January 15, 2020 • 42 mins
In the wake of President Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 which institutes mandatory minimum prison sentences for pot, my dad completes his most successful smuggling trip ever, then doubts himself, leading to the biggest rip-off of his career.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. It's nineteen eighty six and I'm eleven.
This year stands out to me for many reasons. For one,
it introduced the cool ranch Dorito, a coveted slumber party
junk food for me and my friends who came over
to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Labyrinth, and Pretty and Pink,
(00:30):
which all came out that year. I also remember the
horrific Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. The spaceship blew up on
live TV in front of every American kid, including me
watching at school with my classmates. And at this time,
my Saturday morning cartoons were frequently interrupted by Ronald and
(00:53):
Nancy Reagan's relentless Just Say No campaign. Not long ago,
in Oakland, California, I was asked by a group of
children what to do if they were all for drugs,
and I answered, just say no. That's Nancy Reagan. After
her husband Ronald Reagan, a former blist movie actor, was
(01:15):
elected president in nineteen eighty, his administrations Just Say No
ads and PSA's flooded TVs and radios urgently instructing American
kids to stand up to drugs, just say no, and
turn in anyone using drugs to the police, including your parents. Today,
there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country
(01:37):
and no one is say from it. Drugs steal away
so much, they take and take, until finally, every time
a drug goes into a child, something else is forced out,
like love and hope and trust and confidence. Drugs take
away the dream from every child's heart and replace it
(01:58):
with a nightmare. In nineteen eighty six, Reagan's Anti Drug
Abuse Act is passed. The Act renewed the war on
drugs and instituted mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenses,
and maximum sentences ran to life. That year, my dad
(02:19):
does a trip moving so much pot that if he'd
gotten caught, he could have received a lengthy prison sentence
under Reagan's new law. Now, this trip is a major success,
but it's also the beginning of the end of my
dad's career as a pot smuggler, because, like success, rip
(02:40):
offs are very common in the illicit, all cash world
of smuggling, And following the biggest triumph of my dad's
career came the biggest ripoff of his life. I'm Rainbow
Valentine and this is disorganized crime smuggler's daughter rolling the douving, young,
(03:13):
free and groovy, making it up. We rolled along, rolling
along far out the country, roll he rag in the
Golden ganging York State, making it up as we roll along?
(03:44):
Did mom just leave? How do I know how many
things come? I'm coming up around here? Will you join
us for them? With your key for the stories about Arlados?
In nineteen eighty six, my dad is rolling along in
his cross country smuggling enterprise, and his personal silk road
is a well oiled machine. He's honed his skills accomplishing
(04:09):
smuggling success with his handful of trusted colleagues in Marin
County in New York. Most Saturdays, he takes me and
my little brother to the grown Ups Mill Valley baseball
game at the foot of Mount tam and the Crisp
Marine Air the ball game I mentioned in episode one
when I learned that most of the players were coincidentally
(04:29):
also smugglers. Now this game is where fun and business converge.
During these ball games, my dad gets friendly with a
player we're calling baseball. A sparkly, cheerful art and theater
enthusiast working in the same trade as my dad, but
a different scene. Now, baseball has around thirty thousand pounds
(04:52):
of Mexican pot coming in and needs some people to
distribute it. Also, by the way, Baseball is the smuggler
who coined the term savings them loam the smugglers bank.
He told me about this trip, it was I'm in
a huge load of Mexican came in. You know, well,
(05:14):
twenty five thirty thousand pounds. That that's big. Yeah, that's
that's big. So my dad teams up with Baseball as
one of his distributors and over six months smuggles over
one third of Baseball's thirty thousand pounds of Mexican pot.
My East Coast guy says, yeah, I think we can
(05:35):
do a lot of this back east. We're using the
biggest rental truck you can rent, twenty four footers and
filling it with a time at a time, because there
was really a lot of it. Part of my dad's
job on all of his tricks, particularly bigger ones like this,
was quality control. Raised by a professional art critic, My
(05:57):
dad is a discerning connoisseur of everything, including pot, and
he preferred to distribute quality pot. Now, according to my dad,
great weed is aromatic, not full of shake or seeds
and comes in loose, fluffy bales, not firm pressed bricks.
When you get that big, you've got to separate the
good stuff from the mediocre stuff from the shitty shake.
(06:21):
So after running out of all the good stuff, there
were two other levels, and I remember doing one deal
locally with the low level stuff and the guy bought
five hundred pounds for cash, and I made a hundred
bucks a pound on it. So in one two hour segment,
(06:43):
I made fifty grand. Holy yeah, which was coold. This
trip with Baseball is the most successful of my dad's
twenty two years in smuggling, and he says it's the
happiest story of his career, from the excellent colleagues he
worked with, to the slickness of the operation and how
much money he ended up making. To give you a perspective, Divonne,
(07:06):
the whole trip I ended up over six months selling
thirteen thousand pounds, which was the biggest trip I had
ever done, and it was so comfortable and easy. We
got into this regular flow which was fabulous and and
didn't really have competition because we were one of the
(07:28):
two big distributors of the whole thing, and they just
loved it, and we were easy to deal with, and
we through that period of time we made about seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in nineteen eighty six is worth over
one point seven million dollars in today's money. By the way,
(07:51):
this is the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
cash my dad absurdly laundered in socks in episode six.
So to celebrate the success of the trip, my family
went on a fancy vacation to Barbados. We went holidays
fairly regularly to Caabo, Saint Lucas, Hawaii, Yllapa, a remote
Mexican destination for psychedelic pioneers and hippies. I see a
(08:15):
pattern now. We usually vacationed in between trips with family
friends who, of course, it turns out we're also pot smugglers.
So we had a vacation. Yeah, yeah, we had a
which was really abraded. Yeah, we did. We celebrated. So
we booked this villa in Barbados for ten days. It
was I don't know, six bedrooms, and it had a pool,
(08:37):
and it had a chauffeur and a maid and a
cook and a just a whole several people who were
always there working or would take you anywhere, or would
do anything. And it wasn't on the water. It was
up on the hill above town and we went there
for Thanksgiving. We're eating flying fish every day, fried fish.
(08:59):
It was delicious. Right, we had the flying fish, and
so they would bring in fresh fish that was good.
Who was delicious? It was amazing. I'll never forget this
trip one because of its grandeur, but also it coincided
with the appearance of Haley's Comet, only visible to the
naked eye every seventy five to seventy six years. So
(09:21):
do you remember seeing Haley's commet at Narvators? Do you
remember that we watched it right one one night by
the people by the pool of the big right, which
was next to the polo field. That was that big
grass thing was a polo field next to them, next
to that long pool. Haley's Comet has been recorded since
(09:44):
ancient times and in civilizations around the world, and has
been associated with both good and bad omens, perhaps a
foreshadowing of my family's approaching hardships. This family vacation was
the last time we celebrated a successful trip. The last
time my dad splurged on decadence and the last time
(10:07):
money came easily, it was the end of my family's
monetary wealth and cushy lifestyle. Of course, my dad didn't
know that yet, nor did he know that he was
about to make one of the worst judgment calls of
his life. I'm Rainbow Valentine, and this is disorganized crime.
(10:28):
We'll be right back. So before getting into my dad's
big financial misstep, let's go back to the Reagans. With
the passage of Reagan's Drug Abuse Act, the stress of
my parents double lives was compounding. The Just Say No
(10:53):
campaign flooded radios, TVs, and billboards across the country. I
reached back out to Dennis McNally, our official counterculture historian,
to talk about the Reagans and just say now to
understand the Reagans. So it's important to go back a
little bit. In nineteen sixty six, he ran for a
(11:16):
governor of California, and he ran, in various subtle ways,
on a platform attacking the students at Berkeley who had
had the free speech movement in nineteen sixty four. He
conflated the students at cal Berkeley with hippies and said
that his famous line was that hippies were like, let's say,
(11:42):
they had hair like Jane, talked like Tarzan, and smelled
like the chimp with a cheetah or whatever it was called. Secondly,
he attacked He ran an anti black campaign against the
people who had rioted at the Watts riots in nineteen
(12:02):
sixty five, and that is of what got him elected.
This is the platform that got Reagan elected California governor
in the sixties and US President in nineteen eighty. Nancy
Reagan had these extreme pretensions to the real social upper class,
(12:25):
to the the you know, the old money that in
some way still still runs America, and one of the
other And one of the side effects of that and
the holding over from his opposition to cal Berkeley and
the free speech movement, was just saying no. The the
(12:46):
impact of just saying no was simply to lump all
drugs together, and so anybody that had anything to do
with drugs, no matter what the drug, was going to
get as much time as the judges could figure out
to give them. Simply it harshed everything you didn't want
(13:10):
to get caught much of. Just say no and The
Anti Drug Abuse Act was targeted at crack and cocaine,
but as Dennis said, all drugs and drug users were
lumped together as one melodramatic evil. The Anti Drug Abuse
Act of nineteen eighty six required a minimum sentence of
five years for drug offenses that involved one hundred kilos
(13:33):
of marijuana, plus a minimum sentence of ten years for
drug offenses that involved one thousand kilos of marijuana. Now
one hundred kilos is roughly two hundred and twenty pounds.
A thousand kilos of pot is over two thousand, two
hundred pounds. With the thirteen thousand pounds my dad had
(13:56):
just smuggled, he could have been sentenced to decades under
the new law. So one thing we've done this season
is show the fun side of disorganized crime, because my
mom and dad remember their past truly with the glass
(14:18):
half full. They're fun and funny people, and there's always
a ridiculous twist to their stories. That was totally interesting mom,
Because my mom and I recently visited with one of
her old girlfriends whose brothers were busted and I'm gonna
drive home. My mom began having revelations. Um, you said
(14:41):
you had a plan B. What was your plan B?
I'll have to remember, you know I had passed sports
and to go to just gonna go to Europe. You
know you could do that then because there was no
day trouble. Did you have like passports and different names? Yeah,
(15:02):
different names made the past the sky that I knew
here was like this really sleazy counterfeter. Oh my god,
where are those passports now? Oh? We burned everything, you know,
way long time ago. You burned it. We didn't sell them.
They'd evaporated somehow, you know, the evaporated. That's not possible.
(15:29):
That's one of our terms for losing. It's evaporated. So
this podcast has brought up a lot of repressed memories
and emotions within my parents. That was cathartic for my
mom to remember. She'd suppressed a ton of fear and
stress over the years, raising kids and hiding the business.
She told me more while she was watering in the garden,
(15:51):
the stress of being Yeah, but I was trading a dune.
I would I'd rather be comfortable than in poverty and
have to keep my mouth shut. I'd rather be comfortable
and have another I doned it once with her doctor.
My mom just revealed what was going on at the house.
It was too stressful to hold it in. I don't
(16:13):
know something about it. I just like blurted it out,
like we are so much weighted around. It's just, you know,
there's a hundred pounds in the basement. I'm freaking out,
and he said, oh, that's what's going on. It's hard
to keep secrets. I'm trying to think if there's any
girlfriends that knew my secrets. I don't know. I couldn't
(16:35):
talk to a therapist around her. That can't keep any
secrets from moving. Under the Reagan administration, people were getting
busted for pot and going to jail in alarming numbers
because cannabis laws were draconian. In nineteen eighty eight, the
Anti Drug Abuse Act was enhanced, which doubled down on
(16:57):
policies to create a drug free America. As a result
of these laws and the impact on the drug smuggling community,
my parents were under enormous stress, more stress than ever before,
and according to scientific research, stress and decision making are
a terrible combination. To understand this further, I called my
(17:20):
dad's friend, psychiatrist and neuroplasticity expert, doctor Michael H. Moscowitz.
Now he's been working in public health and medicine for
almost forty years. I used to babysit his kids when
I was a teenager driving to my job, and the
car given to me when I turned sixteen a giant
American former pot smuggling boot of a vehicle. I was
(17:41):
so embarrassed to drive it. So, you know, it's interesting
because you know, the effects we see in people's behaviors
is that they become less effective in problem solving, planning,
executive function, all those types of things. And that means
that when people are stressed, they're going to make mistakes.
(18:03):
They're going to say and do things that they don't
really mean, but then now they have to own them.
They're they're going to really not function at in an
optimal way. But when that when that stressful chemistry gets
trapped in that area of the brain, it shuts off
(18:24):
the other parts of the brain that we use to
reason and do other things so that we can make
a decision to do what has to be done and
not weigh it over and think about it and run
it through a lot of different processes. What about What
are your thoughts on people making financial decisions in stressful times, well,
you know, if you can avoid it, you should avoid it. Unfortunately,
(18:45):
those decisions sometimes come up and force themselves on people.
I would say in that circumstance, it would be great
if people just kind of stepped back before they made
those decisions, did some deep breathing, if they knew meditation,
to meditate a little bit, just really try to get
themselves calm down and slow everything down before they make
those decisions, because the fireworks going off in their brain
(19:07):
is really going to make it hard for them to
make a decision that's rational and will hold up. Yeah. Awesome.
I read that in the Psychologist, one of the journals,
that they discovered people when under stress sort of ignore
the negative outcomes of a situation and focus on the
positive outcomes. Yeah, it's true, and it's one of those
(19:30):
things that involves in a bunch of different chemistry in
the brain and different regions of the brain that are
being lit up and set off. We have a reward
center deep in our brain that is good on most things,
but when people are in a stressful situation, it tends
to shift over to more addictive and compulsive behaviors than
healthy ones. So feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk
(19:54):
and reward. When under stress, people pay more attention to
the upside of a possible outcome. The research found stress
makes people focus on the way things could go right
instead of wrong, and start paying more attention to the
positive information and discounting negative information. So when stressed out
(20:16):
people are making a difficult decision, they may pay more
attention to the upsides and less to the downsides. So
that is perhaps why my dad ends up putting his
trust in the unscrupulous hands of the wrong person. Stresses
one factor. Also, my dad's rising star could have made
him feel invincible, regardless who knows, but que the Green Beret,
(20:44):
I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime. We'll be
right back. So after we return from the family vacation
to Barbadoes, my dad feels a lot of rusher to
(21:06):
clean his money, so he buys some wine his money
laundering investment of choice, but he's on the lookout for
other investment opportunities because seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
is a lot of money to launder? Is this the
most cash you've ever had? My own? Yeah, my own
(21:27):
and stashing what do I do with it? How do
I launder this money? Among other things. Yeah, back then,
so I'm feeling, oh my god, I've got all this money.
I've got to do something with it. I don't know
why I felt so pressed to do anything with it,
but just be for a while. I was thinking too
quickly and not just appreciating being where I was. I
(21:53):
met some one of your classmates fathers one day in
a carpool. This is the Beret, the Green Beret, the
Green Beret, and he was driving to Mercedes, I think
at the time. And I made up with this guy
who who starts to smooth talk me. And I'm gonna
(22:17):
need a break here first before I get into this. Yeah,
that's a rough story. Yeah, take a break for a minute. Now.
This story is challenging for my dad to tell. He's
still angry about it towards the Green Beret, but also
towards himself, because, as he sees it, his unfortunate financial
(22:37):
choice put his family in jeopardy and everything on the line.
So let's go back to the beginning. It all started
when I made a new friend. When I was in
fourth grade. A new girl joined our class, an only child.
She lived with her glamorous mom, who wore sparkly makeup
(23:00):
every day, unlike most of the artsy hippie moms who
only wore makeup on special occasions. By fifth grade, I
became good friends with the new Girl, and her single
mom's townhouse became a favorite slumber party location. We didn't
have to share the TV with any siblings. She lived
near the mall, which we were allowed to explore on
(23:20):
our own, and her mom would get us junk food
that none of the hippie moms would ever consider. The
New Girl was super fun, kind and joyful, and she
loved giving everyone makeovers and crimping her hair with her
cool eighties crimping iron. I'll call her Chipmunk. Eventually, Chipmunk's gruff,
sunglass wearing, chain smoking dad moved to the area, and
(23:41):
Chipmunks split her time between her parents' condos. This was
the green beret. You got your third cup of coffee
for this one. Hu. I was making a lot of
money fairly quickly and regularly, so I sort of was
now on the lookout for where to put it, like
(24:05):
I needed to put it anywhere other than where I
should have left it. We had run into each other somehow,
so what I remember more than anything, you know, I
don't remember what we talked about, other than to say
he said to me, I'll show you how to make
real money. Chipmunk's dad was also not an artsy hippie.
(24:28):
He said he'd once been a Special Forces operative, hence
the alias square and stocky. He looked like a meaty
Germanic refrigerator, and he constantly smoked cigarettes, which was unusual
amongst my friend's parents. He always wore prescription sunglasses even inside.
His eyes were really visible, and unlike Chipmunk's vibrant mom,
(24:50):
he didn't seem to like kids. He was imposing, grumpy
and casually racist, stewing simmering in a miasma of cigarette smoke.
In retrospect, my dad and I realized he was kind
of like Derth Vader. He was eyes almost like. I think,
he had a vibe of like the dark, like Star
Wars dark Empire. Yeah, he was. He was hypnotic. He
(25:14):
was very Star Wars villain nat Yeah, why are people
all around Darth Vader doing his bidding now? However, even
though Chipmunk's dad definitely hadn't been a psychedelic pioneer, and
he wasn't remotely artsy or intellectual. He was a good talker,
a really good talker, and my dad and Chipmunk's dad
(25:37):
seemed to hit it off in some weird way. Soon
it appeared that they were doing business together. And just
like me and my friends didn't really know what my
dad did for a living, we also didn't know what
Chipmunk's dad did for a living. But it didn't matter
because we didn't care. We cared about the MTV Countdown,
sixteen candles and scoring craft macaroni and cheese, all of
(26:00):
which were provided at Chipmunk's house. And my dad doing
business with chipmunk Dad was great for me because Chipmunk
and I got to spend even more time together, which
was always super fun. Real estate, yeah, oh yeah, he
was doing development, he was doing deals. My parents have
(26:22):
explained to me what they understood the Green Beret's supposed
business ventures to be, and it's still somewhat confusing, which
is what he was aiming for. Here's my mom's take
on it. What kind of power did you see him?
How over dad? She could hypnotize people and assure them
that he was like divinely guided or something he was,
(26:43):
but he you know, in business like he knew and
you'd explained it's really weird schemes like and you wouldn't
understand what they were saying about, you know, different transactions
should do with the bank, because the bank was trying
to put him in person because he had gotten caught.
He why piece of pacy was in the perfect place
(27:08):
because he first he tugged at our heartstrings. Oh with
this bank trying to put him in jail, you know,
this bank thing, and so we believed him. He didn't
do anything. I think what the Greenberry scam was. You
would find a teetering company like that was having a
(27:31):
hard time getting funding, and he talked them into selling
it to him for a legal letter from the bank
saying they would back it. So they would have this
company on the Virgin collapse and do well with it.
They would find a naive investor like Walter, and then
(27:54):
he would just pump him up with like, oh, this
company can really do great because we have this company,
and then we have this rock company over here, and
this shock company here, and this floor X come there,
and we'll go squeeze shale for more oil and we'll
put them all together and there'll be a combination. So
you were caught up in you know, we would just
(28:16):
only be a part of a scam. It was all
a pyramid like weird pyramids. So Chipmunk's dad portrayed himself
as a big time developer with real estate opportunities across
the country, and he operated a confusing pyramid like scheme
scamming businesses and investors out of money. And he started
(28:36):
his scam by tugging at my trusting, empathetic parents hippie
heart strings. I spent months living in Palm Springs with
him off and on. In eighty six six. Yeah, I
was down there a lot trying to get this deal.
And again it was another deal of assets that had
(28:59):
been impossible to develop. But it was huge. I can't
remember how huge. I mean, could have been a couple
of million anchors. Holy Yeah. He was into mining in
Colorado at one point, and we were into mining in Mississippi.
We had some kind of a guy, I don't know
(29:19):
what it was, gravel or some such thing, among other things.
To assure his investors, e My dad, the Green Beret,
would hand over some of his own assets as collateral
for one of their deals. He handed over a supposed
Van Dyke painting to my parents. Now it may have
been authentic, but knowing now what we know about the
(29:41):
Green Beret, I can only assume if the Van Dyke
painting wasn't a forgery, it was stolen. There was a
time at which, like a fool, I even had in
my hands what was supposed to be a Van Dyke painting.
It's probably ten feet tall and I had I had
it in a specifically climate controlled locker in New York
(30:05):
that kept artwork. So he was into art, because I
thought he was into all sorts of He was into
anything that he could use leverage on. Basically, his deal
was to use assets that were not as valuable as
they could appear to be to leverage against loaning money.
(30:27):
Is what I think as I look back. He was
in any place he could scam where the dollar you know,
where the numbers were hitting seven or eight figures. The
Greenberret kept pitching my dad on enticing projects that he
promised would reap in a ton more money for my dad,
plus it would come back clean. So my dad, hypnotized
(30:49):
by the Greenberry's slick talk, and under immense stress, continue
to believe that positive outcomes would materialize, and Dad kept
investing in Chipmunk's dad's deceptions. He would suck it out slowly,
fifty grand at a time for one thing or another,
and it happened over a prolonged period of maybe a
(31:14):
year or more. After middle school, me and Chipmunk went
to the same private college prep high school in Marin.
It's the late eighties, and things start to go downhill
between our dads. At some point during my high school years,
my parents begin to hate the Green Beret, like really
loathe him. Clearly a business deal had gone wrong between them,
(31:36):
but I didn't know the details. After high school, Chipmunk
and I drifted apart, and while we reconnected in our
adult years on social media, were old friends rather than
close friends. Part of the reason is because I've always
known that her dad in some way stool money from
my dad. It was always a deal is going to
(31:58):
be closed Tuesday or Friday. That was the song. You
could almost make up a song about him called Tuesday
or Friday because next Tuesday we're gonna it's gonna close
and all this money is gonna go into it. I mean,
it was like it was this mantra, but I would
(32:21):
constantly bug him about deal. I mean I realized probably
I don't know, within the year obviously, but I stayed
in touch for years and years to you know, waiting
for the big hit. I don't know what I was hoping.
I mean, I really have trouble putting my head back
into that headspace now, because all I can the headspace
(32:44):
goes to what a dumb shit I was, you know, Okay,
I mean, why not one hundred grand and say enough already?
You know, it's so I can't even quite greed back
to greed. Did you make any money off of the
Green Beret money off of No? It was a one
(33:06):
way street all the way. The bigger the money, the
bigger the sharks. That's the nature of life, my gullible,
adrenaline junkie, money obsessed psychedelic pioneer Dad. His work in
(33:26):
the smuggling world was done primarily in good faith deals
done on handshakes between largely honest counterculture outlaws. So Dad
approached the street world to clean his money in the
same way, which ultimately was foolish because not everyone is
honorable and ethical. As Dad's attorney Bernie Siegel said, in
(33:49):
the late eighties. The quality of the criminal has gone downhill.
Now I understand Bernie was talking about people like the
Green Beret, a dishonest criminal and shameless con man, different
from a psychedelic outlaw. Was that paperwork between you? No?
What he knew? It's real simple. He knew that I
(34:11):
could never do anything to him because it was illegal money.
So he did you know your apostle work? Clearly, he
was clear about the fact that he could just continue
sucking money until I would stop giving it, and there
would be nothing I could do about it because I
couldn't go to the police. There was never closure, there
(34:32):
was never a fu No. He just sort of disappeared
and would never talk to me, you know. And if
I wanted to, I could chase him and find me easily,
But for what purpose to spit in his face? It
wasn't worth the energy. In total. My Dad ends up
(34:52):
giving the Green Beret five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Do you remember ever, like telling Dad not give any
more money to the Green Beret? Oh? Yeah. I went
over there one day and I said, don't you take
any more moneage from Walter. We're tapped out. Just leave
us alone. And then that afternoon Walter went over and
(35:14):
he the Green Beret, got Walter to sign over the
Standyke painting that was not our storage unit in New
York City. This painting is the collateral the Green Beret
had given to my dad, and my dad unfathomably gives
it back to him. It's like he was under Darth
(35:36):
Vader's power. It was like some kind of like weird
collateral they were moving around was a hot Vandyke painting
and I saw at once. We went to the storage
and saw it, and it was supposed to be, you know,
an asset for us in case they didn't pay us back.
(35:58):
So the Green Beret was like a conn man. He
was fast hered. Walter hippotas do his fitting. Okay, So
Reagan wants pot smokers and smugglers to rot in prison,
and my Dad's overburdened neurons are firing, causing him to
potentially focus solely on positive outcomes. The lucrative deals the
(36:23):
Green Barrat promises will close on Tuesday or Friday, resulting
in clean cash for our family to live on. So
my dad under the extreme stress of working in an
extremely high stakes business under attack from the federal government,
supporting a family of five trusted the wrong person, made
(36:46):
a bad decision and gave five hundred and fifty thousand
dollars to the Green Beret, believing he would be true
to his word, launder the money and return it to
my dad. Well, that never happened. Every good con man
has a great show. Just like my dad was excellent
at his job as a pot smuggler, the Green Beret
(37:08):
was excellent at his job as a first class a
one grifter and thief. Big wins are often accompanied by
big losses. Easy come, easy go. It's a cliche for
a reason. The grifter stole from the perfect victim, a
counterculture outlaw who couldn't go to the law for justice,
(37:30):
and he wouldn't stoop to violence. Shit happens and how
we deal with it and forms one's daily joy and contentment.
My parents are big on letting things go, not dwelling
on the past, focusing on the positive. Easier said than done.
After my dad loses five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
(37:52):
my family begins our slide into a lower economic class,
and as the late eighties march into the early nineties,
Reagan pours a ton of money into the drug Enforcement administration,
and my dad colleagues start getting busted or fleeing the country.
As money's getting tight, my dad starts selling off her
(38:13):
family's assets, and me and my siblings begin an unwitting
adjustment to a life of financial stress. But the worst
consequence of the Green Beret's audacious theft was my dad's
gradual descent into a year's long depression, Ignited by a
sense of failure to his family and bolstered by his
(38:34):
childhood of constant criticism from his father. My dad wore
a melancholy coat of shame self loathing for years to come.
The Green Beret's torch of deceit with a slow burning,
long lasting fire of guilt, remorse, and embarrassment within my dad,
which thirty years later is finally waning. What lesson can
(38:59):
I learn from this tobacco? Well, don't assume you know
who your parents are, where they come from, and what
they're dealing with. Be aware that insecurity, greed and hubris
are human and laid to downfalls. And be mindful of
naivete thinking all people have good intentions, The assumption that
(39:19):
all people are honest and good is a dangerous expectation
in a world of resource inequality. Survival is based on resources,
and the struggle for resources is as old as the
origins of life, which, by the way, are single celled
microorganisms known as prokaryotes, whose energy came from carbon and
sunshine almost four billion years ago. Well, my dad's energy,
(39:43):
in the form of five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
was lost, but thankfully he remained a free, honest outlaw
under the radar of the federal government. The green beret
is the tip of the misfortune Iceberg, with his ominous
(40:04):
negative energy, heading the wheels in motion for a string
of terrible developments coming up. In the next episode, I
talked with a pot smuggler I've known since I was six,
who went to a federal prison for years. And we'll
hear about close associates and my parents whose family was
torn apart when one brother is sentenced to ten years
(40:26):
in a federal prison and the other becomes a fugitive.
I'm Rainbow Valentine, and this is Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter.
Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded by me.
(40:49):
Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are Gabby Watts and Taylor Church.
Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Ryan Lavin, Elsie Crowley and
Me at School of Humans, and Connell Burn and Charles
Bryant at Iheartradiant. Our music is by Gabby Lala and
Claire Campbell, with a rich theme by Mark Karen Andy.
You can follow us online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com.
(41:19):
Write the story doing as we met am by steeping
Princess of the Red Trees. She Hess, keep it real,
handshake seals the deal, Wrap the stack, sealed, meal and
(41:40):
road up. These all greas rolling, Dooby Young, rich and groovy,
making it up. We rolled along, Rolling along, Far Country, Roll,
(42:00):
Rolling along Far Country Roll, Run in Aloe, Far Country
Roll
School of Humans. It's nineteen eighty six and I'm eleven.
This year stands out to me for many reasons. For one,
it introduced the cool ranch Dorito, a coveted slumber party
junk food for me and my friends who came over
to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Labyrinth, and Pretty and Pink,
(00:30):
which all came out that year. I also remember the
horrific Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. The spaceship blew up on
live TV in front of every American kid, including me
watching at school with my classmates. And at this time,
my Saturday morning cartoons were frequently interrupted by Ronald and
(00:53):
Nancy Reagan's relentless Just Say No campaign. Not long ago,
in Oakland, California, I was asked by a group of
children what to do if they were all for drugs,
and I answered, just say no. That's Nancy Reagan. After
her husband Ronald Reagan, a former blist movie actor, was
(01:15):
elected president in nineteen eighty, his administrations Just Say No
ads and PSA's flooded TVs and radios urgently instructing American
kids to stand up to drugs, just say no, and
turn in anyone using drugs to the police, including your parents. Today,
there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country
(01:37):
and no one is say from it. Drugs steal away
so much, they take and take, until finally, every time
a drug goes into a child, something else is forced out,
like love and hope and trust and confidence. Drugs take
away the dream from every child's heart and replace it
(01:58):
with a nightmare. In nineteen eighty six, Reagan's Anti Drug
Abuse Act is passed. The Act renewed the war on
drugs and instituted mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenses,
and maximum sentences ran to life. That year, my dad
(02:19):
does a trip moving so much pot that if he'd
gotten caught, he could have received a lengthy prison sentence
under Reagan's new law. Now, this trip is a major success,
but it's also the beginning of the end of my
dad's career as a pot smuggler, because, like success, rip
(02:40):
offs are very common in the illicit, all cash world
of smuggling, And following the biggest triumph of my dad's
career came the biggest ripoff of his life. I'm Rainbow
Valentine and this is disorganized crime smuggler's daughter rolling the douving, young,
(03:13):
free and groovy, making it up. We rolled along, rolling
along far out the country, roll he rag in the
Golden ganging York State, making it up as we roll along?
(03:44):
Did mom just leave? How do I know how many
things come? I'm coming up around here? Will you join
us for them? With your key for the stories about Arlados?
In nineteen eighty six, my dad is rolling along in
his cross country smuggling enterprise, and his personal silk road
is a well oiled machine. He's honed his skills accomplishing
(04:09):
smuggling success with his handful of trusted colleagues in Marin
County in New York. Most Saturdays, he takes me and
my little brother to the grown Ups Mill Valley baseball
game at the foot of Mount tam and the Crisp
Marine Air the ball game I mentioned in episode one
when I learned that most of the players were coincidentally
(04:29):
also smugglers. Now this game is where fun and business converge.
During these ball games, my dad gets friendly with a
player we're calling baseball. A sparkly, cheerful art and theater
enthusiast working in the same trade as my dad, but
a different scene. Now, baseball has around thirty thousand pounds
(04:52):
of Mexican pot coming in and needs some people to
distribute it. Also, by the way, Baseball is the smuggler
who coined the term savings them loam the smugglers bank.
He told me about this trip, it was I'm in
a huge load of Mexican came in. You know, well,
(05:14):
twenty five thirty thousand pounds. That that's big. Yeah, that's
that's big. So my dad teams up with Baseball as
one of his distributors and over six months smuggles over
one third of Baseball's thirty thousand pounds of Mexican pot.
My East Coast guy says, yeah, I think we can
(05:35):
do a lot of this back east. We're using the
biggest rental truck you can rent, twenty four footers and
filling it with a time at a time, because there
was really a lot of it. Part of my dad's
job on all of his tricks, particularly bigger ones like this,
was quality control. Raised by a professional art critic, My
(05:57):
dad is a discerning connoisseur of everything, including pot, and
he preferred to distribute quality pot. Now, according to my dad,
great weed is aromatic, not full of shake or seeds
and comes in loose, fluffy bales, not firm pressed bricks.
When you get that big, you've got to separate the
good stuff from the mediocre stuff from the shitty shake.
(06:21):
So after running out of all the good stuff, there
were two other levels, and I remember doing one deal
locally with the low level stuff and the guy bought
five hundred pounds for cash, and I made a hundred
bucks a pound on it. So in one two hour segment,
(06:43):
I made fifty grand. Holy yeah, which was coold. This
trip with Baseball is the most successful of my dad's
twenty two years in smuggling, and he says it's the
happiest story of his career, from the excellent colleagues he
worked with, to the slickness of the operation and how
much money he ended up making. To give you a perspective, Divonne,
(07:06):
the whole trip I ended up over six months selling
thirteen thousand pounds, which was the biggest trip I had
ever done, and it was so comfortable and easy. We
got into this regular flow which was fabulous and and
didn't really have competition because we were one of the
(07:28):
two big distributors of the whole thing, and they just
loved it, and we were easy to deal with, and
we through that period of time we made about seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in nineteen eighty six is worth over
one point seven million dollars in today's money. By the way,
(07:51):
this is the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
cash my dad absurdly laundered in socks in episode six.
So to celebrate the success of the trip, my family
went on a fancy vacation to Barbados. We went holidays
fairly regularly to Caabo, Saint Lucas, Hawaii, Yllapa, a remote
Mexican destination for psychedelic pioneers and hippies. I see a
(08:15):
pattern now. We usually vacationed in between trips with family
friends who, of course, it turns out we're also pot smugglers.
So we had a vacation. Yeah, yeah, we had a
which was really abraded. Yeah, we did. We celebrated. So
we booked this villa in Barbados for ten days. It
was I don't know, six bedrooms, and it had a pool,
(08:37):
and it had a chauffeur and a maid and a
cook and a just a whole several people who were
always there working or would take you anywhere, or would
do anything. And it wasn't on the water. It was
up on the hill above town and we went there
for Thanksgiving. We're eating flying fish every day, fried fish.
(08:59):
It was delicious. Right, we had the flying fish, and
so they would bring in fresh fish that was good.
Who was delicious? It was amazing. I'll never forget this
trip one because of its grandeur, but also it coincided
with the appearance of Haley's Comet, only visible to the
naked eye every seventy five to seventy six years. So
(09:21):
do you remember seeing Haley's commet at Narvators? Do you
remember that we watched it right one one night by
the people by the pool of the big right, which
was next to the polo field. That was that big
grass thing was a polo field next to them, next
to that long pool. Haley's Comet has been recorded since
(09:44):
ancient times and in civilizations around the world, and has
been associated with both good and bad omens, perhaps a
foreshadowing of my family's approaching hardships. This family vacation was
the last time we celebrated a successful trip. The last
time my dad splurged on decadence and the last time
(10:07):
money came easily, it was the end of my family's
monetary wealth and cushy lifestyle. Of course, my dad didn't
know that yet, nor did he know that he was
about to make one of the worst judgment calls of
his life. I'm Rainbow Valentine, and this is disorganized crime.
(10:28):
We'll be right back. So before getting into my dad's
big financial misstep, let's go back to the Reagans. With
the passage of Reagan's Drug Abuse Act, the stress of
my parents double lives was compounding. The Just Say No
(10:53):
campaign flooded radios, TVs, and billboards across the country. I
reached back out to Dennis McNally, our official counterculture historian,
to talk about the Reagans and just say now to
understand the Reagans. So it's important to go back a
little bit. In nineteen sixty six, he ran for a
(11:16):
governor of California, and he ran, in various subtle ways,
on a platform attacking the students at Berkeley who had
had the free speech movement in nineteen sixty four. He
conflated the students at cal Berkeley with hippies and said
that his famous line was that hippies were like, let's say,
(11:42):
they had hair like Jane, talked like Tarzan, and smelled
like the chimp with a cheetah or whatever it was called. Secondly,
he attacked He ran an anti black campaign against the
people who had rioted at the Watts riots in nineteen
(12:02):
sixty five, and that is of what got him elected.
This is the platform that got Reagan elected California governor
in the sixties and US President in nineteen eighty. Nancy
Reagan had these extreme pretensions to the real social upper class,
(12:25):
to the the you know, the old money that in
some way still still runs America, and one of the
other And one of the side effects of that and
the holding over from his opposition to cal Berkeley and
the free speech movement, was just saying no. The the
(12:46):
impact of just saying no was simply to lump all
drugs together, and so anybody that had anything to do
with drugs, no matter what the drug, was going to
get as much time as the judges could figure out
to give them. Simply it harshed everything you didn't want
(13:10):
to get caught much of. Just say no and The
Anti Drug Abuse Act was targeted at crack and cocaine,
but as Dennis said, all drugs and drug users were
lumped together as one melodramatic evil. The Anti Drug Abuse
Act of nineteen eighty six required a minimum sentence of
five years for drug offenses that involved one hundred kilos
(13:33):
of marijuana, plus a minimum sentence of ten years for
drug offenses that involved one thousand kilos of marijuana. Now
one hundred kilos is roughly two hundred and twenty pounds.
A thousand kilos of pot is over two thousand, two
hundred pounds. With the thirteen thousand pounds my dad had
(13:56):
just smuggled, he could have been sentenced to decades under
the new law. So one thing we've done this season
is show the fun side of disorganized crime, because my
mom and dad remember their past truly with the glass
(14:18):
half full. They're fun and funny people, and there's always
a ridiculous twist to their stories. That was totally interesting mom,
Because my mom and I recently visited with one of
her old girlfriends whose brothers were busted and I'm gonna
drive home. My mom began having revelations. Um, you said
(14:41):
you had a plan B. What was your plan B?
I'll have to remember, you know I had passed sports
and to go to just gonna go to Europe. You
know you could do that then because there was no
day trouble. Did you have like passports and different names? Yeah,
(15:02):
different names made the past the sky that I knew
here was like this really sleazy counterfeter. Oh my god,
where are those passports now? Oh? We burned everything, you know,
way long time ago. You burned it. We didn't sell them.
They'd evaporated somehow, you know, the evaporated. That's not possible.
(15:29):
That's one of our terms for losing. It's evaporated. So
this podcast has brought up a lot of repressed memories
and emotions within my parents. That was cathartic for my
mom to remember. She'd suppressed a ton of fear and
stress over the years, raising kids and hiding the business.
She told me more while she was watering in the garden,
(15:51):
the stress of being Yeah, but I was trading a dune.
I would I'd rather be comfortable than in poverty and
have to keep my mouth shut. I'd rather be comfortable
and have another I doned it once with her doctor.
My mom just revealed what was going on at the house.
It was too stressful to hold it in. I don't
(16:13):
know something about it. I just like blurted it out,
like we are so much weighted around. It's just, you know,
there's a hundred pounds in the basement. I'm freaking out,
and he said, oh, that's what's going on. It's hard
to keep secrets. I'm trying to think if there's any
girlfriends that knew my secrets. I don't know. I couldn't
(16:35):
talk to a therapist around her. That can't keep any
secrets from moving. Under the Reagan administration, people were getting
busted for pot and going to jail in alarming numbers
because cannabis laws were draconian. In nineteen eighty eight, the
Anti Drug Abuse Act was enhanced, which doubled down on
(16:57):
policies to create a drug free America. As a result
of these laws and the impact on the drug smuggling community,
my parents were under enormous stress, more stress than ever before,
and according to scientific research, stress and decision making are
a terrible combination. To understand this further, I called my
(17:20):
dad's friend, psychiatrist and neuroplasticity expert, doctor Michael H. Moscowitz.
Now he's been working in public health and medicine for
almost forty years. I used to babysit his kids when
I was a teenager driving to my job, and the
car given to me when I turned sixteen a giant
American former pot smuggling boot of a vehicle. I was
(17:41):
so embarrassed to drive it. So, you know, it's interesting
because you know, the effects we see in people's behaviors
is that they become less effective in problem solving, planning,
executive function, all those types of things. And that means
that when people are stressed, they're going to make mistakes.
(18:03):
They're going to say and do things that they don't
really mean, but then now they have to own them.
They're they're going to really not function at in an
optimal way. But when that when that stressful chemistry gets
trapped in that area of the brain, it shuts off
(18:24):
the other parts of the brain that we use to
reason and do other things so that we can make
a decision to do what has to be done and
not weigh it over and think about it and run
it through a lot of different processes. What about What
are your thoughts on people making financial decisions in stressful times, well,
you know, if you can avoid it, you should avoid it. Unfortunately,
(18:45):
those decisions sometimes come up and force themselves on people.
I would say in that circumstance, it would be great
if people just kind of stepped back before they made
those decisions, did some deep breathing, if they knew meditation,
to meditate a little bit, just really try to get
themselves calm down and slow everything down before they make
those decisions, because the fireworks going off in their brain
(19:07):
is really going to make it hard for them to
make a decision that's rational and will hold up. Yeah. Awesome.
I read that in the Psychologist, one of the journals,
that they discovered people when under stress sort of ignore
the negative outcomes of a situation and focus on the
positive outcomes. Yeah, it's true, and it's one of those
(19:30):
things that involves in a bunch of different chemistry in
the brain and different regions of the brain that are
being lit up and set off. We have a reward
center deep in our brain that is good on most things,
but when people are in a stressful situation, it tends
to shift over to more addictive and compulsive behaviors than
healthy ones. So feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk
(19:54):
and reward. When under stress, people pay more attention to
the upside of a possible outcome. The research found stress
makes people focus on the way things could go right
instead of wrong, and start paying more attention to the
positive information and discounting negative information. So when stressed out
(20:16):
people are making a difficult decision, they may pay more
attention to the upsides and less to the downsides. So
that is perhaps why my dad ends up putting his
trust in the unscrupulous hands of the wrong person. Stresses
one factor. Also, my dad's rising star could have made
him feel invincible, regardless who knows, but que the Green Beret,
(20:44):
I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime. We'll be
right back. So after we return from the family vacation
to Barbadoes, my dad feels a lot of rusher to
(21:06):
clean his money, so he buys some wine his money
laundering investment of choice, but he's on the lookout for
other investment opportunities because seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
is a lot of money to launder? Is this the
most cash you've ever had? My own? Yeah, my own
(21:27):
and stashing what do I do with it? How do
I launder this money? Among other things. Yeah, back then,
so I'm feeling, oh my god, I've got all this money.
I've got to do something with it. I don't know
why I felt so pressed to do anything with it,
but just be for a while. I was thinking too
quickly and not just appreciating being where I was. I
(21:53):
met some one of your classmates fathers one day in
a carpool. This is the Beret, the Green Beret, the
Green Beret, and he was driving to Mercedes, I think
at the time. And I made up with this guy
who who starts to smooth talk me. And I'm gonna
(22:17):
need a break here first before I get into this. Yeah,
that's a rough story. Yeah, take a break for a minute. Now.
This story is challenging for my dad to tell. He's
still angry about it towards the Green Beret, but also
towards himself, because, as he sees it, his unfortunate financial
(22:37):
choice put his family in jeopardy and everything on the line.
So let's go back to the beginning. It all started
when I made a new friend. When I was in
fourth grade. A new girl joined our class, an only child.
She lived with her glamorous mom, who wore sparkly makeup
(23:00):
every day, unlike most of the artsy hippie moms who
only wore makeup on special occasions. By fifth grade, I
became good friends with the new Girl, and her single
mom's townhouse became a favorite slumber party location. We didn't
have to share the TV with any siblings. She lived
near the mall, which we were allowed to explore on
(23:20):
our own, and her mom would get us junk food
that none of the hippie moms would ever consider. The
New Girl was super fun, kind and joyful, and she
loved giving everyone makeovers and crimping her hair with her
cool eighties crimping iron. I'll call her Chipmunk. Eventually, Chipmunk's gruff,
sunglass wearing, chain smoking dad moved to the area, and
(23:41):
Chipmunks split her time between her parents' condos. This was
the green beret. You got your third cup of coffee
for this one. Hu. I was making a lot of
money fairly quickly and regularly, so I sort of was
now on the lookout for where to put it, like
(24:05):
I needed to put it anywhere other than where I
should have left it. We had run into each other somehow,
so what I remember more than anything, you know, I
don't remember what we talked about, other than to say
he said to me, I'll show you how to make
real money. Chipmunk's dad was also not an artsy hippie.
(24:28):
He said he'd once been a Special Forces operative, hence
the alias square and stocky. He looked like a meaty
Germanic refrigerator, and he constantly smoked cigarettes, which was unusual
amongst my friend's parents. He always wore prescription sunglasses even inside.
His eyes were really visible, and unlike Chipmunk's vibrant mom,
(24:50):
he didn't seem to like kids. He was imposing, grumpy
and casually racist, stewing simmering in a miasma of cigarette smoke.
In retrospect, my dad and I realized he was kind
of like Derth Vader. He was eyes almost like. I think,
he had a vibe of like the dark, like Star
Wars dark Empire. Yeah, he was. He was hypnotic. He
(25:14):
was very Star Wars villain nat Yeah, why are people
all around Darth Vader doing his bidding now? However, even
though Chipmunk's dad definitely hadn't been a psychedelic pioneer, and
he wasn't remotely artsy or intellectual. He was a good talker,
a really good talker, and my dad and Chipmunk's dad
(25:37):
seemed to hit it off in some weird way. Soon
it appeared that they were doing business together. And just
like me and my friends didn't really know what my
dad did for a living, we also didn't know what
Chipmunk's dad did for a living. But it didn't matter
because we didn't care. We cared about the MTV Countdown,
sixteen candles and scoring craft macaroni and cheese, all of
(26:00):
which were provided at Chipmunk's house. And my dad doing
business with chipmunk Dad was great for me because Chipmunk
and I got to spend even more time together, which
was always super fun. Real estate, yeah, oh yeah, he
was doing development, he was doing deals. My parents have
(26:22):
explained to me what they understood the Green Beret's supposed
business ventures to be, and it's still somewhat confusing, which
is what he was aiming for. Here's my mom's take
on it. What kind of power did you see him?
How over dad? She could hypnotize people and assure them
that he was like divinely guided or something he was,
(26:43):
but he you know, in business like he knew and
you'd explained it's really weird schemes like and you wouldn't
understand what they were saying about, you know, different transactions
should do with the bank, because the bank was trying
to put him in person because he had gotten caught.
He why piece of pacy was in the perfect place
(27:08):
because he first he tugged at our heartstrings. Oh with
this bank trying to put him in jail, you know,
this bank thing, and so we believed him. He didn't
do anything. I think what the Greenberry scam was. You
would find a teetering company like that was having a
(27:31):
hard time getting funding, and he talked them into selling
it to him for a legal letter from the bank
saying they would back it. So they would have this
company on the Virgin collapse and do well with it.
They would find a naive investor like Walter, and then
(27:54):
he would just pump him up with like, oh, this
company can really do great because we have this company,
and then we have this rock company over here, and
this shock company here, and this floor X come there,
and we'll go squeeze shale for more oil and we'll
put them all together and there'll be a combination. So
you were caught up in you know, we would just
(28:16):
only be a part of a scam. It was all
a pyramid like weird pyramids. So Chipmunk's dad portrayed himself
as a big time developer with real estate opportunities across
the country, and he operated a confusing pyramid like scheme
scamming businesses and investors out of money. And he started
(28:36):
his scam by tugging at my trusting, empathetic parents hippie
heart strings. I spent months living in Palm Springs with
him off and on. In eighty six six. Yeah, I
was down there a lot trying to get this deal.
And again it was another deal of assets that had
(28:59):
been impossible to develop. But it was huge. I can't
remember how huge. I mean, could have been a couple
of million anchors. Holy Yeah. He was into mining in
Colorado at one point, and we were into mining in Mississippi.
We had some kind of a guy, I don't know
(29:19):
what it was, gravel or some such thing, among other things.
To assure his investors, e My dad, the Green Beret,
would hand over some of his own assets as collateral
for one of their deals. He handed over a supposed
Van Dyke painting to my parents. Now it may have
been authentic, but knowing now what we know about the
(29:41):
Green Beret, I can only assume if the Van Dyke
painting wasn't a forgery, it was stolen. There was a
time at which, like a fool, I even had in
my hands what was supposed to be a Van Dyke painting.
It's probably ten feet tall and I had I had
it in a specifically climate controlled locker in New York
(30:05):
that kept artwork. So he was into art, because I
thought he was into all sorts of He was into
anything that he could use leverage on. Basically, his deal
was to use assets that were not as valuable as
they could appear to be to leverage against loaning money.
(30:27):
Is what I think as I look back. He was
in any place he could scam where the dollar you know,
where the numbers were hitting seven or eight figures. The
Greenberret kept pitching my dad on enticing projects that he
promised would reap in a ton more money for my dad,
plus it would come back clean. So my dad, hypnotized
(30:49):
by the Greenberry's slick talk, and under immense stress, continue
to believe that positive outcomes would materialize, and Dad kept
investing in Chipmunk's dad's deceptions. He would suck it out slowly,
fifty grand at a time for one thing or another,
and it happened over a prolonged period of maybe a
(31:14):
year or more. After middle school, me and Chipmunk went
to the same private college prep high school in Marin.
It's the late eighties, and things start to go downhill
between our dads. At some point during my high school years,
my parents begin to hate the Green Beret, like really
loathe him. Clearly a business deal had gone wrong between them,
(31:36):
but I didn't know the details. After high school, Chipmunk
and I drifted apart, and while we reconnected in our
adult years on social media, were old friends rather than
close friends. Part of the reason is because I've always
known that her dad in some way stool money from
my dad. It was always a deal is going to
(31:58):
be closed Tuesday or Friday. That was the song. You
could almost make up a song about him called Tuesday
or Friday because next Tuesday we're gonna it's gonna close
and all this money is gonna go into it. I mean,
it was like it was this mantra, but I would
(32:21):
constantly bug him about deal. I mean I realized probably
I don't know, within the year obviously, but I stayed
in touch for years and years to you know, waiting
for the big hit. I don't know what I was hoping.
I mean, I really have trouble putting my head back
into that headspace now, because all I can the headspace
(32:44):
goes to what a dumb shit I was, you know, Okay,
I mean, why not one hundred grand and say enough already?
You know, it's so I can't even quite greed back
to greed. Did you make any money off of the
Green Beret money off of No? It was a one
(33:06):
way street all the way. The bigger the money, the
bigger the sharks. That's the nature of life, my gullible,
adrenaline junkie, money obsessed psychedelic pioneer Dad. His work in
(33:26):
the smuggling world was done primarily in good faith deals
done on handshakes between largely honest counterculture outlaws. So Dad
approached the street world to clean his money in the
same way, which ultimately was foolish because not everyone is
honorable and ethical. As Dad's attorney Bernie Siegel said, in
(33:49):
the late eighties. The quality of the criminal has gone downhill.
Now I understand Bernie was talking about people like the
Green Beret, a dishonest criminal and shameless con man, different
from a psychedelic outlaw. Was that paperwork between you? No?
What he knew? It's real simple. He knew that I
(34:11):
could never do anything to him because it was illegal money.
So he did you know your apostle work? Clearly, he
was clear about the fact that he could just continue
sucking money until I would stop giving it, and there
would be nothing I could do about it because I
couldn't go to the police. There was never closure, there
(34:32):
was never a fu No. He just sort of disappeared
and would never talk to me, you know. And if
I wanted to, I could chase him and find me easily,
But for what purpose to spit in his face? It
wasn't worth the energy. In total. My Dad ends up
(34:52):
giving the Green Beret five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Do you remember ever, like telling Dad not give any
more money to the Green Beret? Oh? Yeah. I went
over there one day and I said, don't you take
any more moneage from Walter. We're tapped out. Just leave
us alone. And then that afternoon Walter went over and
(35:14):
he the Green Beret, got Walter to sign over the
Standyke painting that was not our storage unit in New
York City. This painting is the collateral the Green Beret
had given to my dad, and my dad unfathomably gives
it back to him. It's like he was under Darth
(35:36):
Vader's power. It was like some kind of like weird
collateral they were moving around was a hot Vandyke painting
and I saw at once. We went to the storage
and saw it, and it was supposed to be, you know,
an asset for us in case they didn't pay us back.
(35:58):
So the Green Beret was like a conn man. He
was fast hered. Walter hippotas do his fitting. Okay, So
Reagan wants pot smokers and smugglers to rot in prison,
and my Dad's overburdened neurons are firing, causing him to
potentially focus solely on positive outcomes. The lucrative deals the
(36:23):
Green Barrat promises will close on Tuesday or Friday, resulting
in clean cash for our family to live on. So
my dad under the extreme stress of working in an
extremely high stakes business under attack from the federal government,
supporting a family of five trusted the wrong person, made
(36:46):
a bad decision and gave five hundred and fifty thousand
dollars to the Green Beret, believing he would be true
to his word, launder the money and return it to
my dad. Well, that never happened. Every good con man
has a great show. Just like my dad was excellent
at his job as a pot smuggler, the Green Beret
(37:08):
was excellent at his job as a first class a
one grifter and thief. Big wins are often accompanied by
big losses. Easy come, easy go. It's a cliche for
a reason. The grifter stole from the perfect victim, a
counterculture outlaw who couldn't go to the law for justice,
(37:30):
and he wouldn't stoop to violence. Shit happens and how
we deal with it and forms one's daily joy and contentment.
My parents are big on letting things go, not dwelling
on the past, focusing on the positive. Easier said than done.
After my dad loses five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
(37:52):
my family begins our slide into a lower economic class,
and as the late eighties march into the early nineties,
Reagan pours a ton of money into the drug Enforcement administration,
and my dad colleagues start getting busted or fleeing the country.
As money's getting tight, my dad starts selling off her
(38:13):
family's assets, and me and my siblings begin an unwitting
adjustment to a life of financial stress. But the worst
consequence of the Green Beret's audacious theft was my dad's
gradual descent into a year's long depression, Ignited by a
sense of failure to his family and bolstered by his
(38:34):
childhood of constant criticism from his father. My dad wore
a melancholy coat of shame self loathing for years to come.
The Green Beret's torch of deceit with a slow burning,
long lasting fire of guilt, remorse, and embarrassment within my dad,
which thirty years later is finally waning. What lesson can
(38:59):
I learn from this tobacco? Well, don't assume you know
who your parents are, where they come from, and what
they're dealing with. Be aware that insecurity, greed and hubris
are human and laid to downfalls. And be mindful of
naivete thinking all people have good intentions, The assumption that
(39:19):
all people are honest and good is a dangerous expectation
in a world of resource inequality. Survival is based on resources,
and the struggle for resources is as old as the
origins of life, which, by the way, are single celled
microorganisms known as prokaryotes, whose energy came from carbon and
sunshine almost four billion years ago. Well, my dad's energy,
(39:43):
in the form of five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
was lost, but thankfully he remained a free, honest outlaw
under the radar of the federal government. The green beret
is the tip of the misfortune Iceberg, with his ominous
(40:04):
negative energy, heading the wheels in motion for a string
of terrible developments coming up. In the next episode, I
talked with a pot smuggler I've known since I was six,
who went to a federal prison for years. And we'll
hear about close associates and my parents whose family was
torn apart when one brother is sentenced to ten years
(40:26):
in a federal prison and the other becomes a fugitive.
I'm Rainbow Valentine, and this is Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter.
Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded by me.
(40:49):
Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are Gabby Watts and Taylor Church.
Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Ryan Lavin, Elsie Crowley and
Me at School of Humans, and Connell Burn and Charles
Bryant at Iheartradiant. Our music is by Gabby Lala and
Claire Campbell, with a rich theme by Mark Karen Andy.
You can follow us online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com.
(41:19):
Write the story doing as we met am by steeping
Princess of the Red Trees. She Hess, keep it real,
handshake seals the deal, Wrap the stack, sealed, meal and
(41:40):
road up. These all greas rolling, Dooby Young, rich and groovy,
making it up. We rolled along, Rolling along, Far Country, Roll,
(42:00):
Rolling along Far Country Roll, Run in Aloe, Far Country
Roll
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