ryan?

  Did he?

• 3:38:44Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, they were, he was, wherever I went with him, there was about three or four fellows there that was, you know, was well armed. So, but you didn't see it. You just, it was just like a bunch of them.

• 3:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  You just knew they were around?

• 3:38:56Roger Reaves?

  Well, they were there for sure. They was there, and they were there protecting him because he, I suppose he'd killed a bunch of people. He's a murderer.

• 3:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:04Roger Reaves?

  And so I only met him, I guess, four times. But I went down there one time and saw him and I said, listen, man, that runway is just too short in the jungle. We're having trouble getting off there. And next time the boys went down there, they said it looked like L.A. International. They clean the jungle now. They had bulldozers down in Old Clay and it was smooth, five thousand feet. So he got, he got it done if you ask him to do something.

• 3:39:32Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:39:32Roger Reaves?

  Because it was, it was a lot, don't know, that was like fifteen million dollar worth of coke there coming out twice a week.

• 3:39:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:38Roger Reaves?

  So they was, they was interested in keeping me happy.

• 3:39:41Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's kind of a mystery on who was in charge of the Medellin cartel.

• 3:39:46Roger Reaves?

  They, they were no, they were no leader. They was, I suppose that only ones that I ever knew was Pablo and Jorge.

• 3:39:55Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:39:55Roger Reaves?

  And Jorge was the one that was my handler, let's say. And I know, I mean, because they were right there next door and I, I knew the cocaine coming, there would be, I believe, twenty-five kilos in a duffel bag. And the duffel bag would have a lock on it. And they would be.

• 3:40:15Roger Reaves?

  What the people used to brand their steers that their animals with, it would look like brands on those duffel bags.

• 3:40:21Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:40:22Roger Reaves?

  Three rattlesnakes, or three X's, or whatever that they had. And I kind of learned, so I know that Ochoa was shipping a lot more than Escobar was.

• 3:40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Was he?

• 3:40:34Roger Reaves?

  Yes, uh-huh. There was three of them, there was three brothers and an old man, and I don't know, but certainly they were, for my opinion, they were a lot bigger. But each one of them was individual. And I told you about how it was an insurance company with the $10,000 guaranteed. Now, yes, so that was why they had so much of it, that they just, whoever they wanted to come in out of the jungle.

• 3:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  So, I'm just, I'm curious about the structure of the Medellin cartel. Is it, is the Medellin cartel like an umbrella company? And then you have Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar as subsidiary companies? They're kind of partners?

• 3:41:12Roger Reaves?

  No, they were nothing like that. It was just individual people, just like you and I, and Tim over there, and we kind of says, alright, we got enough money, we big enough, let's just, let's make this, if you, we got this organization, they call it a cartel. We got a loose agreement, that we will, you, the people of Colombia, you give us your cocaine, and we will ship it for you for $10,000 a kilo. Now, they become just a shipping agent. Now, they paid me $5,000 to carry it, so they made $5,000 just receiving it from the little people, 10 kilos, 100 kilos, putting it in my airplane, and then their people

• 3:41:56Roger Reaves?

  in Miami, they had a couple of, a lot of safe houses and...

• 3:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding? So this is, so essentially, at this time, the Medellin cartel is...

• 3:42:08Shawn Ryan?

  Essentially, just a illegal logistics company.

• 3:42:12Roger Reaves?

  A shipping, a shipping outfit. They just, just five guys got together and said, listen, we got enough money. Let's stop this killing. Ten thousand people a year are killed right here in Medellin.

• 3:42:23Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:42:23Roger Reaves?

  Over this cocaine. Let's stop that. We were no, no reason to anybody killing anybody else ever again.

• 3:42:29Shawn Ryan?

  So they did that to stop the violence?

• 3:42:31Roger Reaves?

  To stop the violence and plus they got.

• 3:42:33Shawn Ryan?

  And make a shit ton of money.

• 3:42:34Roger Reaves?

  Billion dollars out of it.

• 3:42:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:35Roger Reaves?

  Listen, we making five thousand dollars every time you, you bring us one. And all we got to do is put it in Roger's airplane and he gets it to my man, Lito in Miami.

• 3:42:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:44Roger Reaves?

  Lito gives it to whoever they tell him to give it to. That's it.

• 3:42:51Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, then it developed into more than that because they started killing everybody.

• 3:42:56Roger Reaves?

  Well, Ocho, I don't believe ever got into it. I think they might have had Bear Seal killed, but other than that Escobar was a killer. Nobody else, the rest of the fellas didn't. The, they had, they, okay, the best I understand it was that there were three organizations in Colombia that was in the cocaine business. The military was one, they one is biggest. And then they had the FARC guerrillas that owned a third or maybe almost half of the country, particularly all the Amazon area, and they were the growers. And plus the people from Bolivia and Peru were shipping their base up because they could get to, either up there to, to manufacture it.

• 3:43:42Roger Reaves?

  So they, the FARC was big time in it.

• 3:43:46Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:43:46Roger Reaves?

  And that's where they got their money to try to take over the government. And they, they were communist. So, uh, but then you had the, I'll call them the white Colombians, the landowners that owned the ranches up in the highlands all, all throughout Colombia. Well, they were dead against the FARC because FARC was wanting to take their land.

• 3:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:06Roger Reaves?

  So they was, they was at war to some scale with the FARC. And now the military definitely is wanting the FARC out of the way because they, they're gonna take over the country and get rid of the military. Now, the military was in the cocaine business too. Which was sure, you can't say they weren't, they was, I don't know how big they were, but they was, they were shipping it.

• 3:44:29Roger Reaves?

  So, but the, uh, the, the, the white Colombians landowners was, was big too. So there was kind of a three-way war going on there.

• 3:44:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:44:39Roger Reaves?

  And, uh.

• 3:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  And where did the cartels fall into this?

• 3:44:43Roger Reaves?

  Well, they were with the white landowners.

• 3:44:45Shawn Ryan?

  They were the white landowners?

• 3:44:46Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 3:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  So what about the, what about the Cali cartel versus the Medellin cartel?

• 3:44:52Roger Reaves?

  Okay, now, the Cali, the, after the Cali cartel, well, I mean, the Medellin cartel got in trouble. Then Cali sprung up. And I, um, I spent four days in the house with, uh,

• 3:45:09Roger Reaves?

  Miguel, I can't say it, Aurelio, the one that was the, uh, the, the big, um, they owned drugstores down there.

• 3:45:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:45:18Roger Reaves?

  And, uh.

• 3:45:20Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not familiar.

• 3:45:21Roger Reaves?

  No, anyhow, I don't, I'm not either, but I never did any business, but I went, went to Canada to unload a load for twenty tons for them.

• 3:45:28Shawn Ryan?

  To Cali or to?

• 3:45:29Roger Reaves?

  For the Cali cartel later on.

• 3:45:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:45:32Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, that, uh, I was up in Canada and, um, right at two thousand and, uh, the millennium. And so I was waiting on the boat to come. I had a big boat to go out and meet it and two big dump trucks to put it in and all that. And they was gonna pay twenty, I was gonna make forty million dollars for one night's work. So.

• 3:45:54Shawn Ryan?

  Forty million dollars?

• 3:45:55Roger Reaves?

  They would pay me two thousand dollars a kilo to unload this ship. It was a big boat coming out of Lima, a big container ship, and one of the containers was going to be on the back. And they had a big rope and every six feet or so was a hook with, with twenty kilos of marijuana, of cocaine to it. All in waterproof bags and it was gonna, it would be string out a mile. And then I, I had a salmon, uh, salmon boat with a reel on it to reel that in and put it into the fish hole.

• 3:46:23Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:46:24Roger Reaves?

  So, anyway, I got all that and I, and I, like an idiot, they wanted to give me some money. I said, no, man, I'll, I'll take care of that. Well, I called my friend down in Mario, where's the boat? We ready, you know, we're waiting. He said, Leyland, Atisia, read the newspaper. So I got, went and got a, a newspaper.

• 3:46:46Roger Reaves?

  Seven hundred arrested worldwide. And there's the people I'm working for, number one, two, three, four, five.

• 3:46:57Roger Reaves?

  I got rid of that stuff I had. I sold it to Fire Sale the same morning.

• 3:47:04Shawn Ryan?

  We're having a liquidation sale over here.

• 3:47:06Roger Reaves?

  Bought me a car. And we headed, I didn't want to come across the border or nothing. We went east all the way to Montreal before I got stopped.

• 3:47:14Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 3:47:16Roger Reaves?

  That's how close I came to it. Wow.

• 3:47:19Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:47:20Roger Reaves?

  They had stitches in that thing from all the way back. That was a Cali cartel. That's, that was my only dealings with them.

• 3:47:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:47:29Shawn Ryan?

  Did you go down to Cali at all?

• 3:47:30Roger Reaves?

  Oh, I stayed in Cali for months. I just stayed down there and I, I enjoyed it very much, yes.

• 3:47:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I, I lived in Colombia for five years, roughly, in and out of there. And, uh, well, I'm just curious, what was your favorite part of Colombia to go to? Was it Medellin?

• 3:47:47Roger Reaves?

  I think so, yes. And then Bogota and Medellin and out in that area there, yes. I liked the mountains behind, uh, Santa Marta. You go up to the mountains, it's got snow on it. You go up there and the Indian people, it's so nice and the little coffee farms. And you look down on the sailboats and the ocean and we'd take mules and go back into the back country. And I mean, it was just, oh, there'd be mule trains, fifty mules, some guy on the front of it. And, and at night they'd, they'd pass each other. And I remember those two guys and one of them, they both have cigarettes. You could see a cigarette glow and those guys with a deep voice, adios, adios, I thought the world, saying goodbye. And I found out the adios means to God, to God, adios.

• 3:48:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:29Roger Reaves?

  And so I said, all right. And then you see some little boy with a switch, bringing up that last donkey in the back, them huge bales of marijuana all on it. That was just so romantic. It was just beautiful.

• 3:48:43Roger Reaves?

  You go into a place that they must have like four or five hundred mules, donkeys.

• 3:48:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:48Roger Reaves?

  And they'd have a tack room there that you just couldn't believe with the saddles and and work saddles and just go out and lasso what you want and go.

• 3:48:57Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever buy any property in Columbia?

• 3:48:59Roger Reaves?

  No, I did not.

• 3:49:00Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever want to?

• 3:49:01Roger Reaves?

  No.

• 3:49:02Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:49:02Roger Reaves?

  It was lawless when I was down there. I think it's, I know it's better off now, but it's not. Back then it was just like, good gracious, you don't know.

• 3:49:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I actually had a, my best friend bought a condo in Cartagena and got ripped out right from under him and that was about two thousand fifteen, maybe? But um, I wanted to buy some stuff. Did you ever go down and look at, when I was going down to Medellin, um, I dabbled in a lot of cocaine and uh, I would go, did you ever go look at Pablo Escobar's grave?

• 3:49:40Roger Reaves?

  No, I didn't. I've never been there since then. Yeah, oh, I did. I went, yeah, when I got out of prison in Germany, well, I'm getting ahead of myself. I went to Columbia again.

• 3:49:52Shawn Ryan?

  Did you?

• 3:49:52Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:53Shawn Ryan?

  It's interesting. I, I went to his grave and uh, it's really, I, I was expecting something like this huge shrine or something. And it's just a little, I'll put a picture up on it right now, but it's just a little, a little tombstone, just a little headstone. Doesn't even come out of the ground. And um, his family's buried next to him and on one side of this cemetery is all the mafiosos and on the other side is all the politicians, the police officers and it's really.

• 3:50:29Roger Reaves?

  The riquelos.

• 3:50:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's really, it's really weird and uh.

• 3:50:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we'll go over there and um, I just wanted to see all this stuff.

• 3:50:38Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:39Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 3:50:40Roger Reaves?

  It's history.

• 3:50:40Shawn Ryan?

  Throw a little cocaine on his tombstone and blast a line off of it.

• 3:50:45Roger Reaves?

  I wonder if he even did any cocaine.

• 3:50:47Shawn Ryan?

  I do too.

• 3:50:48Roger Reaves?

  I don't think he did. Didn't seem like the fella do it.

• 3:50:51Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you knew him better than I did.

• 3:50:52Roger Reaves?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:54Shawn Ryan?

  But um, but yeah, some wild times down there.

• 3:50:58Roger Reaves?

  I don't think the Ocho was ever, ever, I went to theirs, I stayed there several days of their house with my family. There was not, not even a cigarette was smoked. They were just gentle people.

• 3:51:08Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 3:51:09Roger Reaves?

  Yes, really nice people. Just, you just wouldn't think. It's like I am. I'm not, I'm not a bad person because I did that stuff. So, I mean, they, they weren't either.

• 3:51:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:51:21Roger Reaves?

  It's just people that fell into it. They were resting tears. They had money. They was good, good people. And hey, you give me a million dollars to move that chair from one side of the room to the other, well, I'll see if I can't get it across there.

• 3:51:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Why do you think, I mean, Escobar got labeled the richest man in the world, the most wealthy man in the world at one time. But then I'm sitting here talking to you and you're saying that the Ocho, that Jorge Ochoa was shipping out way more than Escobar. Do you think that Jorge just didn't give a shit about being in the limelight and maybe Escobar?

• 3:51:59Roger Reaves?

  At all. And when they built that prison, he stayed in the prison like lay down, Escobar, lay down. He, he, he was.

• 3:52:08Shawn Ryan?

  He wanted in the limelight.

• 3:52:10Roger Reaves?

  He was gonna be in it, I reckon. He, but when I met him, he didn't seem like, but later on, I mean, I'm sorry I ever knew him. I'm sorry I ever shook his hand. He's an evil man. I mean, somebody blew an airline.

• 3:52:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:23Roger Reaves?

  And bring, kill all those people. I mean, I can understand in war, you're fighting somebody, kill them. But just to kill babies and women and children, just, just airplane full of people flying along and just get blown out the sky.

• 3:52:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:36Roger Reaves?

  They, they ain't no place in hell hot enough for him.

• 3:52:39Shawn Ryan?

  They, they have tours now in Medellin where you can go and they give you the tour on all the government buildings that he's blown up and the church, all the stuff, you know?

• 3:52:51Roger Reaves?

  It was awful.

• 3:52:52Shawn Ryan?

  Went to the uh,

• 3:52:55Shawn Ryan?

  But there's a church where all the, the sicarios or the assassins go to pray before they do their hits. It's, it's still a very interesting culture down there if you could dig in.

• 3:53:06Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's satanic, deabolical. Same thing with Putin right now doing over what he's doing. What are these people, what, what in the world gets in their mind to do something like that to kill all these, all these wonderful innocent people?

• 3:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:22Roger Reaves?

  Or kill them anybody, whether they're innocent or not. That just, take lives is just precious. There's just no way.

• 3:53:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So, when you were involved with the, with the Medellin cartel and doing trans- transportation for them, um, did you see the violence start to develop?

• 3:53:42Roger Reaves?

  I didn't ever see any violence, any violence happen to me.

• 3:53:45Shawn Ryan?

  Or hear about it, I mean?

• 3:53:46Roger Reaves?

  Well, I told you about the blood spattering on me when somebody shot the dog and shot the man, but other than that...

• 3:53:52Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, even in Miami, Miami became, I mean, Miami was a war zone in the eighties.

• 3:53:57Roger Reaves?

  I was living there when they shut up that liquor store down there.

• 3:54:00Shawn Ryan?

  But you had to know that all this was centered around cocaine.

• 3:54:04Roger Reaves?

  Of course it was. Miami was just thriving on it. It was just, but it just, it just seemed like, like if, when we was in Vietnam, you're in a war out there, but you don't, you're not in Vietnam, you don't see it.

• 3:54:20Shawn Ryan?

  Did it bother you at all that, cause I mean, from, from the time you met Escobar to, I mean, things have developed and changed so much, you know, did you, were you glad you weren't dealing with Escobar? Were you glad you were dealing with Ochoa? Did it bother you how much violence was starting to pop up about, you know, because of the drugs?

• 3:54:44Roger Reaves?

  I didn't, I didn't know much about any violence and I, I didn't feel it or I didn't see anything with me landing an airplane and getting the windshield wiped and putting the gas in it, throw that stuff in there and taking off and flying back and...

• 3:55:01Roger Reaves?

  Getting it out of the airplane. It was just like, I was worried more about getting caught with a DEA and those planes that was out there with me and I wasn't even thinking about those people down there. Well, they had that covered.

• 3:55:11Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:55:11Roger Reaves?

  So he was just, he landed in Nicaragua, oh, the generals there and everybody there and just like, it was all, y'all better have been hauling corn. Nobody cared. It was just like, this is, this is money. And I didn't, I didn't see any violence. And I, I mean, as far as cocaine at that time, it was not killing anybody. Not that I've ever heard of. Now, people say that it did and people may have a heart attack from making it go, uh, the heart go too fast. But, uh, I, I don't, now I understand with the, with the crack and stuff, they put it with it to kill you. But pure cocaine is, from what I understand, is not all that bad for you.

• 3:55:56Roger Reaves?

  And plus, it was just rich people doing it. And I was a hero for bringing it to them. So we were just, and then, then later on, it did change, completely changed, but I was in prison during those years.

• 3:56:07Shawn Ryan?

  At some point, and I'm not sure where this fits in with your story, you moved to a hundred and thirty foot yacht, I believe.

• 3:56:21Roger Reaves?

  Yes. I, I don't know which, which one you're talking about.

• 3:56:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 3:56:27Shawn Ryan?

  There we go. You moved a hundred tons of cocaine.

• 3:56:33Roger Reaves?

  Oh, no, that was way, way later. Let's, don't skip that. Let's go one twenty more.

• 3:56:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:56:37Roger Reaves?

  Get, get some years in front. I did, um, I took, took a, uh, an eighty foot sailboat, went around the world, bought, got three and a half tons of hashish. Did I tell you about that? And took it into Canada, went around through from Pakistan. And, uh, then I think I mentioned that. And then I, I bought a, a hundred and twenty-five foot Coast Guard cutter. And was going to take it to, um, Thailand to get a load and bring it back.

• 3:57:05Roger Reaves?

  And the crew abandoned it in Quayle High Harbor. They got scared. And I found out from the newspaper that a mystery ship abandoned Quayle High Harbor.

• 3:57:17Roger Reaves?

  And Dragon and Hippies had gone over there and claimed it for salvage.

• 3:57:24Roger Reaves?

  And we went over there and it took a month or two to get that thing straightened out. They had stole every piece of brass off of it, all the instruments out of it and sold it. That was the crew. Thank you, Paul Ray, Paul Ray Gibson, man out of Florida, did that to me. So I've had some. So anyhow, that was that one. Uh, that was the two that I hold.

• 3:57:44Shawn Ryan?

  You were on the boat from Pakistan, correct?

• 3:57:48Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 3:57:48Shawn Ryan?

  How long did that take?

• 3:57:50Roger Reaves?

  Took several months.

• 3:57:52Shawn Ryan?

  What did, I mean, what are you doing on there for so, how did you stay awake?

• 3:57:57Roger Reaves?

  There's four of us.

• 3:57:59Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just kidding. You're shipping a thing of cocaine, I'm asking you how to stay awake.

• 3:58:03Roger Reaves?

  I like country music and the other three was, uh, was rockers. So anyhow, I think I had, you know, some of my stuff, Hank Williams and I'm missing a Hank Williams tape. They've thrown it overboard. So I threw two of theirs overboard. And by the time we got to Gibraltar, they wasn't a tape on that boat.

• 3:58:24Shawn Ryan?

  There was four of them.

• 3:58:25Roger Reaves?

  Yes, uh-huh.

• 3:58:28Roger Reaves?

  We didn't know what we were doing. I, I went and took, uh, uh, eight tracks and plugged it in and, and learned to navigate celestial. So I'm a celestial navigator.

• 3:58:39Shawn Ryan?

  Incredible. Incredible.

• 3:58:42Roger Reaves?

  I got us around the world.

• 3:58:44Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's, um, let's fill in the blanks then before we hit the, the hundred and thirty foot yacht.

• 3:58:49Roger Reaves?

  All right. Yes, there's a lot of them.

• 3:58:53Roger Reaves?

  I can't even, oh, yes. All right. I took a load of money down, another load of money down to Grand Cayman Island. And I decided I'd just fly back commercially. And I had the little receipt for how many millions of dollars I had in my pocket.

• 3:59:10Roger Reaves?

  And I got to Miami and there was a warrant for my arrest and they took me into the law office and said, you're, you've been arrested, it's from LA. And I thought, was that Los Angeles or Louisiana? And I didn't think too much about it. I hadn't done anything. I hadn't been caught doing nothing. I hadn't done nothing in a while.

• 3:59:29Roger Reaves?

  So anyway, they took me, took me in back in the customs thing and said, yes. And so I went into the bathroom and I got rid of that receipt for that 15 million dollars or whatever it was, flushed it.

• 3:59:45Roger Reaves?

  And they took me to jail and I found out it was, I was charged with continuing criminal enterprise, which carries up to life without parole for marijuana importation. And I was number 41 person in the United States to ever be charged with that terrible crime. John Gotti was number 42 and he died in there. Most of them do die to get charged with that. I said, what do you mean? What's it, 848, Title 21? Well, you have to be organized three different organizations with five people or more. I said, I've never done that.

• 4:00:23Roger Reaves?

  He said, who, who was the mechanic on your airplanes? Who gassed it up? Who put the marijuana in there? Who unloaded it? Who sold it?

• 4:00:35Roger Reaves?

  We can think of a dozen that's in that chain that you're responsible for. Wow. So I hired Albert Krieger, I guess the smartest and best lawyer I've ever heard of. And my bill was five million dollars. Five million dollars? I had it near about back, back pocket money, but it called nebbity hearing and you had to prove where it come from. Well, I'm not getting out of jail no time soon. So anyway, I, I go, I.

• 4:01:07Roger Reaves?

  I give up my property. I give up millions and millions of dollars to the, to the government and pay the cost of prosecution, whatever else they wanted. So I wound up with thirty-five years, with a five-year sentence and thirty years special parole probation.

• 4:01:26Roger Reaves?

  Mr. Reeves, oh, and the prosecutor got up there, Lane Phillips, and had a hole in his shoe, and he's, he's preaching. "Your Honor, Mr. Reeves is not a drug dealer." Oh, he was like he was a movie star, and I knew he practiced this in the mirror. "Your Honor, Mr. Reeves is not a drug smuggler. Your Honor, Mr. Reeves is a drug industrialist with a fleet of planes and a navy of ships at his disposal. He spanned the globe for three decades with his death and destruction. We asked for nothing but a life sentence."

• 4:02:03Roger Reaves?

  The little judge gave me thirty-five years, and I think he was on my side, but he had to go along with what the prosecution, so anyhow. And then he gave me thirty years of parole probation and pay the cost of prosecution. And so I wound up, and I had to do two years, a little over two years on that five years. So I went to prison, and, oh, boy, we're down at Terminal Island, and I was in the...

• 4:02:33Roger Reaves?

  Rather interesting that John Delorean came in on cocaine charges, and he was in the cell next to me. And Mari, pretty woman, thirty-nine years old with a baby, and she came, and we had a new Mercedes, and John Delorean's wife, what was her name, Christine Ferrari? She looked, they had similar features, and she had a Mercedes just like we had. So when my wife would come to the jail, the helicopters would flop on her. All the news people get out. Anyhow, they got the wrong beauty. Anyway, I got to be friends with John Delorean, and so I saw him with those lawyers coming from New York with the shark-skin suits on, and he didn't know what to do, and neither did I.

• 4:03:16Roger Reaves?

  So I said, "John, I don't, I don't know, and I wouldn't advise nobody on the lawyer. But when we go to trial, when we go to court, that judge, I, I got..."

• 4:03:27Roger Reaves?

  My lawyer's from Florida, paying the big money, but we got a little lawyer named Howard Weisman that for ten thousand dollars, he's the lawyer for a local attorney that we have to use to go. And the judge says, "How you doing, Howard? How's the wife and the young'uns and that dog have puppies yet?" And I said, "Man, they get along fine." I said, "If I had anything, I'd get rid of that big lawyer and get that little lawyer." And he said, "Well, you introduced me to him." And I said, "Yes." So I called Howard up and he got John Delorean as his lawyer and they won that case, the biggest entrapment case ever in history where the DEA had tried to entrap Delorean. They didn't know anything about it. They just put him in a room with a lot of cameras all hidden.

• 4:04:12Roger Reaves?

  "This stuff is more valuable than gold, isn't it? How many kilos can I have to have?" "A hundred?" "I mean, why, you could get a hundred." He won. Anyhow, John Delorean sent me a Christmas card every year for as long as he lived. No kidding. So I made friends in there with that. Then after I got sentenced, they put me on a bus going north to Plasington. Plasington Prison, I never heard of it. Well, I was in there and they had like forty little cages. They had a guy in the front with a driver and then they had another one with a shotgun with a banana clip and then they had another one behind us with a banana clip.

• 4:04:54Roger Reaves?

  And we took off and went to Lompoc Penitentiary and I, "Wow." Well, they put off a couple of guys and picked up a couple and then went across the street to the farm and picked up a couple and then they went on up to Plasington. I had no idea. And went in that gate and man, there's pretty blonde women in their clothes and long dress and they waved to us. This is a co-ed prison they put me in. There's four hundred women in there, young, good-looking, they're all federal. Most of them were bank robbers or not really robbers. They were in there, they worked in banks across the United States and they were secretaries to the president of the bank.

• 4:05:37Roger Reaves?

  Well, they had boyfriends or husbands that needed a loan to build a house for four hundred thousand dollars. So they signed the president's name. And the boyfriend got the loan, he didn't pay it back. And they got about five years apiece and they were just coming in there regularly.

• 4:05:56Roger Reaves?

  Anyhow, they let us wear our own clothes. And we could walk with the girls. The girls had two chalets and the men had one. There's two hundred men in here and four hundred women. And those women was... That's a good ratio. Rather frisky.

• 4:06:13Roger Reaves?

  But I'm telling you what, so uh... I went in and uh... We went into our chalet and they just showed me my cell and so there's a nice guard lady, tall woman, thin and about thirty years old, and she's give us an induction. Well, she just come from where we started and she opened the first door. I mean, I've never been there an hour. And I'm having induction. And when she opens that door, there's two guys in the compromised position with their pants around their legs. And they're around their ankles. And they looked like George Bush when they told him that straight center blow. Their eyes looked like two owls turned that way.

• 4:06:57Roger Reaves?

  And she said, "Senor Flaco, would you please uninsert your penis from Senor Gordo's rectum and come to my office, but uh, clean up first, please." And she shut the door. And I thought, "Damn, I mean, is this what prison gonna be like? But after thirty-three years in prison, it's the only time I ever saw something like that."

• 4:07:20Roger Reaves?

  Well, that's good. So anyway, that's the homosexuality that I saw in prison. So we went on down. Anyway, uh, that was, that was a delightful time that I spent in that prison up there. Those women, I mean, we had, uh, I guess, I guess there was a woman there, every month they'd give you a, have a dance and a band would come in and you could dance with the girls on the big, big store. This is prison? This is prison. We wore our own clothes. I had a trench coat with a scarf around my neck and...

• 4:07:52Roger Reaves?

  So, and uh, they had guards that would slip up in the wheat. And they were binoculars on their days off trying to catch people having sex.

• 4:08:03Roger Reaves?

  And if they did, they've caught you, they'd put you on a bus. And they send you, they called it diesel therapy. And they put you on a bus nonstop for six months. They'd go like to Phoenix and then they'd go to Portland and then go to Chicago and then it'd go to Miami. And you come in at a jail somewhere out in the country and they'd hose you down with a hose. And give you a jumpsuit. A few hours later, you was up with a sandwich and some tepid coffee. And on the road again, you didn't have a chance to write. Letters, you didn't have a chance to write court documents. They called it diesel therapy. And those big bad men was broke after six months. They'd cry to get off that bus. Damn.

• 4:08:43Roger Reaves?

  So, uh, uh, and also if you got caught with having sex with those women, they'd, they'd send you a picture, a letter to your family, to my wife and say, your husband has been caught having sex with another inmate. They didn't say which, oh, man or woman. Oh, man. So I, I behaved myself. Anyhow, my wife came to see me with the children. We had a little, it was a really beautiful place. But it was sad, some of those women have babies and the government would take it, the prison would take it from them and never know what happened to them. They give them up for adoption. So that, uh, it, that didn't last long and, and they took the men out of there. But that was, that was the first prison I went to. For two, how many years? I stayed there about a year and then I, I, I begged to go to Lawn Park Camp.

• 4:09:28Roger Reaves?

  Cause it was near home. What a mistake. I came out of a, oh, let me just tell you, I got another story. I had a, I had my roommate named Mike Nix. He was a strong young fellow, maybe 25 years old. And he could take a big, uh, big telephone book, it's that thick, even with the plastic on them and rip it down. Just tear it apart like any of them. And you know what? He didn't do much, but he was, he was a little, he was a, a soldier in Germany. And he got in some trouble. And his paperwork was all in a little courthouse, like, like a little shack and he set it on fire. So he got 25 years for burning down a courthouse. Oh.

• 4:10:09Roger Reaves?

  But anyway, the girls loved him and he talked ugly. He wrote the ugliest letters back and forth to them and he'd slip into women's dorm and service two or three of them at a time. So one time, he'd come back into cell and his nostrils was blaming and I mean, he was wild. They had locked the women's dorm while he was in there and he knew somebody had told. So there was big picture windows there. They was like six feet by four and he had kicked that out with a brick working on and got out of there and came back around and got in our unit. Damn. And, uh, there's one more story about Mike. The last time I ever seen Mike, I guess we had breakfast together and he went over slipping

• 4:10:51Roger Reaves?

  into the woman's dorm. Uh, no he wasn't. He worked in the kitchen. And a lot of girls worked in the kitchen, so they went into the freezer unit. And there was a table in there and they was, they was having fun. And so the woman guard, I remember her name, she was a really nice old lady. She came in and said, "Get down, Mike." And him and the girl just laughed and shook their head. They knew it was over. So he just kept going on. And so she had to call backup and them guards said that they took six of them to pull that stag in off and said when he did, his pecker was just steaming in that cold.

• 4:11:32Roger Reaves?

  And they put Mike on the bus and I never saw him again. What a wonderful guy. So that's the way my prison life started off with John Delorean and a bunch of women. And then I came to the camp and what a letdown. Oh my goodness gracious. So, uh, sagging bunks and guys farting and jacking off and all night long all around you. It was a hundred people in a dorm and it was old. Anyway, they put me, I got a job as a cowboy. Well, not cowboy, fixing fence out on the Vandenberg Air Force Base. And, uh, it was just rifle rattlesnakes and they would dosse the rattlesnakes and I don't

• 4:12:16Roger Reaves?

  mind rattlesnakes at all. And I'd catch one in each hand, make his mouth open and I'd run the guard with him. Guess what? I'm in the kitchen the next day, washing dishes. So I had fun there and I, uh... I, uh, after, when you're one year short of your release date, you can get a furlough from a federal prison camp. So if you go over a thousand miles or over five hundred miles, I believe five hundred miles, you get seven days. And if you're local, you only get five days. They give you travel time both ways. So I went to Georgia. And, uh, my wife and children was all on the airplane on Delta and they all over me

• 4:13:00Roger Reaves?

  and hugging me and the stewardess says, "What is going on here?" And my wife said, "He just got out of prison this morning and we're on furlough." And she went back and brought us two big bottles of champagne.

• 4:13:14Roger Reaves?

  So when I was, uh, when I went back, the guys wanted little Sony televisions, those little things with little one-inch square, uh, you don't even remember them, but that was back in nineteen eighty-three. So I brought back a sack of those and I got caught coming back in with them. Bam, I'm shipped back to the prison in Terminal Island. What a mess. So I, I found out that time with, with that. And I got out of prison after a little over two years and I'm so happy to be home. I'm in front of the television, got it in the kitchen in the morning, and there's Ronald Reagan's blue eyes. And he says, "We have absolute proof that the communist Sandinista government of Nicaragua is in the cocaine

• 4:13:57Roger Reaves?

  running business, cocaine trafficking." And there's Barry's plane, the fat lady, bellied in on the runway. And I thought, "Oh, shit. Barry has done it again." I'd heard he had switched over and gone, gone with the police.

• 4:14:15Shawn Ryan?

  You'd heard that?

• 4:14:16Roger Reaves?

  I'd heard. Somebody told me that Barry may be working with him. I don't know who told me, but somewhere, I think.

• 4:14:21Shawn Ryan?

  So how did, before we get into that then, cause how did you guys just, did communications just fall off? Cause he was working for you.

• 4:14:29Roger Reaves?

  Yes. Well, whenever I got arrested, Barry went and got the lawyers and he sent a lawyer there from Baton Rouge in, robbed me. And then he got Albert Krieger, the best lawyer that I tell you I've ever seen, and a whole, he did a whole crew. And he had, I believe, three of my airplanes and he, he gave Murray the money for him a hundred percent, helped her whatever he could. And, uh, but then he, I wasn't there and I was just cut out of the deal.

• 4:14:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:14:56Roger Reaves?

  So he just kept on flying. So he, of course, he knew the people by then, but it was too much together. I couldn't keep it apart, didn't even try to. But, uh, so, but now he's, he's crashed his plane on the Nicaragua one runway there where we refuel. And the phone rang.

• 4:15:17Roger Reaves?

  And he said, Roger, I'm, uh, I wanna, I gotta see you. I'll, I'll come out tonight to the French restaurant. I forgot the name of it. Says I'll be there at nine o'clock.

• 4:15:27Roger Reaves?

  All right, Barry. So I went in at nine o'clock in the room. Not a very big restaurant and maybe ten or fifteen tables. All of them look like thirty, forty years old leather skirts and sports coats and blue jeans. And Barry's leaning upside the wall at the back, he's gained weight. And I walk up to him and I say, Barry, are you wired? He said, no, I'm not, Roger. I said, well, you just talk, I'm gonna listen. And he said, all right. So I sit down with him and he went to talk and he said, Roger, I was, uh,

• 4:15:59Roger Reaves?

  I was protected there and, and Mina, you know about that. He said, they all, when the shit hit the fan, they all ran, left me holding the bag. And I was indicted in three, in Miami, in, in Florida, Louisiana, and Arkansas, facing three life sentences.

• 4:16:22Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, so I've told everything. I've been full Congress. I've testified to everything that was going on.

• 4:16:30Roger Reaves?

  But you're under my umbrella. I told them I would not testify unless they protected you. So you're, you, you and I are partners. He said, you've got to come to Miami and testify before a grand jury.

• 4:16:47Roger Reaves?

  I said, the all DEA agents? He said, every one of them. I said, well, bring your head honcho over. He put his hands between his eye, over his eyes, and the tears run down between his hands. He said, I just couldn't do it, Roger, I just couldn't do it. I'm so sorry, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do life in prison.

• 4:17:05Roger Reaves?

  So that's when I told him, "Bring your feller over." I felt sorry for him. I mean, I really did. So the guy came over, lanky feller, crop duster from Alabama, I believe, Jake Jacobson. He's the one that was in that crashed airplane in Nicaragua. And he told me the same thing. He said, "Well, you can come tomorrow." Well, we had some Chevish regal and got a little pie-eyed, and I liked him, except we was on different sides. He said, "You can come tomorrow to Miami in first class with Mari, or I'll take you down in chains. And the only place you're gonna ever see your family again, as long as you live, is in a federal prison visiting room, I promise you." And I said, "I'll make sure to come first last."

• 4:17:48Roger Reaves?

  So I did. Mari and I went down to Miami the next day, and I went in to see a lawyer. I went to see Gould is his name. I didn't realize his partner had been blown up and killed because he's representing a snitch. So, but he's supposed to have been the best at the time, and I went in to see him. And he just says, you know, he says, "I'll represent you for $600,000. I don't talk to snitches." I said, "I'm not a snitch." He said, "Well, that's what you're talking about." I said, "No, I'm not. I'm just trying to get what you..." He said, "Listen, man. Being a snitch is like being pregnant. You either are, or you're not." He was nasty. He said, "Once you start talking, if you don't tell them everything,

• 4:18:28Roger Reaves?

  you will receive a life sentence, because everything you've ever done, everything else they said about you will be used against you." He said, "You gotta go, you gotta tell everything, from day one to now." And so I left his office, and I thought, "Damn, that guy." I went to see another, and he told me the same thing. And I said, "Listen, man, I've got to say something. I've got to..." He said, "You can't. If you're gonna do it, you've got to do it all, or you will be convicted and get life."

• 4:18:57Roger Reaves?

  So I went to the, that afternoon, I went to the courthouse. And I was gonna tell them I'd, and so I spoke to meet them like at three o'clock. And I was standing, it was hot, and I was standing behind a pillar, big marble pillars there at Miami Federal Court. And I was up the stairs, and here come the, the three cars. They had about four of them with their machine gun pistols in the front, and I think two in the front and two on each side of Barry in the back. They was looking out this way and that way with Barry as they come to the court. And Barry's car pulled right up and stopped beside me. And I just stepped down that step and hit the top of that car. Wham! You should have seen them. They tore that car up trying to.

• 4:19:42Roger Reaves?

  I said, see how easy it would be? They didn't appreciate my humor. So I said, listen, I'm having trouble with lawyers. I'll get one tomorrow. And Barry said, use mine, use mine. I said, all right, give me your card. So he gave me the card. And I had no intention of it. So anyhow, I just tried and put it off so I ain't rested that night. So anyway, I, I went to a festival restaurant there, and Carl Gable was my favorite restaurant at that time. Still is. I think it's closed now. And I was having dinner, and of course Barry knew it was, and he came in with Debbie, and we had dessert together. And I said, Barry, they're gonna kill you, friend. Oh, no, listen, now there's Fabio's in jail, and Ocho's in the, this and the other. I said, Barry, they gonna kill you.

• 4:20:27Roger Reaves?

  There's no way on earth you're not gonna get killed. And I hugged his neck, I might have kissed him. I said, Barry, they gonna kill you. And I took Mari and the children, and we fled to Brazil. And we was down there about six months, and I got word that Barry was dead, killed. And I, I shed some tears, told Mari and Miriam, and they cried. And we've, I mean, the biggest niche in the world's dead, and I'm facing a life sentence, but I'm still sorry they killed him. But he should have known. Who killed him? The guy that was in the, that, the guy that flew up on the first load with me with a machine gun pistol, he's the one killed him. He's still in Angola. There was four of them, one of them died, and three of them still left up there.

• 4:21:12Roger Reaves?

  They're doing life, never gonna get out. Ronaldo was his name, that ugly man. I mean, he was ugly. I'm sure he still is ugly. Yeah. Yeah, that's who killed Barry.

• 4:21:25Roger Reaves?

  How long were you down in Brazil? Six months, you said? It was a little over a year. Over a year? Yeah. And we had nice Brazilian passports and I left there and went down to Argentina, all the way to the, all the way to Ushuaia. I was looking, looking for a home. Ushuaia, Brazil would have been good, but then I had Brazilian passports. I didn't speak Portuguese. I was afraid if I made investments in soybeans and all that, somebody'd come take it away from me. Yeah. Do you still have all your money in Caymans? Pardon? Did you still have your money? I'd moved some of it out by then, but that guy done stole it. Most everything. Most, a lot of the stuff is gone. How much money did you have left at this point? About four million dollars. Four million? Yeah.

• 4:22:10Roger Reaves?

  So you went from... Were you at the height already? Did you go from sixty million to four million? To four, yeah. Shit. I was talking about sixty million because I had invested all kind of money in real estate deals. And hydroelectric plant and oil wells, all that just got wiped away when that guy got killed. And so, and he just got taken by the government and bankers and lawyers. Everybody touched me, stole it. They just, just wholesale. You go to prison and your money's out there, it ain't there when you get out. Yeah. Not, not unless you're a bad fella and want to kill somebody. And then, kill them, you go back. So it was just like, alright, you catch twenty-two there.

• 4:22:53Roger Reaves?

  How was, how was Maury doing down there? Maury did fine. She just kind of let it, she didn't get involved and she stayed away from it. I didn't, I didn't tell her much and just, she just thought I was bulletproof and I said, I'm gonna go do it. I'd go and come back that night or the next day and... Did she ever get frustrated with all the moving around and... Well, we didn't move so much, you see, until then. Now, now, when we on, see now, the gum has done kicked in our door and held her hostage all day long and took, took our home from us twice. So she's not too happy with them either. Yeah. And so now, see, I've never been caught with a, with a, with a dollar nor, nor one gram of marijuana. And I get thirty-five years.

• 4:23:35Roger Reaves?

  Just because everybody got caught, sometimes five, six, seven years later, pointing their finger at me.

• 4:23:43Roger Reaves?

  Roger did it, Roger did it, until they build a case against you. Well, you don't have to, and like I told, they had me for bringing that money to the Grand Cayman Island, I said, some of that money, I never even touched it. The lawyer said, you don't have to fondle it to be guilty. So I, so it's like anything else, they don't have to catch you shooting somebody for murder. Two people say you, they saw you do it, you gone. Yeah. So it's the same thing with marijuana, they say, say you did it. And, and I pled guilty to a lie. There's a guy that, I don't know why he told them, he said he drove by my house and sold four hundred pounds of marijuana in my garage. You can't even see the garage from my house from the highway. And I've never had anything in my house, never, not even an ounce of marijuana at my

• 4:24:28Roger Reaves?

  house on property. I don't, I don't use it and don't, I just don't have anything to do with it except fly it. Yeah. So that's why she was, uh, I will tell you a little, Mari, Mari did get involved in the marijuana business one time. Did she? Tell that. Uh, I flew into a, a little airport over there, over the mountain, Santaynes, and I landed and the unloader was supposed to be there to, to, to unload me. And it was, I don't know, about Christmas time. And, uh, I, I had, I had a ton of marijuana in the airplane and, so I got out and there's nobody there, nobody, a little runway out, way out in the country.

• 4:25:13Roger Reaves?

  And I was so angry with him, what in the world? What am I gonna do with this load to go where the truck's supposed to be here? So I think I had twenty one hundred dollar bills in my pocket, but I didn't have a dime to use that phone. So I had to walk to Solvang, it's about five miles away. And I took off walking and I got to, got to Solvang and I, I called Mari, I says, Mari, come over here, just, as quick as you can, pick me up and come, come on some kind of little truck or something so we can move this stuff. So she borrowed a little El Camino truck with a little, little body from a friend of mine and she came over and we went back out and the, the plane was empty.

• 4:25:58Roger Reaves?

  I said, "Oh, man, this unloader, Wild Bill done stole that load."

• 4:26:04Roger Reaves?

  So we went back home. I didn't, I didn't know what had happened. I thought they might have gotten it. But it's about two o'clock. "Hey, I got a nice Christmas present, Roger." Da, da, da, da, da. And I thought, "You rascal, you." And he said, "We saw, we saw you land at eight o'clock. We thought it was an airliner had that big lights on that plane. We didn't know your plane was so big." So we went to McDonald's to get something to eat. We come back, man, the present was there. And he left me hanging for about six hours. So, anyway, the next morning, we took that little truck and went back over there, just at daylight. And I got in, I said, "Well, make just a minute, Marty. Let me see, let me sweep this thing out, because I know they didn't." So I got in there, we're sweeping the plane out. I had linoleum all in the planes, right up to the windows, so the seeds couldn't get in there. They convict you on a seed or two.

• 4:26:50Roger Reaves?

  So mine was, I had a professionally linoleum, from one end to the other. I get up on there, and there was a little spot there where the stewardess make coffee and stuff. And under that was a big bag of sticky buds, maybe sixty, seventy pounds. I said, "Oh, the idiots. Oh, my goodness gracious. I'd be convicted like this, though. What's the same load?" So I drug that thing out, and I tried to put it in that truck, and it wouldn't go in. So I throwed it up in the back. "I gotta get out of here." And I said, "Murray, just go get rid of it." She said, "I can't live it." I said, "Just let the tailgate down, and, and back up and slam on brakes. I don't care. Get rid of it." So she took off with it. And I took off, and I flew across, and I landed at the airport, and I had a hangar.

• 4:27:34Roger Reaves?

  And I, I went in the hangar, so she came up, and I said, "You get rid of it all right?" She said, "Yes, but you're not gonna like this." I said, "What?" She said, "I heard it, it, it went in water." I said, "Honey, there's nothing but a desert between here and San Andres. How did you get it in water?" She said, "I don't know. I did what you said. I backed up to a cliff, and I put on the brakes, and it went a long way down, and I heard it hit water."

• 4:28:03Roger Reaves?

  I said, "Let's go see what you're talking about." She'd backed up to a cliff six or seven hundred feet high and slammed on brakes and that thing went down to the poison, open poison ivy and it hit a little stream down and bounced out. I had to get ropes and everything up so you can always laugh about her and her one marijuana trip. So she did do it once. Oh, be damned. Yeah. Well, back to Brazil. All right. So you're down there for about a year. About one full year, yes. And then we went on down to Argentina and I didn't find it there and Mari said, "If I, if I die in this place, Roger, please don't leave my bones here."

• 4:28:45Roger Reaves?

  I was out there looking at a place to grow soybeans. So I said, "All right." So we bought a ticket and went to Amsterdam and we stayed in Amsterdam for a while and then, uh, then went to the south of France and we lived there for a year and had a nice time. And then my friend Jerry, the one that used to fly for me, he came over and, uh, he said, "Let's go to, I want you to introduce you to somebody. I want you to introduce you to Howard Marks." So we went to Mallorca, Spain, and I met Howard Marks, which was my Waterloo. Biggest mistake I ever did in my life was meeting that man. So he knew everybody.

• 4:29:27Roger Reaves?

  He'd been traveled around the world and he had a guy named John Denby that had walked across India and China and that guy knew a lot of people and Howard was using him. And so he hooked us up to, uh, I went to Pakistan and again hooked us up for a 10-ton load out of there and I think I put a million dollars or so up and we hauled the load and it was so bad stuff. It was too much yak fat in it, it wouldn't stay lit, couldn't hardly sell it. So just one, one vehicle after another with him. So I, uh, I don't know how. Well, let's take a quick break before we get into.

• 4:30:16Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 4:30:40Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Roger, we're back from the break. You're starting to get involved with Howard.

• 4:30:47Roger Reaves?

  Oh, boy. Howard, my Waterloo.

• 4:30:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 4:30:52Roger Reaves?

  So I was living in the south of France, there in Biott. And my friend Jerry come over and met me. We had a nice time reunion. He'd been the one that had been flying the same as Barry. And he came over with his entourage. And so my daughter, Maria, was there and she wanted to fly over. They had chartered a private jet and was flying around the world. And she flew with him to Mallorca. No, yeah, to Mallorca, Spain. Well, it was M. Reeves. So the DEA thought they had a lead on me and that I was living in France

• 4:31:32Roger Reaves?

  because the M. Reeves, Mari Reeves, got on a plane with Jerry Wills to fly to Mallorca. It caused me to leave France. Anyway, we went over and met Howard. And I liked Howard all right. He had a lot of contacts. And so he said that he could get all kinds of stuff out of Pakistan. So anyhow, I was the one wound up buying, paying for, I gave him a million dollars to pay for a load of...

• 4:32:06Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, it was a million or two million. Yeah, a million, a million dollars I gave him to put down on another load of hash each.

• 4:32:14Roger Reaves?

  So.

• 4:32:17Roger Reaves?

  They pulled a, a big scam on us. We had to boat over into Maldives. It was a hundred and, I believe, a hundred and eight foot Alaska king crab, crabber. Almost knew that thing was nice. And, uh, so they went over there, Howard and his guys, Dobie and Hobie, and they put a bug on it. And they says, all right, we have information there with the CIA, there with the DEA, and there's a bug on that boat. And for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, we'll tell you where it is. I said, oh shit, I ain't paying you nothing to find that one. I can find a bug in a few minutes if it's on there. Oh, sorry, we've already took it off. Here it is. And I give them two hundred and fifty thousand of your dollars.

• 4:32:59Roger Reaves?

  And that's when I about come undone with Jerry. I said, Jerry, I ain't putting up with that. It's just a scam. So he took me out in the hall and said, Roger, this deal's worth twenty, thirty million dollars. Don't mess it up for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They already got the money anyway. So anyway, we, we did the, uh, fool around and it says, oh, uh, Malics can't get the hash and this and the other, so, but I got a deal for you in Thailand.

• 4:33:26Roger Reaves?

  Thailand? Thailand. We can get, the military will load you twenty, two hundred miles off the coast. But we need two, two million dollars. The military's gonna load you? Yeah. With what? Marijuana. So I went over to Thailand and I gave the other million dollars. Now he's already got one, but we can't transfer it and this and the other. So, uh, he, uh, the, the boat came and, and they loaded this with, I, I went and looked at marijuana. It was good stuff. It was, uh, half of it was in nitrogen sealed. Uh, so it stays fresh, but I understand it deteriorates pretty quick after you open it. But when you open it, it's just like it come out the field.

• 4:34:05Roger Reaves?

  Anyway, we put the seventeen tons on the boat. The military went out and loaded it with a military cruiser. And the boys took it on across the Pacific right quick. So Howard wanted me to stay, says, Roger, I got a guy named Rummy here. And he's got an eighty-five foot wooden sailboat. And he wants to get loaded and would you put some money on it? I said, Howard, if I had any more money, I would, I would put it on my own boat. Oh, but anyhow, I flew him back to Mallorca. We'd done moved there, near Howard, a few miles, twenty, thirty miles away. But Howard was, he could ten days later. And he stayed over and loaded that old boat, the wooden boat. Got it somehow.

• 4:34:49Roger Reaves?

  And the unloaders unloaded our boat and was selling it. They said, don't take it to the United States. Just sell it up here. We can get fourteen hundred dollars a pound. Well, that's about fifty million dollars for that load. So my friend Jerry and Ron says, okay, let's do it. So they're staying in a, they're staying in a nice condo or hotel, hotel. And money's coming in, two or three million dollars a day. Every two or three days, they rented a storage place and they got six, seven, eight million dollars in there. And he's got the little tag in Ron's pocket. And they got three million dollars in the hotel room and two or three million dollars downstairs in his car.

• 4:35:30Roger Reaves?

  And Howard sends John Denby, his old friend that's hooked up with the Cray brothers out of, out of England. And he lands in my, in Vancouver. And of course, with him comes a telex to the mountain police. This is a notorious criminal entering your country. So they followed him. And he happened just out of chance to go to the same hotel that Ron and Jerry are staying in. No way. And they hug in the lobby. Click, click, click, click, all the pictures on it. Now then, they're watching Jerry and Ron.

• 4:36:09Roger Reaves?

  So they all eat and drink and have a good time. And they got people with pointy shoes and plaid pants following them around, holding hands and taking pictures of them. So now the old wooden sailboat comes in. And the same unloaders that have unloaded us and selling are unloading.

• 4:36:26Roger Reaves?

  And they swarm on them. There's a DEA agent on that old wooden sailboat.

• 4:36:33Roger Reaves?

  I don't know if rum is a DEA agent or his, one of his crew is, but they arrest them all. So they had, they had put them all in jail. And everybody's out the next day, all the Canadians for a hundred thousand dollar bond for marijuana. But Ron, Jerry and Denby can't get out. So they keep them in jail six months. And the lawyer comes in for the unloader said, everything's going sale, fine, we selling it, we doing good.

• 4:36:59Roger Reaves?

  So when, after six months, Jerry and Ron get deported to the United States and Denby gets sent back to England. Well, they, my boys wanted to see about the money and they says, fuck you, we don't owe you nothing, you brought the heat on us. Fifty million dollars, zip, gone. Wow. So Jerry hires a guy from the, as a sod to go and collect it. So the guy meets him in the Belvedere Wilshire Hotel. Said, yeah, I'll get it for two hundred fifty thousand dollars. How do you get in contact with that? I don't know. So anyhow, they got in touch with somebody that gonna collect that money. That guy didn't stay there, he stayed there with the girls for four days, called Jerry, come in, get your money, I got it.

• 4:37:42Roger Reaves?

  So Jerry goes down there and he comes and sit down and puts a Glock to his head, he said, they don't owe you anything. If you don't give me two hundred fifty thousand dollars, I'm fixing to blow your brains all over this hotel room. Jerry calls Ron.

• 4:37:55Roger Reaves?

  Bring me two hundred fifty thousand dollars quick.

• 4:37:59Roger Reaves?

  Now he's lost fifty thousand, he's lost two hundred fifty thousand dollars on top of it and he's, I don't want nothing to do with it, goodbye. Damn. So, anyway, that's gone, but anyhow, in the meantime, I'm, I've been arrested there, you know, in Spain, I've been extradited up to Germany. And I'm serving time in a German prison.

• 4:38:21Roger Reaves?

  Yes, that was, that was another load. I get them mixed up with Howard. But anyhow, Howard owed me the two million for the, to hold that load out of Morocco, and he wouldn't pay me, and he turned me in. So, that was my, my time with Howard.

• 4:38:36Shawn Ryan?

  He turned you in?

• 4:38:37Roger Reaves?

  Turned me in, complete. After all that, he didn't want to pay. He, he knew he was fixing to go down. So he didn't want to pay, and, uh, turned me in.

• 4:38:47Shawn Ryan?

  So where did the yacht come in? The hundred and thirty foot yacht with one thousand?

• 4:38:54Roger Reaves?

  Okay, I'm up in, I'm up in, uh, Germany. And in nineteen ninety, I'd, I'd escaped, I tell you, I tell you, tell about getting out to Germany, the Spanish court jumping on the car. I told you that.

• 4:39:05Shawn Ryan?

  You did.

• 4:39:06Roger Reaves?

  And then I went up to Germany. Did I tell you about escaping from that prison?

• 4:39:10Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't.

• 4:39:11Roger Reaves?

  All right. So I believe it was nineteen ninety that I'm in Lubeck Penitentiary, uh, Lubeck Prison, uh, fortress, with gun towers all around it. They had the Red Brigade and the people in there from all kind of bad folks. And they put me in there with that.

• 4:39:31Roger Reaves?

  And after one year, I escaped from that prison. I went between the bars.

• 4:39:34Shawn Ryan?

  You did mention this.

• 4:39:36Roger Reaves?

  Scuffed all over it, and that woman tried to run that over me. Okay, uh...

• 4:39:41Shawn Ryan?

  I think you had mentioned you went to prison in Spain, too.

• 4:39:45Roger Reaves?

  Yes, I spent seventeen months there.

• 4:39:47Shawn Ryan?

  We did not talk about Spain.

• 4:39:49Roger Reaves?

  Wasn't much to talk about. Yeah, I did some stories to talk about. Uh, since I'd, I jumped on the car and got away, they, they had me naked in Mallorca. And they, in the cell, day and night, they wouldn't let me have any clothes. They thought if I didn't have any clothes, I could escape. And that's when they put, everywhere I went, they put my handcuffed over my shoulder. Anyway, I got up to, uh, to Germany, and, um, they sent me to Madrid. And, uh, rather picturesque.

• 4:40:19Roger Reaves?

  They put me in, there was a, a, a modern prison there. I mean, it was modern. And they had modules, and each module had fifty prisoners in it. And it wasn't nothing much to do. There was a thing about small tennis court and a spot there where you could buy coffee and cupcakes. And you could buy three kilos of food a week. And they'd bring it in and you had prison money. And there was about five or six of us had a lot of money and we'd give the other poor people the money to buy theirs. And we just had copious amounts of food. Salmon and jams and salads and stuff come in. Yeah, I don't, I guess they brought it in two or three times, I forgot. But we had a big table out there where everybody could just eat all they wanted to. And one of us would pay for the coffee one day and the little cakes that did.

• 4:41:05Roger Reaves?

  There was a kick fighter there from Turkey and he could keep ordering at which little store.

• 4:41:11Roger Reaves?

  And they threw the, the, the domino chips down and they just made a lot of rackets. And if they played backgammon, which I played backgammon. They wanted a wooden box so it could make a lot of noise with the dice roll. They wouldn't, they wouldn't roll it on felt, uh-uh. That was the Turks I was in with. Anyhow, wonderful people. So I spent seventeen months there in that place. But I was bored and at the end of it, uh, at the end of that place was a little, little wall about knee high. And on top of it had a chain link fence, just to keep you in that. Beyond that was a big wall with catwalks on it and towers and guards up there with guns. But, uh, and then they had like a moat with all electronic wires. They, I don't think, no way in the world get out of that thing. So it was, it was impenetrable.

• 4:41:58Roger Reaves?

  So, but anyway, there was a little place there, maybe ten feet across. It was dirt. And the boys, they got little cups for your coffee and they'd poke them through that chain link fence. And I guess there was thousands of them there. And I decided I wanted a garden. I didn't have nothing else to do, let me make a garden. I'm a country boy. So I took a mop handle and I made it sharp and I stuck it through those cups one at a time and brought it back up and squashed it through the fence and brought it back until I cleaned the spot about four feet wide. And then it was hard, hard red dirt, rather hard. And I guess it was all the way up to the other end of the place was a spigot. And I got a five gallon bucket and I couldn't, and I poured. For a week I poured water on it till I got that thirsty soil.

• 4:42:44Roger Reaves?

  Softened up. And then I made it like a spade on the end of a, a big, heavy mop panel and stuck it through there. And I pushed it down in the soil about six or eight inches and turned it like a turning plow until I did it all the way across. Guess I get maybe not less than sixty or seventy feet across there. And then out of the vegetables that we bought from the grocery store, I put little jar lids and put dirt in them in my window seal and I got plants started. And then I would take the, I would dig a little hole on the, over there and I'd put that little plant on top of the end of the stick with some dirt on it with a little bit of mud and I'd put it in that hole and rake the dirt back around with the stick. Now I'm working through a fence, like trying to build a, a ship in the bottom.

• 4:43:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:43:28Roger Reaves?

  And then the, the mop panels come with a plastic tube on them and I'd take that and take a cup and pour the water around my plant. And so I got all kinds of plants growing on the other side of the fence. Watermelons and cantaloupes and zucchinis and just about anything that you could imagine that we could order in the grocery store, I got the seed and planted it. Well, those plants grew and I would bring the, cut all the vines off but one and bring it to the fence and weave it in that chain link fence until I had big watermelons hanging and cantaloupes and eggplants and quash and zucchinis and just tomatoes and all kinds of bell peppers. I just had a, a garden that was just unbelievably beautiful hanging in, that whole fence was

• 4:44:12Roger Reaves?

  covered with it like a mosaic of, of fruit. And the warden came and stood in front of it and there was a newspaper article about it.

• 4:44:20Shawn Ryan?

  There was a newspaper article about it?

• 4:44:21Roger Reaves?

  Newspaper about, about that garden in the prison. So, of course they didn't let me stand in front of it. But I had to almost fight to keep the other prisoners from, they laughed at me for a while and then they wanted to pour water on it and I'd, you're gonna drown it, get out of here, this is my garden. So that was in Spain. Uh, it was pretty nice there where it really was.

• 4:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to get into the fishing out?

• 4:44:49Roger Reaves?

  Into which one?

• 4:44:50Shawn Ryan?

  The hundred and thirty footer with the thousand tons.

• 4:44:53Roger Reaves?

  I got out of, I got out of, so I, after I escaped from the German prison, I, I went back to South America to, to see about collecting that three and a half million dollars that Ocho owes me. Well, he wouldn't see me.

• 4:45:09Roger Reaves?

  And my friend helped keep me from getting there, I believe. So anyway, I, I left that, so, but anyhow.

• 4:45:19Shawn Ryan?

  Help keep, keeping you from getting where?

• 4:45:21Roger Reaves?

  Getting to Ochoa, getting to the money. He, he knows something, they all know something, but they, they're not telling me what's happened. They done, they done, they done divided that money up. So I, he said, let me introduce you to somebody. So introducing me to somebody, and the guy said that he had paid me twenty million dollars to take a shipload of cocaine to Australia. I said, well, sign me up, here I am, a fugitive.

• 4:45:46Roger Reaves?

  So I, I.

• 4:45:51Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you put twenty million dollars when you're a fugitive?

• 4:45:55Roger Reaves?

  I don't know, I was gonna get it in Australia, I'd have figured it out after I got it. But it's better not having it. I'd have got, I would have got it probably and put it on a, I'd have bought a sailboat and probably went to Dubai, right up the Indian Ocean.

• 4:46:06Shawn Ryan?

  Why Dubai?

• 4:46:07Roger Reaves?

  I think that they have less DEA, US influence than some other place. I would, I would have been afraid to go into India, they would have probably just taken it.

• 4:46:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:46:19Roger Reaves?

  But I think Dubai would have probably, you could have hid the money on a boat and taken it off and put it in the bank. I think that's what I was thinking about.

• 4:46:26Shawn Ryan?

  What's another safe haven for, when they're, they're well-known for their, their banks not being influenced?

• 4:46:35Roger Reaves?

  I think all the heroin money coming out of Afghanistan and all that, Pakistan goes there and is laundered.

• 4:46:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:46:41Roger Reaves?

  That's, that's a haven. But that, that wasn't, that wasn't the problem, was getting it. So anyway, they.

• 4:46:49Roger Reaves?

  Uh, they bought, they bought a, um, offshore supply vessel. I've found it there in Louisiana. And, uh, those things are worth twelve million dollars. But when they get forty years old, about thirty-nine years old, at forty years old to the day, they can't get insurance to go anymore. So that these, these Exxon and all these different places own these oil wells. And these ships have to be insured to go out there, these, they're also offshore supply vessels. And I think this one had been in the North Sea and it had, it was like five or six stories high and had all the oil well firefighting equipment on it. And I mean, that thing was, that field was palatial. It was nice.

• 4:47:30Roger Reaves?

  You could eat dinner off the, off the floor in the, uh, engine room. It was sparkling. And, uh, so I bought that thing for three hundred thousand dollars. It's priceless crap. Wow. At that time. And I took that thing and I went and, uh, went to, uh, Cape Verde Islands and, uh, put some more fuel on and it was supposed to load up the cocaine there. And I went back out then. I had to go back a thousand miles towards Columbia to meet the boat. And finally they didn't show up. Had me going around under the satellite for four or five, three days. And then finally it came and they put a thou- uh, thousand kilos, a ton of cocaine on it. Just threw it overboard.

• 4:48:13Roger Reaves?

  Now he had that on it. And, uh, there was one Colombian got on there with us. And then had me and another fella from Georgia down. Uh, and so we took it and I went around, uh. What, what does a thousand tons of cocaine look like? A thousand kilos. Thousand kilos. Two thousand, two hundred pounds. Okay. Uh, now kilo, used to you'd be real fluffy and big, but now it's made with, um, uh, they do something with, uh, microwave ovens. In those places you'll see two or three hundred microwave ovens and they cook it in there. So it's oily and dense. So it's almost as dense as water. It'll almost sink. So one cubic meter, thirty-nine point four inches cubed is one ton.

• 4:48:56Roger Reaves?

  So this much and this much is a ton. Okay. And so this stuff would just float just above the water, so it was a little less. So you might say fifty inches cubed. Okay. That's how, that's how big it is. Yeah, I eat it on the boat and made it in the fuel tank. And I took it and went around, went way down, went down uh on the Brazilian side of the Atlantic Ocean because in the southern hemisphere, the oceans, like in your toilet, they turn counterclockwise. And in the northern hemisphere, it turns clockwise. So the oceans run that way. And that on the equator is zero. He got a little boy over on the Equatorial Hotel in Kenya. Burned down, but he's there and he'll put a, he got a five gallon bucket with a funnel and he said, come over here.

• 4:49:40Roger Reaves?

  And he pours and jug of water and it goes, and he goes over here and it goes, and he pours it and it goes straight down. He said, now that's the equator. So that's how sensitive that, that force is. All be damned. That's interesting. Anyway, I was following the current down and then we went way south of Cape Town, of the Cape of Good Hope and went down. And I kept going south. I did, I wanted to stay out of any traffic until no, no boats or ships ever saw me. After I left the traffic off of the, uh, coming out of South America. There's a lot of traffic that I crossed.

• 4:50:16Roger Reaves?

  Got down there, we didn't see anything and uh,

• 4:50:20Roger Reaves?

  one morning I woke up and the swells was just monstrous. I can't tell you how big they were. I fished in Alaska. They were babies compared to this. They were coming off of that Antarctica swirls around there. I don't think a swell gets a hundred feet, but they looked taller than that. It looked like they were just falling down on the back of the boat. And I remember that on the old sailing ships that they had to put a blind up there so that the man on the wheel wouldn't run. And they put two men on there. It's, it's phenomenal to look, see that much water. Standing up behind you and the boat would come up and when it come to the top, the two big propellers, whoa, would come out of the water and that boat would surf down that wave. Wow. And it'd go like twenty-five knots on the GPS.

• 4:51:06Roger Reaves?

  And the nose would stick under about a third of the boat. And it would just stay under there for a while and it'd flow it slowly come up. And that water would rush off the back of it. And I thought. I thought that was nerve wracking. I this boat might not be made for that. It was made for the Caribbean. So I turned and and and went north out of there. I was gonna go under Melbourne. But then I saw the guy that placed at the Columbia and said chosen from had a lot of shoals. And he just looked at it from the from the sea without. And I said, it will never do if it's if it's any wind or any southern wind, which it may be. We could never get a shore there. So I I chose a spot up.

• 4:51:47Roger Reaves?

  Oh, near Sharks Bay in Western Australia, about halfway up or forth up the side of it. And I I went and we we came in and two o'clock at night. And I saw an airplane up there blinking too slow. Uh oh. And I said, all right, we're being watched. And so I went to show up, put the put the cocaine. I had two twenty foot rubber Zodiacs. And I left the big boat out there with my friend Joel on it. And me and the Colombian went to shore. And that guy talked the big talk, but I put it in and so I told him to get in the other one. No, no, no matter how I can't drive.

• 4:52:31Roger Reaves?

  So I had to hook them together, one behind the other and drag them. And we went in and there was a surf and it was pitch black. And I went over that surf and went inside like a lagoon. And then, no, you couldn't see it. I tried to come back over that surf and finally got over to the side. And one of the Zodiac busted. We got out and I got to carrying the cocaine up up a cliff up the high so we could see it. And it was dark and it was raining. Couldn't see anything what we was doing. So finally I got it up there and my saddle got tore off and the whole bottom of my foot got torn off. I had to have new new skin wrapped in the bottom of my foot. So got that stuff in a hole. And then I I went to go back to get the boat and to go get Joel.

• 4:53:17Roger Reaves?

  So one of the Zodiacs had busted and were tied up there. And the other one had drifted away. And it had the motor on it. I said, how in the world am I going to? So I jumped in to swim. Now, this place is called Shark's Bay. It's got thousands and thousands of sharks out there. It's just a bay in there where they come and the whole. So as I'm swimming, the boat just drifting just a little bit faster than I can swim. Oh, boy. This never turns out well. No, it knocks that thing going away from me. And a fin cuts the water, digging out about that high. Get the hell out of here. Are you serious? Cut around me. Well, I draw my feet up and I pray, Lord, don't let it happen now.

• 4:54:01Roger Reaves?

  Don't let. Oh, I don't even hardly breathe. I'm trying to stay up like this. And he cuts his fin around closer. Then that sucker comes up. And he blows. I like to laugh my head off. There's a dolphin looking at me. I didn't have any problem catching that boat. I normally dove over when I got to him. Give you a little extra motivation to swim faster. Know I had. So we took it out there and I went in and got me a hot shower. And they always had some coffee on the cup. I took a cup. Then I'd cut a big hole down the side of the ship and reversed all the pumps.

• 4:54:45Roger Reaves?

  And then I got in the, got the Zodiac with Joel. And going 12 knots, I couldn't even untie it. I had to, had to cut the, cut the rope. And then I nearly dove over when it stopped. And I went back in. And we covered up the cocaine real good with blankets and rocks and brush. And it raining, we got under kind of a rock. Some fishermen at daylight came and they were, they had a cable that they must have put out. And they were catching these great big, like red snappers, about 20 pounds. And he was pulling them up the cable. They put something to go over their mouth once they catch them. And that, that brings them up. And they was taking them off one after the other. Dang, what fishing?

• 4:55:27Roger Reaves?

  And then it were down, down, down, you sons of bitches. They docked me in the head. Picked me up by my groin. Treated me real bad. And there was three of them, they were called the TRG, and they were stealing that cocaine like crazy. They was throwing it back in the surf where it was rushing back around. I said, I hope they get it all. They had a gun to my head, don't you look, don't you look. Damn. And then after a while, I saw the federal police coming. So, uh, they arrested us and took us, took us down to Geraldton. And stayed there for a day and then they put us in a Brink's truck and, and took us to a prison in, in Perth. And, uh, I got twenty-five years.

• 4:56:09Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, then I testified that Joel, who I put the boat in his name, didn't know that it was cocaine. And he, he, he thought we was gonna sell the boat in Indonesia. And when the cocaine come, he couldn't swim a thousand miles. So he, after three trials, he won his trial. And he went home and they appealed my sentence and raised me to life.

• 4:56:31Roger Reaves?

  So instead they was gonna do it if I testified. So anyway, I, uh, I got a life sentence for testifying and, um, but they put it eighteen years as a minimum before I could apply for parole. So that, but whenever they found out that I had escaped from all those prisons before and the police, they come and arrested me in the prison and put me in what they call the shoe. And, uh, I was in the shoe there. There was a, there was only three other ones when I went in there. And, uh, that was the worst of the worst. I mean, it was like the silence of the lambs. Really? Just exactly like that. And, uh, they had, uh, one-way mirrors that they looked at you, five or six cars. And we cooked our own food.

• 4:57:15Roger Reaves?

  They carry ourselves, they came at six o'clock in the morning, opened the cell with about six of them with truncheons. They was ready to beat you to death if you moved. And, uh, it was quite boring in that place. I stayed in there just a little over a year, but there was a computer in there. And after I got life, I thought, you know, my, my children, grandchildren, great-grandkids, they never know who I am. And some of these stories, I believe I'll tell them about when Grandma bought me the little pony. And I started, I didn't know how to, how to turn that computer on, but I could type. It didn't have a program on it. It just had a thing called Paintbrush. And so I, I got to typing and I painted over a mi- I printed out over a million words before

• 4:57:57Roger Reaves?

  I quit. And so then when I got out of there, I got a computer and got it, got the computer. And it took me, I reckon, a year to figure out what I'd wrote. It was all red, yellow and green. Cause I didn't worry about spelling or punctuation. I just wanted to tell the story. So I wrote the book there called Smuggler while I was in prison. You have any idea how long it took you to type a million words? About three or four months. Three or four months? That's all I did. Didn't have nothing to do. Did you like doing it? Yeah, cause some of the times and it's a lot of the stuff that I put, I just cried and the tears come out. I think it did me like something good to remember my grandpa, grandma and my daddy and the stuff, the ghost stories that told around the fire and all that sort of stuff as a youth. It's like therapy.

• 4:58:38Roger Reaves?

  Therapy, yes, it did good. And I took all that out because nobody wants to read about my grandpa. But this, I just left the stuff that I did in it. Yeah. And the truth. So that's what I did. And it was, it was enjoyable. And then, of course, I couldn't send the book out after I got it all typed together. And they allowed me to buy a computer for myself. And Australia's prison was, was more progressive than here, much more so. So I had the computer and there was a skydiver in there and he had a illegal telephone. And so he said, oh, you want to get that to your wife? What's her email number? Click. And in one second, Mari had that book in the United States. So she published it for me while I was in prison.

• 4:59:23Roger Reaves?

  That's amazing. Yeah. When did you get out of prison? I got out two years ago. Two years ago? I came back from Australia. I, I was coming up on the 18th year and, and nobody hardly gets parole on their first year eligible. They, anybody, no matter what, they'd say, okay, you got life, you got 50 years or 30 years before you can apply for parole. And most everybody, come back in five years, you're not rehabilitated.

• 4:59:52Roger Reaves?

  So I wrote my neighbor, Mr. Jimmy Carter, a letter, and I asked him, "Mr. Carter, I mean, I was your neighbor, remember back yonder, da-da-da." Jimmy Carter was your neighbor? Was your neighbor, was a neighbor, yes. So I had a farm there, right, right close to, close to his. So, uh, he wrote a letter to the Attorney General of Australia, and said, "If appropriate, I would ask that you will, or I hope that you will consider for parole, my neighbor and friend Roger Reeves." And so things started rolling, and I got paroled. So they put me on a plane. Uh, uh, on the day, eighteen years, I got out. Course, I hadn't gotten any trouble.

• 5:00:36Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, I got, uh, flew back laughing across the Pacific and with three marshals from Australia. I think they knew what was going on. But anyhow, the plane emptied and I stepped out,

• 5:00:49Roger Reaves?

  and five little Mexican-American

• 5:00:54Roger Reaves?

  Border Patrol guys grabbed me hard, slammed me into the wire, bruised my face, kicked my feet apart, handcuffed me, two-leg irons on me, put the handcuffs on me so hard. There's one ugly woman there saying, "Eyes ahead, eyes ahead." I said, "If I had a bulldog look like you, I'd shave his ass and teach him to walk backwards."

• 5:01:22Roger Reaves?

  They took me and put me in the, in the choky there in Los Angeles. And I couldn't get out of there. I said, "I've been in open prison for sixteen of the last years." I said, "What in the world?" And the lieutenant says, "I can't move you, man." So, one day, the little window slid open, a nice-looking man standing there said, "My name is Assistant Warden Short." Says, "We saw your National Geographic documentary, and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation." Click. I never could get out of there. I stayed in, in isolation for months.

• 5:01:59Roger Reaves?

  Just, uh, National Geographic did a, did a thing, and I was part of it down in Australia. Australia's hardest prison.

• 5:02:07Roger Reaves?

  And I kinda bragged about cutting a hole in that place when it ran you.

• 5:02:13Roger Reaves?

  So that that cost me. Yeah. So they the parole board supposed to give you, they was parole for marijuana thirty forty three years ago. And by law, they're supposed to give you a hearing within ninety days. They never gave me one. I went to Oklahoma City to get a hearing and I got there about three thirty, four o'clock and a nice lady says, oh, you're Reeves, there was a man from Washington here and he waited and he said that he'd come back next year.

• 5:02:43Roger Reaves?

  So there I got out on the floor, but I had to count, I had to register every two hours that I'd go back into shoe when I was in Oklahoma. So I had to come in and sign a thing on the floor, right where I was, I was on like the eighteenth floor, whatever.

• 5:02:59Roger Reaves?

  So I guess they thought I was gonna escape again after the, but anyway, she said, would you like to have a, me to ask for parole on the record? I said, I've never asked for it. I said, please do. So the next day she's come and said, yes, I have your parole here. You get out in ninety days from today and they're sending you to Terminal Island, California for the rest of your time. So they took me back and took me a week or two to get back there. What a mess getting back.

• 5:03:26Roger Reaves?

  Uh, when I was in, uh, there's so much corruption. Let me just tell you how much corruption is in our government. It will make you sick. Everybody in it is. When I was in Long Park Penitentiary, I watched them move dirt. About the tenth of April, they got big bulldozers and they moving dirt from one place to the other, back and forth.

• 5:03:52Roger Reaves?

  Somebody's cousins getting paid off. They wanna use up all the money that they have. Yep. So we can ask for more next year. I saw that in my own eyes. Then on this, I would be, I saw a nice young fella from down in South Georgia where I'm from, he said, where are you going? So I got caught with two grams of methamphetamine. I got to go to Los Angeles for psychiatric evaluation. I've been here three months waiting for a plane. Then I meet another fella, he said, well, I'm from Long Beach and what about you? He said, I got caught with two grams of methamphetamine. I got to go to Atlanta, Georgia for psychiatric evaluation. I believe that Fed Air has twenty-three planes flying prisoners around the United States. It's Canadian company. You better not ask anything about that.

• 5:04:38Roger Reaves?

  That's interesting.

• 5:04:40Roger Reaves?

  It's like we had a. It's a Canadian company, huh? I heard it was. I don't know. I've never looked into it really, but I believe it is. But anyhow, you know who it's owned by. It's owned by our politicians for sure in the border of the prisons. It's their retirement. It's the same thing with these, uh, with these places that make things in prison. You better not ask about them. You'll be put in a shoe and transferred. So they make office furnitures for, or cables for space stuff. All kinds of stuff in prisons are made by prison labor, a dollar an hour. Yeah. So that's a, I don't, where was I now? I regressed to the. You were getting transferred from Oklahoma.

• 5:05:23Roger Reaves?

  Yes, I got back there and, and after a year, after, uh, three months, they let me out. Right. And, oh, they put me in the, they, I got out, I come out of the chow hall and the guy said he had, uh,

• 5:05:38Roger Reaves?

  cut my hair. He said, when you come out the chow hall, turn to the right. Well, I did. And the guy said, walk between us. And he went up like, boof. And I said, I bet I could outrun you. And they tackled me to the ground.

• 5:05:52Roger Reaves?

  Put me in the, choke me in the shoe and wouldn't let me out because I'd threatened to assault an officer.

• 5:06:02Roger Reaves?

  So I'm in there and I don't particularly want to get out. They got COVID coming out there.

• 5:06:08Roger Reaves?

  And, uh, I'll tell you one, one little story just about, uh,

• 5:06:15Roger Reaves?

  they come, Reeve got, got somebody for you. So they put somebody in there with me and it was a young fellow from El Salvador. And, uh, his name, he wanted to be called Pablo. I think he's called Pablo Escobar. Anyway, he had, he was a transient farm worker that had been five times caught. And he told me that he was from a pineapple, had a home in a pineapple plantation down there, and had a wife and children, but he was the dullest knife in the drawer. But he had some kind of, a lot of them have psychiatric problems. And he, I guess, sleeping on the ground in the fields here in Washington, the United States, said he made two hundred dollars a day and shipped it all home.

• 5:06:58Roger Reaves?

  And he lay down and a bug got in his ear and they had to cut his whole ear out to, to take that, to get that bug or whatever infection it was out of there. And they put that in, so he was still sick from the stitches. And they gave him medicine, and sometime he would just turn completely red, just bright red, and he'd just wring his hands and walk back and forth. I said, Pablo, sit down here. How long's it been since anybody touched you? He didn't know. And I said, just sit down there, and I just sat down and went to massage his shoulders, and he was just, oh, oh, oh, just pitiful what people in there without love, without touching, without no, nobody, nobody for years. Yeah.

• 5:07:41Roger Reaves?

  And tell me, you see the color just come back to him. Oh, thank you, senor, thank you. And it just, it's all mental coming to him. And so I had a lock for my little, little container there, and it had a three ways, like eight, twelve, fourteen. And so he wanted to play with it. And so I said, okay, now come on, do it, do it back eight. I'd tell him to pop open, he'd be so smile. And then he wanted to write it down, I said, no, you can remember three things. So he worked at that thing and worked at it with him and helped it, and when that thing popped open, you should have seen the smile on his face. For the rest of the time I was in there, that's what he did, open and close that lock.

• 5:08:27Roger Reaves?

  So we wouldn't go out. He was very shy. We had to hang towels up for him to go to the bathroom or to take a bath. But neither one of us wanted to go out with those guards. It was all covered up in cloth every which way. And it was just like dead men walking out there. There was eight people died in there with us. Really? You know, the most of any place in the United States was right there in Terminal Island. And we was in a sick ward and in the lockdown. So there was a little sink there with a bowl. You had to push water hard, real hard, to get a little stream of

• 5:09:06Roger Reaves?

  water. Well, we put a straw in it. Now you can put a sock under it. We washed ourselves. Don't come in here. Just put the food through the slot. So we stayed in there for the last six weeks. And then they came and bundled me all up and put me out on the street. I got a ride home. I got a ride home. I come home and. How long all at once were you in prison? Eight, nineteen years at that time, when I got out that day. So I got home and Mari was there waiting. And I had on the prison clothes. And of course, I just, first thing

• 5:09:49Roger Reaves?

  I wanted to do was just throw those things into trash. And I went in there and just showered, scrubbed myself, shampooed, shaved, and cleaned up. And I went to the closet and all my clothes from forty years ago and older. Wow. The pants I got around there are fifty years old. Was hanging in the closet. She had washed and ironed and so stark, just each one of them was hanging there so pretty. That made me cry. And my shoes, she had shined them shiny. And I put those clothes on and I put those shoes on. And I took a step and the soles of the shoes stayed on the floor. All the strings had rotted. Wow. So I got the shoes with no soles.

• 5:10:32Roger Reaves?

  Oh, man. And I went to the table and I sit down. It was an oak table that over fifty years ago that I with a carving knife, I cleaned all the claws and took the paint off of it and stripped it. There was a hour. She had made a meal for me and the place mats and the plates, same plates that I'd left forty years ago. Same pictures on the wall. It was a small apartment now where we used to have a mansion to live in, but it was still the same. She had saved it for me just like that. And I just sit there and cry. I'll cry to tell about it right now. It just like, it took me three days. I wouldn't, I still won't look at photographs of her and her children growing up. You will not? I won't, I don't want to. It makes me cry. There she was forty, fifty, sixty and seventy.

• 5:11:17Roger Reaves?

  I wasn't there for none of those birthdays. Sometimes I was out on the skate for a few years and she had joined me, but it was like I wasn't home. Damn. She raised those children and they did well. So whatever she wants, I do now. Yeah. Good for you. Yeah.

• 5:11:39Roger Reaves?

  That's, that's one hell of a woman. Yep. That's amazing. I saw only three other plate people in all the years I was in prison. Their wives stayed with them when they got life sentences. Yeah, it stayed a long time. I said, what'd you tell them? She said, I just told them I'm not available. Beautiful woman, huh? I joke and say, I thought for sure I was gonna have to shoot a husband in law when I got home.

• 5:12:08Roger Reaves?

  But it wasn't one there, thank goodness. Do you regret anything? Of course I regret it. Yeah. Terribly, yeah. So I wasted half of my life in a, in a cage. Yeah. Couldn't you? I mean, yeah, I had ten years of fun and thirty-three years of prison. My goodness, just not worth it. And I look back on my life, I was, I was immature. I had good sense, but I was just immature. And I trusted people and I went through school with a lark. I didn't, in high school, I didn't study, I didn't have to study and went off to college and it was like, "Ugh, I don't want to do this."

• 5:12:47Roger Reaves?

  But if I had trained myself from young to studied, my middle daughter's a doctor. She just went through it, skipped right through medical school. And I could have done the same thing I kind of wanted to. I signed up for it, but I didn't have the stick ability to sit down and study that stuff. And I wish I had. I'd love to help people all over the world and just, yes, I would have loved to have done something like that. What in the world I want to do this for? I wanted to farm. I wanted to farm and to grow tobacco and cotton and corn. That's what I had in mind to do. That's what I wanted to do.

• 5:13:25Shawn Ryan?

  You think you would have got, you could have got away with it if you would have just?

• 5:13:29Roger Reaves?

  If I'd have just quit way back younger, of course I would have got away with it.

• 5:13:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:13:32Roger Reaves?

  Like when I said I made three hundred thousand dollars and you could buy in the United States, you could buy most any house you wanted for three thousand dollars down back then. That would have been a hundred houses.

• 5:13:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:13:44Roger Reaves?

  Now, if you'd done that in California, that'd been one or two hundred million dollars now and somebody else paid for it. Just that simple, nothing. It was just there. I just stuck my head in deeper and deeper into the noose until it got pulled around it. That was it.

• 5:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 5:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  What went through your head when you found out that Pablo Escobar was dead?

• 5:14:10Roger Reaves?

  Nothing. I thought, got what he deserved.

• 5:14:13Shawn Ryan?

  Were you happy?

• 5:14:14Roger Reaves?

  No, I wasn't happy or sad. I think he should have been killed. I think he should have been executed. Anybody does what he does. But gives people like me a bad name had nothing to do with stuff like that.

• 5:14:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:14:25Roger Reaves?

  And the Ochoes and a lot of other people that give a bad name. The man was a megalomaniac. You know, different than Putin, no different than Hitler. He just made some money and puffed his chest up and think, "I'm going to rule the world." And everybody gets brought down, all of them.

• 5:14:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:14:47Roger Reaves?

  Yeah. He was a bad furlong. I'm sorry I ever knew him. I'm sorry he was ever involved in something like that.

• 5:14:57Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have anything else you wanna talk about?

• 5:15:03Roger Reaves?

  Yes, we should talk about the prison system.

• 5:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wanna talk about the prison system?

• 5:15:08Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 5:15:11Roger Reaves?

  It's so deabolically evil and unfair, unjust. It's full of poor people, poor, uneducated people. It's full of people with mental illnesses. Ronald Reagan stopped the mental health program in the United States when he came in, bam. Jimmy Carter had it all, for, for all people, for mental health. Reagan thought, "We don't need it. Let's put that money somewhere else." And now, tens of thousands of people are on the street, homeless. They don't have any insane asylum. You have to be absolutely a babbling idiot to get into one of those places.

• 5:15:56Roger Reaves?

  So you got all these people that are just everywhere you go. They're in the parks and in the freeways, asking for money. I don't mind them asking for money, but those people, they need help, just like a person that's got cancer. They, their, their mind is cancerous. Something's wrong with them. And some of them look, look pretty nice, but they're not. And they come into prison, they'll be sleeping under a bridge. And a policeman or DEA agent, I'm, I'm saying, they'll go under that bridge and they'll, they'll do drugs with them and got a big tattoo and tattoos all over them, big mustache. And they'll get one of them to sell the other one two or three grams of methamphetamine. It's real cheap.

• 5:16:41Roger Reaves?

  And they'll arrest both of them. Now, he's got to arrest. And he does that every month or two. Guess who makes captain? Guess who makes chief? The guy that does that kinda crap, such kinda terrible stuff, just in traps. These ignorant people. I'm ignorant, mentally ill people. Alan, you've got a young lawyer, and he gets a job as a prosecutor.

• 5:17:07Roger Reaves?

  He wants to make judge, and the judge wants to make governor, and the governor wants to make president, and they working their way up.

• 5:17:14Roger Reaves?

  So he lied, cheated, and steals anything. I want a conviction. So he gets that poor fellow that's got two grams, and he says, "You plead guilty to this today, and we'll give you five years. If you don't, I'll guarantee you I'm gonna get you ten years." And that happens from two grams of methamphetamine right up to murder. And the fellow that didn't murder somebody, they said, "We let you, if you plead guilty to manslaughter, we'll give you ten years. But if you don't, you're gonna get the needle. You're gonna get the electric chair." And it scares these people that are mentally ill. They don't have a lawyer. They don't know anything about how a court system works. They don't know anything about their rights. They get a public defender that don't know much more than they do.

• 5:17:56Roger Reaves?

  So, and they plead guilty to these things, and the prison system fills up. And the prosecutor says, "I have a ninety-eight percent win ratio." Yeah, he scared people into signing confessions. He know better than the Mexicans do when they beat me and stuck chili up my butt.

• 5:18:16Roger Reaves?

  That's, that's the way it works. It shouldn't be that way. We should be humane. We have a wonderful country here in America. We have it, and the people just don't know. And you look at these people and you think, "I don't like those people. They, they stink. We don't want them. Put them in jail. Lock them up."

• 5:18:37Roger Reaves?

  And that's what Mr. and Mrs. Nice out there think. They should look at them what they really are. So that, that's our prison system today and our judicial system.

• 5:18:51Roger Reaves?

  And it needs to change. Those people need to come out of prison, and they need to go to mental health. The people that are in there for drug offenses, all of them should be out of there. If two people sell each other something...

• 5:19:05Roger Reaves?

  Yes, we can't have that, but it shouldn't be life in prison, ten years, five years. There's punishment, and you got your laws to do it. But the crime should, the time should fit the crime. I agree with that. And take away from this penitentiary, nobody's doing pentas anymore. That was Quakers. They're not, it's just like, it's just evil. I will shut you in a cage and treat you bad. Now in Australia, they tell you straight up, the warden says, you, when the judge sentences you, that's your punishment, to be away from your loved ones and away from your society for this number of years. We are not here to punish you.

• 5:19:48Roger Reaves?

  Not so, America. And the discontent between the blacks and the browns and the whites is just awful in there now. When I first went in there forty years ago, we all got along, and they do to some degree. But I got sent down there, when I got sent to Terminal Island, I got in the misplace, a lot of people in their wheelchairs and limping around and dying and bags on them. And I went into the TV room and, no, no, no señores, no señor. You're white, you don't, don't come here, this is, this is for the Latinos. I said, I speak Spanish. No señor, por favor, no.

• 5:20:31Roger Reaves?

  Really, he said, no, this, this is only for the Latinos. And I go across, and the one across the way, what you doing here? This is black telling, get the fuck out of here, man. They were, what? We play chess out here. Yeah, that's out there, but in here, it's black. You know, I didn't, don't come across that door. What?

• 5:20:58Roger Reaves?

  So I have to go plumb to the other side and another TV. And there's old white men in there with the long hair and yellow mustaches from smoking. They in the wheelchairs and sitting around in there. And I come in, they says, "Show us your paperwork. Don't come in here till you show your paperwork." "What are you talking about? I ain't showing you shit, man." "Well, we'll take you out." "Well, you gonna take me out in that wheelchair?" "No, man, don't, don't come in here. You got to see you have, you might be a pedophile. You might be a snitch. You might be a homosexual." "I said, what? They can't come in here?" "No. They got their place down at the gym." "What in the world's matter with you people? That's, so that's what it's got to.

• 5:21:43Roger Reaves?

  Just hatred between people from the races of what they did. And in the chow hall, you don't dare sit at that table over there. Boy, that's the important boys. And these over here, they, they're informers. And these over here pedophiles. And these over here, or these. And they're all separated there in the chow hall. They're all in prison. Of course, I can understand some of it, but it's gone way too far."

• 5:22:10Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 5:22:12Roger Reaves?

  That's the US prison system, and that's the US, how they got there.

• 5:22:15Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think you will become an advocate for a prison reform?

• 5:22:19Roger Reaves?

  Oh, absolutely. If anything, they got all kind of stuff that's going on and it's, people worried about where a little boy's gonna go pee pee. I mean, they ought to be worried about something worthwhile. And prisons is a good spot to start. And mental health is even right up there with it. Those two things. And it's so simple to straighten out. Just absolutely.

• 5:22:44Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think the solution is?

• 5:22:49Roger Reaves?

  Mental health programs, money, a lot of money and trickle down to the right people. It's plenty of money. Yeah. Billions and trillions of dollars, these corporations. I'm completely against all this big corporations on everything. Whatever in the world happened to the store, the little doughnut shop, the little whatever. They all owned by Walmarts and all these big ones. How did we let them just take over? Nobody can make a living anymore with a business out there. What happened? That just, I don't know if that'll ever change, but it's wrong. I should be able to open a store on the corner and make a living. You can't, you can't, can't compete with those people.

• 5:23:31Roger Reaves?

  They buy out of China, get it shipped over here and have labor that's five dollars a day made it. You can't, you can't work with it. I, I had bees, I was a beekeeper, I had 500 hives of bees. And I was getting 42 cents a pound for honey and using pollination. And the government says, okay, we're gonna free trade, we're gonna let Brazil and every other country ship. Honey went to seven cents a pound. I couldn't even look after the bees. Had to get, had to give them away and nobody wanted to buy them. So that stuff is happening to all kind of

• 5:24:05Roger Reaves?

  human being, not little people, people that want to work. Yeah. So you get a job driving a truck for UPS or whatever for 25 bucks an hour. You, oh, man, my wife's got one too. And try to make a living that way, but it shouldn't be that way. But I'm not talking about big business, I'm just talking about the the government should take some of these trillions and billions of dollars that they spending and put it in the right position, right place. That we talk about how much money was wasted in Afghanistan and the Middle East in that war. I don't say that it wasn't necessary, but they said, when you talk about how much it was.

• 5:24:48Roger Reaves?

  I read, you can't, you can't have any number when you get numbers with 10 and or nine and zeros from here to the wall, it doesn't make any difference. Yeah. But I understand it cost in goods and services. And it cost every human being from a little tiny baby to the oldest person in the United States, a brand new three bedroom home. Now you put it in that perspective and you say, wow.

• 5:25:15Shawn Ryan?

  Well, there's a lot of money being laced it on a lot of things.

• 5:25:18Roger Reaves?

  Course it is. And, uh, put it, put it to use.

• 5:25:22Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody's complaining about school shootings right now, which they should be, right?

• 5:25:25Roger Reaves?

  Course.

• 5:25:26Shawn Ryan?

  And then they hired eighty-nine thousand IRS agents.

• 5:25:30Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 5:25:30Shawn Ryan?

  They could have hired eighty-nine thousand, I don't know, people to protect the schools.

• 5:25:36Roger Reaves?

  Yes, but.

• 5:25:37Shawn Ryan?

  But they hired eighty-nine thousand, is it eighty-seven or eighty-nine thousand IRS agents?

• 5:25:42Roger Reaves?

  To try to make sure.

• 5:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  New ones.

• 5:25:43Roger Reaves?

  New ones. I, I saw that. Where in the world? What'd they come for?

• 5:25:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we sent fifty-four billion to Ukraine, you know, instead of spending it on our own infrastructure. But I think it all just comes back around in these guys' pockets, you know? Little goes to Ukraine, funnels back in, you know, obviously the IRS.

• 5:26:06Roger Reaves?

  So dishonest, so.

• 5:26:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:26:08Roger Reaves?

  But anyway, if they would put up the money, first off, for mental health, that would, that would, and I mean for sure, take, treat those people right. They don't have to pamper them, just get them off the street and give them something to eat and clean their clothes up and give them a haircut and a, and a shave and, oh, I mean, you know, just absolutely, give them, they got a prison cell for them, why in the world can't they make a little room for them somewhere outside of the town where they got a, where they got a street car, a, a bus service rat back and forth? And, and if they, the ones that need mental health medicine, the ones that need mental health nurses, doctors, get that, make it

• 5:26:53Roger Reaves?

  go. Now then you're gonna stop the influx to the prisons if those people have somewhere else to go, and then next go into prison. See about those people. If they're deemed possible and not dangerous, and they got mental health, you put them in a facility out there that was made for that problem, not a, not a penitentiary. Let them go. Let them get a little, little humanity. Let's just show some love in this country. Take care of our own. I mean, it needs to be done. It needs to be stomped hard down done. And we need to teach in schools. Family, family values. About how many children you can afford?

• 5:27:38Roger Reaves?

  How old do you have to be to have a child? My daughter is a doctor and she delivered a baby to a ten-year-old girl.

• 5:27:47Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 5:27:50Roger Reaves?

  Four generations in the visiting room, all of them on welfare.

• 5:27:54Roger Reaves?

  And all of them with a bunch of children in each generation. And I say that little boy's like Elvis Presley's song, "In the Ghetto." He doesn't have much of a chance.

• 5:28:05Roger Reaves?

  Poor, poor little things. I say, "It shouldn't be." You have to have a permit to ride a moped in the United States, most anywhere else. How much more important to bring a child into this world? I say that a little spara builds her nest before she lays an egg.

• 5:28:26Roger Reaves?

  We don't have that much sense.

• 5:28:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's very true.

• 5:28:34Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like when you got out of prison? You made a video about this, got, what, six million views in twelve hours or something?

• 5:28:42Roger Reaves?

  Yes.

• 5:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  And then they took it down, but I'll play the video right now.

• 5:28:47Roger Reaves?

  Hello, folks. I just got out of prison. I've been drinking thirty-three years marijuana. And the first sign I saw when I come down the road, "Relax, we deliver your marijuana to you."

• 5:29:01Shawn Ryan?

  But what was it like for you to come out of prison? And you'd spent many years in prison for marijuana, not counting the cocaine stuff, but for marijuana? And then you saw that sign, "We'll deliver it right to your front door."

• 5:29:16Roger Reaves?

  It just made me smile all over and I say how ironic, how stupid the world is. I mean, it's just absolutely that. It was, it's just ridiculous. And how many people, they were shot and killed and put life in prison for marijuana. Yes, and now it's, now it's okay.

• 5:29:36Shawn Ryan?

  Now they deliver it to your front door.

• 5:29:38Roger Reaves?

  That's right, it was the same thing when I was making whiskey in Georgia. You go across the river in Florida, my wife couldn't understand it. Well, it's, you can go down there and buy all you want, and up here, they'll shoot and kill you.

• 5:29:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:29:52Roger Reaves?

  Just one state to another. So I made the old moon shine. And it's now in every town, everywhere, same place liquor stores. You go in a little store and little gal behind the counter can hand you a jug of whiskey. Just like nothing. Take the, take the cigarettes off of the counter and just give them out. I mean, it's just so much stuff. It's just, just ridiculous.

• 5:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Roger, I want to wrap this thing up, but um, you have got one hell of a story behind you. And um, for anybody listening, I just want to say all the links. If you're looking to get in touch with Roger or follow him on social media, all the links are below. The book is linked below. I hope your book sales go up.

• 5:30:46Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, don't forget that book, folks.

• 5:30:48Shawn Ryan?

  And what um, what do you got coming up? I know you got some stuff maybe in the works. Do you want to talk about that or no?

• 5:30:56Roger Reaves?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll just say that uh, I, I want to make a, a series about this and, and there's uh, people looking into it. But uh, I, I hope they do and uh, had a couple of writers and they, they say they have a, a deck laid out for thirty. But we'll see if it, it goes. If it is, it's a chance of it and uh, so I'd like to get the story out there.

• 5:31:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it'll be a whole of a story to watch. We'll be watching and uh, I just want to say it was real pleasure to meet you and your wife and hang out with you guys and, and, and it was a real pleasure to get your story out and I, I just wish you the best of luck.

• 5:31:33Roger Reaves?

  Likewise for us. It was really good you invited us.

• 5:31:37Shawn Ryan?

  Cheers.

• 5:31:54Speaker 04

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