January 1, 2020 • 45 mins
As Rainbow Valentine's dad continues to open up about his 20 year smuggling career, he begins to discover that longtime friends that he thought were "straight" were actually as deep in the world as he was. Rainbow Valentine talks with two women involved in the smuggling world whose stories parallel her dad's.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. You can get anything you want and
Alice accepting Alice. This is Peach Blossom singing Arlo Guthrie's
Alice's Restaurant theme song with my dad. She and my
dad have been friends since they were in the iconic
hippie cult classic movie in sixty eight nineteen sixty nine,
(00:32):
You can get No No, No No at Alsuss Hope
that's not going anywhere public. I was awesome. My dad
thought I should chat with her now. He didn't know
(00:54):
if she'd been involved in the smuggling industry, but he
was pretty sure she'd have something interesting to say, and
he was right. I remember one time we had a
bunch of weed and I think it was like on
this seat, and it was in a bag or something
like that, and we had to very quickly get rid
of it. And we had a dirty car. We had
(01:17):
cartons and thing bags all over this floor. At the
moment we had to get rid of it, all I
did was throw it on the floor under my feet,
And so the cop made the driver get out of
the car, and he was being really shitty to him
because he was really blown out long air, you know,
And I'm just sitting there waiting and he comes around.
(01:38):
He opens my side and he's like, what's that. And
I had a bag of hair. I had cut Billy's
hair and I had a bag of hair on the floor,
Oh my god. And right next to it, under the
other foot was this big bat, a very bustable pot.
And I said, that's hair and he said, what are
(02:00):
you talking about. That's hair and I said hair, see hair, hair,
And the guy was so grossed out and so like
hair hair in their car. Then he'd just like, go way,
you're disgusting, and you know, left me alone and didn't
ask me to raise my other five Oh shit like that. So,
(02:20):
as we've been making this podcast, my dad will keep
having revelations that people he knew in the old days
and thought were straight were actually smugglers as well. Just
the other day he ran into an old Mill Valley
neighbor who revealed he'd been tabbing acid in the eighties.
Now Dad didn't know, because, like him, everyone else was
private about their business dealings too. One of those people
(02:45):
is Candy Can. You were never meant to know that
I was a pot dealer, but I came out of
the closet pretty violently. I got busted with just a
horrible scene. This is Candy Can. I've known her since
I was about nine. She's the mother of one of
my childhood friends from the hippie theater community I'm a
part of. Although I've known her forever, Candy Can and
(03:09):
I have newly become friends in my adulthood. I always
vaguely knew she worked in the pot industry, but it
wasn't until she finished sharing her unbelievable tale with me
that we realized she worked in the same network as
my dad. They had inadvertently worked together for over twenty
years and shared the same close friend colleagues, the same
(03:32):
people who were our super close family friends while I
was growing up. We were all surprised, especially my dad,
who sort of knew Candy Can from a distance but
thought she worked with a different smuggling ring where they
ran into each other at a hippie theater reunion party recently,
and it was incredible to watch my dad and Candy
Can talk about the old days. I'd never seen my
(03:56):
dad talk openly about his former business in semi public
with anyone, ever. So how did you meet these guys?
Because you're not a New Yorker I was a hippie
at that part, I know, and I was. I had
this a store in Boulder, Colorado, and they told me
(04:19):
asked me to come to New York. In this episode,
we're uncovering the stories of Peach Blossom and Candy Can.
The stories aren't incredible and illustrate how this world we
lived in and my dad worked in was incredibly small
and interconnected and totally secretive. They tell daring tales about smuggling,
(04:41):
being a woman and mothers in the industry, and like
my dad, what they gained and what they lost by
working in vintage cannabis trafficking. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this
is disorganized crime, smuggler's daughter, young, free and grooving, making
(05:06):
it up. We rolled along the country rolling it up
as well. We've talked a little bit about the nineteen
(05:41):
sixty nine movie Alice's Restaurant before. Alice's Restaurant is a
hippie cult classic movie based on the hit folk song
by Woody Guthrie's son Arlow Guthrie. The movie was written
and directed by Academy Award nominated director Arthur Penn, who
also directed Bonnie and Clyde. Alice's restaurant. The movie is
(06:01):
a satire about government bureaucracy and the draft following the
main character, played by Arlo Guthrie, as he's deemed undraftable
because of his criminal record as a litter bug. The
movie is set in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains,
where my dad, after quitting college and successfully failing his
draft review, moved and became a candlemaker. It's where he
(06:24):
met several of his lifelong friends, including Peach Blossom. Like
my dad, Peach Blossom was an extra in the movie. Yeah,
I have a speaking line which was rare. It was
that the Thanksgiving dinner or VW van pulls up with
the big tra triangle on it and we unload a donkey.
(06:46):
I say, hey, you can write him to Canada, and
Billy says, I was wondering how to get my ass
across the border. So it's a line in the thing.
Peach Blossom moved to the Berkshires after graduating from an
ivy league college. She and her crew of bohemian hippie
friends worked odd, blue collar her jobs and grew pot
(07:07):
on their land. Peach Blossom pushed around a food cart
and she worked as a psychedelic baker. At one point,
I used to make recipes in big buckets and just
take a whole kilo pot and make butter you know,
in the water and let its seat and then make
brownies that would basically cripple people for weeks. At this
(07:27):
time in her life, Peach Blossom was a full convert
to psychedelics and pot and a proud hippie driving a
beat up VW van with long hair and bell bottoms. Now,
in many ways, Peach blossom story mirrors my dad's. She's
a Brooklyn born intellectual, psychedelic enthusiast who eventually ended up
in northern California. She got out of smuggling in the
late seventies, though, and she now works in medicinal herbs.
(07:52):
She discovered hallucinogens while attending Cornell University when friends introduced
her to mescaline and the benefit of psychedelically communing with nature.
And I loved it. My world change, My connection with
nature just completely blossomed. I was talking to trees, I
was sleeping with them, I was, you know, there was
(08:14):
no division between me and nature. And I felt like
everyone should have that experience. So I'd love to turn
you on. I mean that becomes your mantra when the
world is so new and we are the first wave
of people actually experiencing this. When I went back to
(08:37):
where my mother moved in Texas to visit my family,
of course I stashed whatever drugs I could into tampons
and resealed them. You know. I found various ways to
travel with as much weed as I could and psychedelics,
and of course my mission was to go home and
(08:59):
turn my mother on and turn my little sisters on.
And this didn't go over very well with my mother.
In the early nineteen seventies, after Alice's restaurant, Peach Blossom
moves back to New York City and becomes involved in
(09:20):
high stakes smuggling. I moved to New York for a while,
and I was involved in in the pop world, and
my partner at the time ended up going to prison.
Oh no, tell us about tell me about what happened.
He was involved in a brotherhood that went from California
(09:41):
to the East Coast transporting large amounts of both LSD
and and pot. But he was actually arrested for an
LSD conspiracy. And we were living together on East Fourth
Street between A and B This is about nineteen seventy
(10:06):
when my partner on Fourth Street, when he went to prison,
we had a lot of cash in the apartment. We
had seacases of cash. Oh, I'm sure we had I'm
sure we had two hundred thousand in cash at one
point nine. And the part of the story that is
(10:27):
really chilling is that when the Feds came to get
him for this LSD conspiracy, it was a federal bust.
They got him on a conspiracy, which is a particular
term meaning meaning it's a federal charge. And in the apartment,
they searched the apartment and they found a seat case
(10:47):
that had I'm sure eighty grand in it, and it
was never reported. They didn't refere they just took it.
The detectives took it. That was just costant, just what
happened back in the day. Peach Blossom moves west and
is briefly immersed in Ellie's film scene. She's writing screenplays,
but eventually feels compelled to escape the hardships inherent to La. However,
(11:12):
she needed money to return to New England, so she
gets a job moving a steamer trunk of pot from
LA to Boston. I basically checked in a steamer, you know,
a big old fashioned trunk filled with bricks of pot.
How many pounds thirty pounds? But this is on like
(11:34):
United Airlines. This was the luggage I checked to check
to this check luggage. I checked it in. And at
this point I look like a sort of like wild
fashion model, you know. And I'm pulling that off and
dressing that way and talking that up. So I'm leaving
(11:56):
LA and I'm going back to you knowing, you know,
to Boston. And I have to add at this point,
I'm using way too much. Okay, yeah, this is this
is my shot of courage to do that. But I'm
also losing weight, like every second. I remember the moment
where I walked to the back of the plane to
(12:17):
the bathroom and went into the bathroom and basically my
pants fell off. I mean, I was so so skinny.
It was just awful. I get to Boston and it
is the first time in all my smuggling adventures that
I freak out. I am like I could be so busted.
(12:44):
And now I have to go down to baggage claim
and I have to claim my trunks, and now everyone
looks like a fit. Everyone looks like a cop everyone.
I literally have to go into the bathroom to throw
cold water all over myself, and I'm in a total
lather of sweat and nerves. And I have to go
(13:04):
with my claim ticket and claim this drunk because I
swear it, I'm gonna get busted and put away forever.
And I claim it and it's absolutely fine. And as
I'm leaving the Boston airport, there's a policeman, a Boston cop,
and he's looking at me is the whole line of people,
(13:26):
and I've got a big cart with all my shit
on there, and he's just looking at me with that
Boston couple look, which you can't tell is hello or
I'm gonna get you kind of thing. And I get
to the door and he goes coming in from California
and I'm like, yes, officer, and he's like, welcome to Boston, man,
(13:47):
big smile of my thanking. He loads it into the dag.
They gab and I get in the cab and I'm like,
I will never do this again. I'll never smuggle drugs again.
I absolutely will be good. I will not smuggle drugs again.
And I deliver it and I get my and and
really that was the last, No, it wasn't the last time.
(14:15):
It was like me, a woman in the industry, I
took advantage of the looks and the sas and my fast,
quick New York street mouth. I basically sort of shook
my tail or wag my tongue to get out of
out into a lot of things. If you were a
(14:38):
woman back then, if you were a quiet woman, you
were probably at the effect of the discrimination that was
was just do ridgur it was the way it was.
But if you were a baldy woman, you caught people
off guard. So women have always been a part of
the smuggling industries, and utilizing feminine fashion and beauty to
(15:01):
accomplish the job is an age old tradition. In the
se eighteen hundreds, British women smuggled animal bladders filled with
contraband liquor under giant hoopskirts. Now, during American Prohibition in
the nineteen twenties, many women became rum runners, one of
the few viable ways for women to earn a robust living.
(15:23):
The smuggling industry is stressful, with extreme highs and lows,
and like my dad, Peach Blossom tried to leave the
smuggling industry more than once. In nineteen seventy two, Peach
Blossom gives up on the drug world and becomes a
macrobiotic meditator. I moved to Boston, and I'm involved in
(15:44):
very rigid kind of studying acupressure and acupuncture, and I
go to the New England School of Accupuncture and I
work in the macrobiotic community, and I do all this
stuff for a good six years, and then in nineteen
seventy eight, I actually and I'm single during this time,
and I'm very dizzy doing all as of stuff. But
(16:07):
in nineteen seventy eight a couple with a man who
was native Californian but living in Boston has a very
prestigious job in the natural foods industry, as do I,
and we couple and get pregnant, and right after the
birth of my second son, my baby daddy there decides
(16:31):
to go into big time pot smuggling hash smuggling business
in California. And we wrote we actually moved to California
at that point, and that is exactly the world that
we're in. Where are you where? We moved to Studio City, LA,
(16:51):
And then we moved to the Central Coast where we
put up greenhouses, and we have seventeen acres of growing
and this nineteen seventy nine, seventeen acres of growing in greenhouses,
and we're growing magic mushrooms and and we have German
(17:12):
trained attack dogs and we have miles of fencing around
our property. Now, unlike my dad, Peach Blossom said, she
was around plenty of guns. Did you ever see a gun? Oh?
Of course we owned guns. You owned guns when we
when we moved Yeah, when we moved to Studio City,
(17:32):
we were involved with pot, not cocaine. However, la drug scene,
they had guns, and they also were the kind of
people that wanted to know where your family lived. I
got trained on a you know, on a on a firearm. Whoa, yeah,
(17:54):
just because there is that risk when you're involved in
the block market. There are block market criminals that you know.
That's it's an easy mark. But I'm basically living in
this project with my two little babies. Oh okay, and
it's really crazy. And we make a lot of money
(18:16):
enough for me to move up the pot ranch and
take my babies even further north because it's clear to
me I can't raise babies on her pot ranch. This
is really not working. I can't even have a babysitter.
I can't have a friend. I can't you know, it's crazy.
Peach Blossom finally gets fed up and taking her kids,
leaves her husband in the pot farm, and she eventually
quits the pot industry completely to work in the legal
(18:38):
herb industry, first tea and then medicinal herbs. The part
of Peach blossom story that stays with me is her
inability to get a babysitter because of her work at
home situation. It's these small things we take for granted
and don't think twice about that smugglers with kids have
to consider. Smugglers like Peach Blossom and my dad are
(19:02):
people trying to make a living, pay the more occasionally
have a date night without the kids. Another thing that
strikes me about Peach blossom story is the fact that
the seemingly more ruthless LA smuggling world she found herself
in was an option for my dad. If my dad
had been less adverse to violence and guns and hungry
(19:24):
for the easy money cocaine brought, he could have worked
in the LA smuggling subculture. If my dad had entered
the world that Peach Blossom found herself in guns would
have been a part of my dad's life and by default,
our family's life. Today. Peach Blossom works in the medicinal
(19:48):
cannabis industry in California, advocating the healing elements of the
Schedule one drug estimated by the federal government to have
no medical benefits. Individual states and cities are challenging and
changing cannabis laws to reflect growing evidence of cannabis his
medical applications. Cannabis has been the poster child plant for
(20:12):
our generation. Absolutely came out and said we are going
to change a whole lot of things, and cannabis has
been leading us to do that. I really feel that way. Yeah,
change the laws, change the emotions, changed the consciousness, change
so much about our world. And that's what cannabis the
(20:38):
Queen does. Coming up, I talk with Candy Can, another
badass woman who worked in pot smuggling, but with much
more harrowing consequences than Peach Blossoms. I'm Rainbow Valentine and
you're listening to disorganized crime smuggler's daughter. Good evening, and
welcome to tonight's exciting episode of Questing for the Golden Nun.
(21:01):
And now we're joined the infamous good Benefactor with his
able body Oh to Thick. This is an excerpt from
Questing for the Golden Nun, an absurdist radio play I
co created and co produced in the early nineties with
the hippie theater community. I've been a part of my
whole life. Are you a good nun or a bad man?
(21:24):
None is the key. I'm pretty sure. We recorded Questing
for the Golden Nun on a vintage eighties boombox where
you use two fingers to press play and record at
the same time. Take note, kids, this was made way
before the Internet or cell phones. Now, my hippie theater
(21:44):
community is a creative paradise for weirdos, and many of
the people involved are like me, the children of the
counterculture insiders. One friend calls us the hippie mafia, a
perfect description now. Like I mentioned earlier, Candy Can is
the mother of a friend I've had since childhood, and
she's a part of my hippie theater community. While producing
(22:06):
this podcast, my mind and my dad's mind were blown
to learn that Candy Can worked in the same smuggling
network as my dad. My dad calls his crew disorganized crime.
Candy Can calls it the anti network network because everyone
was in the same network, but nobody networked. Now. Candy
Can worked in different roles than my dad, and her
(22:28):
story reveals another side of the same story that my
dad and inadvertently me were in. You were never meant
to know, said, I was a pot dealer, but I
came out of the closet pretty violently. I got busted
with just a horrible scene. So let me go back
to the beginning. I was thirteen years old and my
(22:52):
brothers who were in college and in Wyoming, you could
get a driver's license, so I got a driver's license
and they threw pot in the trunk and I would
drive mix and weed to the frat houses. For me,
it was a liberation because I felt that marijuana was
one of the best highs she could ever get. I'm
(23:13):
a pot loving human being and I knew it from
an early age. Kendy Cannas thirteen driving kilos of pot
to frat houses in Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona. Her brothers
dealt the pot and she was the driver at thirteen.
People Now, when she was a little older, she started
(23:33):
dealing herself. I was started selling pot in high school
and I feld pot to the rabbi son, to the
priest's son, to everybody's. Every kid bought pot for me,
and somebody got busted by their parents and they called
the police. Oh my gosh, and my father had the
(23:55):
cops waiting at the house, and I saw them there,
and I took off down the road and I hitched
tight and I got on a frozen French fry truck
for how were Johnson's And we drove. When we get
to Florida, and I called my brother, and my brother says,
it's okay, Dad forgives you. They're not going to rest.
You should come back and go to college. She'd come
(24:15):
back and go to college. So he flew out. We
rode the train back and I got home and it
was really bad. And the high school teacher said to me,
if there was acid in this apple, would you eat it?
And I said to him yes. Kenny Cann is super smart.
She finished high school. In college, she opens a psychedelic
(24:38):
clothing store in Colorado. By owning and operating this store,
she got to meet all sorts of interesting people. She's
vague on the details on who and when everything got going,
but much like my dad, she fell into a world
of psychedelic people and smugglers, and she said that she
and her crew had a mission to get as much
(24:59):
pot to the people as possible. As my dad worked
exclusively in distribution with only his handful of guys, Candy
Can worked for and with the larger group, becoming a
chief logistics person, wearing a lot of different hats. She
likes the alias Candy Can because she was a candy
(25:22):
woman and she always got whatever job that needed to
be done done. We had boats. I would take the
typewriter out and write registries and fake addresses and bring
ports through. I'd fly to places like Tunisia with a
half a million dollars rolled up in the New York
Sunday paper. I would bring we to the sailors that
(25:46):
were waiting to fill up the boats. I'd smuggle into
places like Tunisia and Egypt, and if they caught you.
I remember the guy was holding up my bag and
he said, did you like John Lennon? I said he
died and it was really bad, and that was a
bag that had the pot in it, and he put
it down and I walked through. And she gets married,
(26:10):
has a daughter and continues her life as a smuggler.
I've already been married now I had a kid. My
husband started doing cocaine. It was bad, really bad, And
we were in Florida, and at this point I had
rented a series of houses on the Lagunas and we'd
have boatloads coming up from Columbia, and we had cigarette
(26:33):
boats that would go from the boat to the dock,
the boat to the dock, and my daughter learned how
to walk around on bales because, yeah, because the house
was so filled. We're talking twin vans that would carry
a thousand pounds each out a day. We sometimes we'd
have three vans that looked exactly the same, so the
neighbors would suspect, and I was the front. I rented
(26:57):
all the houses under Alias's and my beautiful daughter, and
I was a great actress. Time goes on. I've been
working this profession now from Florida. Then we moved. Everybody
(27:17):
wanted to come to California. Heart is nice, Colombian weed
is good, tie weed is better. I mean, we had
the black whack. There were times that I'd get on
an airplane with these gienormous suitcases for the stewardess and
they allowed you to take two on board back to
(27:38):
the gills with black whack Colombian weed and smile and
just bringing the two cases onto the airplane, fly to
New York, take a cab and take it up some stairs.
I did that. How did you mask the smell? I
wore perfume and I had I wore garters and beautiful
short skirts. Oh yeah, you're a tall, beautiful woman. People.
(28:03):
I took advantage of my good looks in a way
that furthered people to believe me. I don't mean to
come off any other way, but it helped me. It
furthered me to be. I couldn't have done it if
I was a guy and I was wearing designer clothes.
And I took my daughter when she was six years old,
(28:24):
to France and London and bought her all her school outfits.
But what she didn't know is I bried over close
to seven hundred thousand dollars on my body strap. But
we had a great vacation. Like Peach Blossom and women
throughout history, Candy Cann uses her beauty to her advantage.
All resources are an asset. Candy Cann says that her
(28:49):
first marriage was tumultuous. Like my parents. She's avidly against
cocaine and hard drugs. Her husband, though, was an addict
and using coke all the time. He also started smuggling cocaine.
One day, she came home to her husband and toddler
to discover cocaine lying on the table within reach of
her kid. That's when she knew she had to leave him.
(29:10):
And he took my daughter, and he left me in
a house with no money and all. He took everything.
He absolutely took everything, and I had bills and I
didn't have my daughter. So I put the word out
because I knew everyone, and I started driving truckloads of
marijuana between Miami and New York. And each truckload, I'd
(29:33):
get twenty granted a pop, and then I would I
managed to get make enough money to hire the best
attorney in New York to prove that he was lying
and that I deserved to have my kid. And I
got my kid back, and I retired for a little bit.
(29:54):
So Candy Can becomes a single mother, and along with
the legal bills to win custody of her child, life
is expensive. Street jobs don't pay nearly enough. It's really
hard to make twelve dollars an hour and raise a family.
It's really hard, and I wanted to provide the best.
(30:16):
So I started working for some people on the West Coast,
and I just didn't go back to my straight job.
I just stayed in California and said, screw this, I'm
going to be half time with my kids. And I
(30:37):
stayed in California and we were at this point having
sophisticated electronics. This is the first time that you did.
You weren't hired to sit in a house twenty four
hours a day in case the phone rang, and it
was the people just sit by a phone like twenty
four hours. That was your job. How much were you
paid to do that? When the deal came through, I
(30:59):
would get a box of money. I sent my daughter
to school with a shoe box and she had money
in it. I said, here's your college education. She has
a lucky streak with her colleagues. Boatload after boatload is
coming in. But then her associates got busted. They were
coming to the house and I managed to escape. It
(31:20):
was very close because I had rented all the houses
and there was a man was coming to the house,
and I don't know what got me out of there.
But I had to go do something for my kid
or something, and I left the house and they came
and I wasn't there, and I escaped and it was
(31:43):
touch and go. I had to live very differently after that.
She moves with her daughter to Hawaii in a communications position. Now,
this is someone who relays info between smugglers, like when
loads come in and where they're offloaded. She deals with
the logistics like bill paying for the safe houses, trucks, phones, pagers, etc.
(32:06):
She's the intermediary between the big international smugglers and the offloaders,
transporters and distributors like my dad and his buddies. So
we were the anti networkers. We would have to wait
in separate rooms. Well, certain people came in and out.
No one couldn't meet anyone because if one person got busted,
(32:26):
they could snitch you out. We were the absolute anti network.
No one knews anybody's name. We didn't want to know
each other's name. I had many different nicknames, and sometimes
we would all be together and the only way you
could communicate is if you were at a certain payphone
(32:47):
at a certain hour on a certain day. Candy Can
has another child with a smuggler who unfortunately gets busted
and goes to a tie prison for twelve years. And
I'm penniless with a baby and a daughter, and everything's
(33:10):
gone like that, and I had to do things that
were essential, like take the stroller into the supermarket, buy
some food, but throw in the milk underneath the kid
because I couldn't afford all the food. It was tough.
I ended up having to give up my identity, which
(33:32):
was so real that I had four birth certificates for
my son that I thought, well, I don't know how
if we're going to have to move or what, or
this or that. And it was a home birth, so
I got four birth certificates for him. So we left
Hawaii and we had to travel and not even go
(33:53):
in the country in case there was an indictment for me.
My lawyer said, leave the country. She starts traveling, visits
the West Coast Acid King Owsley, who had moved to
Australia in the eighties. This was a somewhat common place
for the psychedelic Pioneers or my subculture to go when
things got too hot at home, visit Owsley in Australia.
(34:19):
So once things settle down and became less hot, Candy
Can heads back to the States. Yet again, she gets
straight jobs, but once again, a single mother of two
needs money to live on, so once again she jumps
back into smuggling. It's the early nineteen nineties, so we
get a good run. We're bringing in shit left and right,
(34:43):
and the man is on our tail. Like Tom and Jerry.
We slip out the door there over there. Everything was
just surreal to think that I lived that life. As
my lawyer told me later, no one would believe it.
She's on a delivery job and she hires this dry
(35:05):
on recommendation from a friend. And that's when everything falls apart.
I hired a driver from a friend. He goes into
the bar and drinking and he starts. Somebody in the
bar said, hey, do you know where I can get
some hash? I'm really looking for hash and want to
(35:26):
buy hash. And he's in the bar and he says, sure,
I can get you, and he said how much you want?
As a man knew it was in one hundred pounds.
So he comes back and he lies. He says, I
one of my good buddies that I've known forever cash
for a hundred pounds, and I said, look, it's already sold.
(35:47):
We're transporting it. It's leaving town. We never sell in town.
You know, that's not the way the rules work. People
have DIBs on this, and really, I know a lot
of distributors, and it's really important to keep that under
our hat. That's why we were doing and so good.
And he goes, no, no, no. So he convinces everybody
(36:11):
to let him have this hundred pounds. He gets busted.
This guy at the bar turns him in and he
immediately rolls. When somebody rolls, they say, I'll tell you anything,
I'll do anything. Just let me go, let me go,
let me go, let me go. So he calls me
up and I meet him in a parking lot and
we're talking, and he said, can you talk louder? I go,
(36:33):
what's wrong? Just speak? Come here, closer, let's talk louder. Well,
one thing leads to another, and the next thing I know,
I'm sitting in federal detention and they're sending me notes
underneath the door that I'm facing twenty five years to life.
(36:54):
Oh my god, And would I talk about it? And
I the only questions that I answered is what about
my children? What about my children. You have kids. I
have kids, and the only thing I would talk about
was my kids. I stayed in prison and I prayed,
(37:18):
and I meditated, and I made the walls speak to me,
and I did every magical incantation in my mind and
in my heart, and they stuck me with really terrible people.
The lady who was in my cell said if you
touch me, I'll kill you. And she was a violent,
abusive person. And every woman I met in there was
(37:42):
drug addicted or poor. Mostly they got poor women in
there because they couldn't afford a phone to call their
probation officer, and they kept breaking parole. And then there
was a homeless woman I met who gets herself arrested
every winter, so she has a warm place to sleep
and a meal and a shower. I was in a
(38:05):
room where you couldn't lay down, and they kept it
at about fifty two and they wouldn't give you a blanket,
and you were in the little cotton things, so you
were frozen. And somebody would sit outside the door and say,
do you want something hot to drink? You want to talk?
And there was not a toilet in there either. So
(38:30):
I hire a lawyer and he said they got you.
They got you with the keys. The warehouse had sixteen tons.
It was four hundred grand in the van. They got you.
Let's start negotiating a deal. Candy Can's parents are able
(38:55):
to post bail, and her lawyers recommend that she take
a deal. Remember, they're threatening twenty five years to life
for pot, and her lawyers are saying, maybe they can
get her off with just eight. But Candy Can has
two young kids. She is determined to keep her family
(39:16):
intact and remain free. My lawyer says, I can't do this,
and it's a week before the trial. I can't change it.
And a friend of mine from my network said, call
this guy. So I call him and he goes, well,
you know, once a year I like to do a
big case for free. Oh my god, I'll do this
(39:39):
case for you. So it's one week to trial and
he goes, you know, you have a ninety nine point
nine percent chance of going to jail. I go, yeah,
that means I have a point zero one percent chance
of being free. Candy Can decides to tell them the truth.
(40:02):
She doesn't use real names, but she's telling the jury
her whole life, every deal, every smuggle, I was being
adopted psychically by this prosecutor in the attorney who was
trying to make me out as a villain for society,
for somebody who was not worthy of being a mother
(40:22):
to my children. The prosecuting attorney said, she did it.
We know she did it. This is a hail Mary pass.
You must convict her. She takes the stand to fight
for her life and the lives of her children. And
I cry, and I talk about all the years said
(40:46):
as a mother and a parent and struggling to survive,
and how I thought of one bananas okay, a truckload
of bananas is fine, meaning you know you think a
joint's okay? Well, why is a truckload of joints not okay?
(41:07):
And I cry, and I pray. I have mirrors inside
my shoes. I have every soul on the jury I'm
communicating with. I'm using it, all of my psychic energy.
My mother and father were there, my kids. The jury
(41:36):
came back not guilty on all four counts, and I
walked out of the courtroom. Candy Cann mentioned having mirrors
on the bottom of her shoes. Now, there's a superstition
that mirrors reflect negative energy, so having them on the
bottom of shoes reflects the negative energy away from the wearer,
(42:00):
allowing the positive energy to flow in. Did we mention
that I come from the Hippies? Before the trial, Candy
Can was under house arrest for thirteen months. The trial
took an enormous mental and financial toll on her family
and kids. At one point, her parents encouraged her to
flee and be a fugitive, but that wasn't a life.
(42:22):
She wanted. A life where you're always looking behind your back,
looking away from your family and for what a plant
that in our household we like to joke is a vegetable.
Candy Cann thinks of it as much more than a vegetable.
It's not a vegetable. It alters your mind, and that's
why they make it illegal. It alters your consciousness, it
(42:45):
heals your body. It's not a vegetable. It's mind altering.
It's spiritual. It's my sacred plant. Candy Cann's story blows
my mind because it's an amazing story exposing the extreme
risk undertaken by the pot smugglers of YR and affirms
that at any moment in my childhood something similar could
(43:07):
have happened to my parents. Kenny Can also reveals to
me that my parents, especially my dad, were like her
actors storytellers like me. Kenny Can Saga reminds me that
my family was incredibly lucky for the most part. In
(43:29):
the next episode, we talk about the main reason my
parents were smugglers money cash, where to put it, how
to clean it, and how to conceal hundreds of thousands
in cash from your kids, Plus a new storage unit
stuffed with my dad's secret money laundering weapon. I'm Rainbow
(43:50):
Valentine and this is Disorganized Crime. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter
is written and recorded by Me, Rainbow Valentine. Our producers
are Abby Watts and Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr,
Ryan Live and Elsie Crowley and Me at School of
(44:12):
Humans and Connell Burn and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our
music is by Gabby Lala and Claire Campbell, with original
theme by Mark Karen and Me. You can follow us
online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com. Right novel the
(44:34):
story Do It as We Be tam by Steep and
Princess of the Red streams us Keep It Real, Handshake
Seals the Deal, Wrap the stacks sealed meal going up.
(44:54):
These all gres roling the doobie, young, rich and groovy
making it up. We roll oh, rolling along for country roll,
Rolling along for a country roll, Rolling along for a
(45:22):
country roll.
School of Humans. You can get anything you want and
Alice accepting Alice. This is Peach Blossom singing Arlo Guthrie's
Alice's Restaurant theme song with my dad. She and my
dad have been friends since they were in the iconic
hippie cult classic movie in sixty eight nineteen sixty nine,
(00:32):
You can get No No, No No at Alsuss Hope
that's not going anywhere public. I was awesome. My dad
thought I should chat with her now. He didn't know
(00:54):
if she'd been involved in the smuggling industry, but he
was pretty sure she'd have something interesting to say, and
he was right. I remember one time we had a
bunch of weed and I think it was like on
this seat, and it was in a bag or something
like that, and we had to very quickly get rid
of it. And we had a dirty car. We had
(01:17):
cartons and thing bags all over this floor. At the
moment we had to get rid of it, all I
did was throw it on the floor under my feet,
And so the cop made the driver get out of
the car, and he was being really shitty to him
because he was really blown out long air, you know,
And I'm just sitting there waiting and he comes around.
(01:38):
He opens my side and he's like, what's that. And
I had a bag of hair. I had cut Billy's
hair and I had a bag of hair on the floor,
Oh my god. And right next to it, under the
other foot was this big bat, a very bustable pot.
And I said, that's hair and he said, what are
(02:00):
you talking about. That's hair and I said hair, see hair, hair,
And the guy was so grossed out and so like
hair hair in their car. Then he'd just like, go way,
you're disgusting, and you know, left me alone and didn't
ask me to raise my other five Oh shit like that. So,
(02:20):
as we've been making this podcast, my dad will keep
having revelations that people he knew in the old days
and thought were straight were actually smugglers as well. Just
the other day he ran into an old Mill Valley
neighbor who revealed he'd been tabbing acid in the eighties.
Now Dad didn't know, because, like him, everyone else was
private about their business dealings too. One of those people
(02:45):
is Candy Can. You were never meant to know that
I was a pot dealer, but I came out of
the closet pretty violently. I got busted with just a
horrible scene. This is Candy Can. I've known her since
I was about nine. She's the mother of one of
my childhood friends from the hippie theater community I'm a
part of. Although I've known her forever, Candy Can and
(03:09):
I have newly become friends in my adulthood. I always
vaguely knew she worked in the pot industry, but it
wasn't until she finished sharing her unbelievable tale with me
that we realized she worked in the same network as
my dad. They had inadvertently worked together for over twenty
years and shared the same close friend colleagues, the same
(03:32):
people who were our super close family friends while I
was growing up. We were all surprised, especially my dad,
who sort of knew Candy Can from a distance but
thought she worked with a different smuggling ring where they
ran into each other at a hippie theater reunion party recently,
and it was incredible to watch my dad and Candy
Can talk about the old days. I'd never seen my
(03:56):
dad talk openly about his former business in semi public
with anyone, ever. So how did you meet these guys?
Because you're not a New Yorker I was a hippie
at that part, I know, and I was. I had
this a store in Boulder, Colorado, and they told me
(04:19):
asked me to come to New York. In this episode,
we're uncovering the stories of Peach Blossom and Candy Can.
The stories aren't incredible and illustrate how this world we
lived in and my dad worked in was incredibly small
and interconnected and totally secretive. They tell daring tales about smuggling,
(04:41):
being a woman and mothers in the industry, and like
my dad, what they gained and what they lost by
working in vintage cannabis trafficking. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this
is disorganized crime, smuggler's daughter, young, free and grooving, making
(05:06):
it up. We rolled along the country rolling it up
as well. We've talked a little bit about the nineteen
(05:41):
sixty nine movie Alice's Restaurant before. Alice's Restaurant is a
hippie cult classic movie based on the hit folk song
by Woody Guthrie's son Arlow Guthrie. The movie was written
and directed by Academy Award nominated director Arthur Penn, who
also directed Bonnie and Clyde. Alice's restaurant. The movie is
(06:01):
a satire about government bureaucracy and the draft following the
main character, played by Arlo Guthrie, as he's deemed undraftable
because of his criminal record as a litter bug. The
movie is set in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains,
where my dad, after quitting college and successfully failing his
draft review, moved and became a candlemaker. It's where he
(06:24):
met several of his lifelong friends, including Peach Blossom. Like
my dad, Peach Blossom was an extra in the movie. Yeah,
I have a speaking line which was rare. It was
that the Thanksgiving dinner or VW van pulls up with
the big tra triangle on it and we unload a donkey.
(06:46):
I say, hey, you can write him to Canada, and
Billy says, I was wondering how to get my ass
across the border. So it's a line in the thing.
Peach Blossom moved to the Berkshires after graduating from an
ivy league college. She and her crew of bohemian hippie
friends worked odd, blue collar her jobs and grew pot
(07:07):
on their land. Peach Blossom pushed around a food cart
and she worked as a psychedelic baker. At one point,
I used to make recipes in big buckets and just
take a whole kilo pot and make butter you know,
in the water and let its seat and then make
brownies that would basically cripple people for weeks. At this
(07:27):
time in her life, Peach Blossom was a full convert
to psychedelics and pot and a proud hippie driving a
beat up VW van with long hair and bell bottoms. Now,
in many ways, Peach blossom story mirrors my dad's. She's
a Brooklyn born intellectual, psychedelic enthusiast who eventually ended up
in northern California. She got out of smuggling in the
late seventies, though, and she now works in medicinal herbs.
(07:52):
She discovered hallucinogens while attending Cornell University when friends introduced
her to mescaline and the benefit of psychedelically communing with nature.
And I loved it. My world change, My connection with
nature just completely blossomed. I was talking to trees, I
was sleeping with them, I was, you know, there was
(08:14):
no division between me and nature. And I felt like
everyone should have that experience. So I'd love to turn
you on. I mean that becomes your mantra when the
world is so new and we are the first wave
of people actually experiencing this. When I went back to
(08:37):
where my mother moved in Texas to visit my family,
of course I stashed whatever drugs I could into tampons
and resealed them. You know. I found various ways to
travel with as much weed as I could and psychedelics,
and of course my mission was to go home and
(08:59):
turn my mother on and turn my little sisters on.
And this didn't go over very well with my mother.
In the early nineteen seventies, after Alice's restaurant, Peach Blossom
moves back to New York City and becomes involved in
(09:20):
high stakes smuggling. I moved to New York for a while,
and I was involved in in the pop world, and
my partner at the time ended up going to prison.
Oh no, tell us about tell me about what happened.
He was involved in a brotherhood that went from California
(09:41):
to the East Coast transporting large amounts of both LSD
and and pot. But he was actually arrested for an
LSD conspiracy. And we were living together on East Fourth
Street between A and B This is about nineteen seventy
(10:06):
when my partner on Fourth Street, when he went to prison,
we had a lot of cash in the apartment. We
had seacases of cash. Oh, I'm sure we had I'm
sure we had two hundred thousand in cash at one
point nine. And the part of the story that is
(10:27):
really chilling is that when the Feds came to get
him for this LSD conspiracy, it was a federal bust.
They got him on a conspiracy, which is a particular
term meaning meaning it's a federal charge. And in the apartment,
they searched the apartment and they found a seat case
(10:47):
that had I'm sure eighty grand in it, and it
was never reported. They didn't refere they just took it.
The detectives took it. That was just costant, just what
happened back in the day. Peach Blossom moves west and
is briefly immersed in Ellie's film scene. She's writing screenplays,
but eventually feels compelled to escape the hardships inherent to La. However,
(11:12):
she needed money to return to New England, so she
gets a job moving a steamer trunk of pot from
LA to Boston. I basically checked in a steamer, you know,
a big old fashioned trunk filled with bricks of pot.
How many pounds thirty pounds? But this is on like
(11:34):
United Airlines. This was the luggage I checked to check
to this check luggage. I checked it in. And at
this point I look like a sort of like wild
fashion model, you know. And I'm pulling that off and
dressing that way and talking that up. So I'm leaving
(11:56):
LA and I'm going back to you knowing, you know,
to Boston. And I have to add at this point,
I'm using way too much. Okay, yeah, this is this
is my shot of courage to do that. But I'm
also losing weight, like every second. I remember the moment
where I walked to the back of the plane to
(12:17):
the bathroom and went into the bathroom and basically my
pants fell off. I mean, I was so so skinny.
It was just awful. I get to Boston and it
is the first time in all my smuggling adventures that
I freak out. I am like I could be so busted.
(12:44):
And now I have to go down to baggage claim
and I have to claim my trunks, and now everyone
looks like a fit. Everyone looks like a cop everyone.
I literally have to go into the bathroom to throw
cold water all over myself, and I'm in a total
lather of sweat and nerves. And I have to go
(13:04):
with my claim ticket and claim this drunk because I
swear it, I'm gonna get busted and put away forever.
And I claim it and it's absolutely fine. And as
I'm leaving the Boston airport, there's a policeman, a Boston cop,
and he's looking at me is the whole line of people,
(13:26):
and I've got a big cart with all my shit
on there, and he's just looking at me with that
Boston couple look, which you can't tell is hello or
I'm gonna get you kind of thing. And I get
to the door and he goes coming in from California
and I'm like, yes, officer, and he's like, welcome to Boston, man,
(13:47):
big smile of my thanking. He loads it into the dag.
They gab and I get in the cab and I'm like,
I will never do this again. I'll never smuggle drugs again.
I absolutely will be good. I will not smuggle drugs again.
And I deliver it and I get my and and
really that was the last, No, it wasn't the last time.
(14:15):
It was like me, a woman in the industry, I
took advantage of the looks and the sas and my fast,
quick New York street mouth. I basically sort of shook
my tail or wag my tongue to get out of
out into a lot of things. If you were a
(14:38):
woman back then, if you were a quiet woman, you
were probably at the effect of the discrimination that was
was just do ridgur it was the way it was.
But if you were a baldy woman, you caught people
off guard. So women have always been a part of
the smuggling industries, and utilizing feminine fashion and beauty to
(15:01):
accomplish the job is an age old tradition. In the
se eighteen hundreds, British women smuggled animal bladders filled with
contraband liquor under giant hoopskirts. Now, during American Prohibition in
the nineteen twenties, many women became rum runners, one of
the few viable ways for women to earn a robust living.
(15:23):
The smuggling industry is stressful, with extreme highs and lows,
and like my dad, Peach Blossom tried to leave the
smuggling industry more than once. In nineteen seventy two, Peach
Blossom gives up on the drug world and becomes a
macrobiotic meditator. I moved to Boston, and I'm involved in
(15:44):
very rigid kind of studying acupressure and acupuncture, and I
go to the New England School of Accupuncture and I
work in the macrobiotic community, and I do all this
stuff for a good six years, and then in nineteen
seventy eight, I actually and I'm single during this time,
and I'm very dizzy doing all as of stuff. But
(16:07):
in nineteen seventy eight a couple with a man who
was native Californian but living in Boston has a very
prestigious job in the natural foods industry, as do I,
and we couple and get pregnant, and right after the
birth of my second son, my baby daddy there decides
(16:31):
to go into big time pot smuggling hash smuggling business
in California. And we wrote we actually moved to California
at that point, and that is exactly the world that
we're in. Where are you where? We moved to Studio City, LA,
(16:51):
And then we moved to the Central Coast where we
put up greenhouses, and we have seventeen acres of growing
and this nineteen seventy nine, seventeen acres of growing in greenhouses,
and we're growing magic mushrooms and and we have German
(17:12):
trained attack dogs and we have miles of fencing around
our property. Now, unlike my dad, Peach Blossom said, she
was around plenty of guns. Did you ever see a gun? Oh?
Of course we owned guns. You owned guns when we
when we moved Yeah, when we moved to Studio City,
(17:32):
we were involved with pot, not cocaine. However, la drug scene,
they had guns, and they also were the kind of
people that wanted to know where your family lived. I
got trained on a you know, on a on a firearm. Whoa, yeah,
(17:54):
just because there is that risk when you're involved in
the block market. There are block market criminals that you know.
That's it's an easy mark. But I'm basically living in
this project with my two little babies. Oh okay, and
it's really crazy. And we make a lot of money
(18:16):
enough for me to move up the pot ranch and
take my babies even further north because it's clear to
me I can't raise babies on her pot ranch. This
is really not working. I can't even have a babysitter.
I can't have a friend. I can't you know, it's crazy.
Peach Blossom finally gets fed up and taking her kids,
leaves her husband in the pot farm, and she eventually
quits the pot industry completely to work in the legal
(18:38):
herb industry, first tea and then medicinal herbs. The part
of Peach blossom story that stays with me is her
inability to get a babysitter because of her work at
home situation. It's these small things we take for granted
and don't think twice about that smugglers with kids have
to consider. Smugglers like Peach Blossom and my dad are
(19:02):
people trying to make a living, pay the more occasionally
have a date night without the kids. Another thing that
strikes me about Peach blossom story is the fact that
the seemingly more ruthless LA smuggling world she found herself
in was an option for my dad. If my dad
had been less adverse to violence and guns and hungry
(19:24):
for the easy money cocaine brought, he could have worked
in the LA smuggling subculture. If my dad had entered
the world that Peach Blossom found herself in guns would
have been a part of my dad's life and by default,
our family's life. Today. Peach Blossom works in the medicinal
(19:48):
cannabis industry in California, advocating the healing elements of the
Schedule one drug estimated by the federal government to have
no medical benefits. Individual states and cities are challenging and
changing cannabis laws to reflect growing evidence of cannabis his
medical applications. Cannabis has been the poster child plant for
(20:12):
our generation. Absolutely came out and said we are going
to change a whole lot of things, and cannabis has
been leading us to do that. I really feel that way. Yeah,
change the laws, change the emotions, changed the consciousness, change
so much about our world. And that's what cannabis the
(20:38):
Queen does. Coming up, I talk with Candy Can, another
badass woman who worked in pot smuggling, but with much
more harrowing consequences than Peach Blossoms. I'm Rainbow Valentine and
you're listening to disorganized crime smuggler's daughter. Good evening, and
welcome to tonight's exciting episode of Questing for the Golden Nun.
(21:01):
And now we're joined the infamous good Benefactor with his
able body Oh to Thick. This is an excerpt from
Questing for the Golden Nun, an absurdist radio play I
co created and co produced in the early nineties with
the hippie theater community. I've been a part of my
whole life. Are you a good nun or a bad man?
(21:24):
None is the key. I'm pretty sure. We recorded Questing
for the Golden Nun on a vintage eighties boombox where
you use two fingers to press play and record at
the same time. Take note, kids, this was made way
before the Internet or cell phones. Now, my hippie theater
(21:44):
community is a creative paradise for weirdos, and many of
the people involved are like me, the children of the
counterculture insiders. One friend calls us the hippie mafia, a
perfect description now. Like I mentioned earlier, Candy Can is
the mother of a friend I've had since childhood, and
she's a part of my hippie theater community. While producing
(22:06):
this podcast, my mind and my dad's mind were blown
to learn that Candy Can worked in the same smuggling
network as my dad. My dad calls his crew disorganized crime.
Candy Can calls it the anti network network because everyone
was in the same network, but nobody networked. Now. Candy
Can worked in different roles than my dad, and her
(22:28):
story reveals another side of the same story that my
dad and inadvertently me were in. You were never meant
to know, said, I was a pot dealer, but I
came out of the closet pretty violently. I got busted
with just a horrible scene. So let me go back
to the beginning. I was thirteen years old and my
(22:52):
brothers who were in college and in Wyoming, you could
get a driver's license, so I got a driver's license
and they threw pot in the trunk and I would
drive mix and weed to the frat houses. For me,
it was a liberation because I felt that marijuana was
one of the best highs she could ever get. I'm
(23:13):
a pot loving human being and I knew it from
an early age. Kendy Cannas thirteen driving kilos of pot
to frat houses in Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona. Her brothers
dealt the pot and she was the driver at thirteen.
People Now, when she was a little older, she started
(23:33):
dealing herself. I was started selling pot in high school
and I feld pot to the rabbi son, to the
priest's son, to everybody's. Every kid bought pot for me,
and somebody got busted by their parents and they called
the police. Oh my gosh, and my father had the
(23:55):
cops waiting at the house, and I saw them there,
and I took off down the road and I hitched
tight and I got on a frozen French fry truck
for how were Johnson's And we drove. When we get
to Florida, and I called my brother, and my brother says,
it's okay, Dad forgives you. They're not going to rest.
You should come back and go to college. She'd come
(24:15):
back and go to college. So he flew out. We
rode the train back and I got home and it
was really bad. And the high school teacher said to me,
if there was acid in this apple, would you eat it?
And I said to him yes. Kenny Cann is super smart.
She finished high school. In college, she opens a psychedelic
(24:38):
clothing store in Colorado. By owning and operating this store,
she got to meet all sorts of interesting people. She's
vague on the details on who and when everything got going,
but much like my dad, she fell into a world
of psychedelic people and smugglers, and she said that she
and her crew had a mission to get as much
(24:59):
pot to the people as possible. As my dad worked
exclusively in distribution with only his handful of guys, Candy
Can worked for and with the larger group, becoming a
chief logistics person, wearing a lot of different hats. She
likes the alias Candy Can because she was a candy
(25:22):
woman and she always got whatever job that needed to
be done done. We had boats. I would take the
typewriter out and write registries and fake addresses and bring
ports through. I'd fly to places like Tunisia with a
half a million dollars rolled up in the New York
Sunday paper. I would bring we to the sailors that
(25:46):
were waiting to fill up the boats. I'd smuggle into
places like Tunisia and Egypt, and if they caught you.
I remember the guy was holding up my bag and
he said, did you like John Lennon? I said he
died and it was really bad, and that was a
bag that had the pot in it, and he put
it down and I walked through. And she gets married,
(26:10):
has a daughter and continues her life as a smuggler.
I've already been married now I had a kid. My
husband started doing cocaine. It was bad, really bad, And
we were in Florida, and at this point I had
rented a series of houses on the Lagunas and we'd
have boatloads coming up from Columbia, and we had cigarette
(26:33):
boats that would go from the boat to the dock,
the boat to the dock, and my daughter learned how
to walk around on bales because, yeah, because the house
was so filled. We're talking twin vans that would carry
a thousand pounds each out a day. We sometimes we'd
have three vans that looked exactly the same, so the
neighbors would suspect, and I was the front. I rented
(26:57):
all the houses under Alias's and my beautiful daughter, and
I was a great actress. Time goes on. I've been
working this profession now from Florida. Then we moved. Everybody
(27:17):
wanted to come to California. Heart is nice, Colombian weed
is good, tie weed is better. I mean, we had
the black whack. There were times that I'd get on
an airplane with these gienormous suitcases for the stewardess and
they allowed you to take two on board back to
(27:38):
the gills with black whack Colombian weed and smile and
just bringing the two cases onto the airplane, fly to
New York, take a cab and take it up some stairs.
I did that. How did you mask the smell? I
wore perfume and I had I wore garters and beautiful
short skirts. Oh yeah, you're a tall, beautiful woman. People.
(28:03):
I took advantage of my good looks in a way
that furthered people to believe me. I don't mean to
come off any other way, but it helped me. It
furthered me to be. I couldn't have done it if
I was a guy and I was wearing designer clothes.
And I took my daughter when she was six years old,
(28:24):
to France and London and bought her all her school outfits.
But what she didn't know is I bried over close
to seven hundred thousand dollars on my body strap. But
we had a great vacation. Like Peach Blossom and women
throughout history, Candy Cann uses her beauty to her advantage.
All resources are an asset. Candy Cann says that her
(28:49):
first marriage was tumultuous. Like my parents. She's avidly against
cocaine and hard drugs. Her husband, though, was an addict
and using coke all the time. He also started smuggling cocaine.
One day, she came home to her husband and toddler
to discover cocaine lying on the table within reach of
her kid. That's when she knew she had to leave him.
(29:10):
And he took my daughter, and he left me in
a house with no money and all. He took everything.
He absolutely took everything, and I had bills and I
didn't have my daughter. So I put the word out
because I knew everyone, and I started driving truckloads of
marijuana between Miami and New York. And each truckload, I'd
(29:33):
get twenty granted a pop, and then I would I
managed to get make enough money to hire the best
attorney in New York to prove that he was lying
and that I deserved to have my kid. And I
got my kid back, and I retired for a little bit.
(29:54):
So Candy Can becomes a single mother, and along with
the legal bills to win custody of her child, life
is expensive. Street jobs don't pay nearly enough. It's really
hard to make twelve dollars an hour and raise a family.
It's really hard, and I wanted to provide the best.
(30:16):
So I started working for some people on the West Coast,
and I just didn't go back to my straight job.
I just stayed in California and said, screw this, I'm
going to be half time with my kids. And I
(30:37):
stayed in California and we were at this point having
sophisticated electronics. This is the first time that you did.
You weren't hired to sit in a house twenty four
hours a day in case the phone rang, and it
was the people just sit by a phone like twenty
four hours. That was your job. How much were you
paid to do that? When the deal came through, I
(30:59):
would get a box of money. I sent my daughter
to school with a shoe box and she had money
in it. I said, here's your college education. She has
a lucky streak with her colleagues. Boatload after boatload is
coming in. But then her associates got busted. They were
coming to the house and I managed to escape. It
(31:20):
was very close because I had rented all the houses
and there was a man was coming to the house,
and I don't know what got me out of there.
But I had to go do something for my kid
or something, and I left the house and they came
and I wasn't there, and I escaped and it was
(31:43):
touch and go. I had to live very differently after that.
She moves with her daughter to Hawaii in a communications position. Now,
this is someone who relays info between smugglers, like when
loads come in and where they're offloaded. She deals with
the logistics like bill paying for the safe houses, trucks, phones, pagers, etc.
(32:06):
She's the intermediary between the big international smugglers and the offloaders,
transporters and distributors like my dad and his buddies. So
we were the anti networkers. We would have to wait
in separate rooms. Well, certain people came in and out.
No one couldn't meet anyone because if one person got busted,
(32:26):
they could snitch you out. We were the absolute anti network.
No one knews anybody's name. We didn't want to know
each other's name. I had many different nicknames, and sometimes
we would all be together and the only way you
could communicate is if you were at a certain payphone
(32:47):
at a certain hour on a certain day. Candy Can
has another child with a smuggler who unfortunately gets busted
and goes to a tie prison for twelve years. And
I'm penniless with a baby and a daughter, and everything's
(33:10):
gone like that, and I had to do things that
were essential, like take the stroller into the supermarket, buy
some food, but throw in the milk underneath the kid
because I couldn't afford all the food. It was tough.
I ended up having to give up my identity, which
(33:32):
was so real that I had four birth certificates for
my son that I thought, well, I don't know how
if we're going to have to move or what, or
this or that. And it was a home birth, so
I got four birth certificates for him. So we left
Hawaii and we had to travel and not even go
(33:53):
in the country in case there was an indictment for me.
My lawyer said, leave the country. She starts traveling, visits
the West Coast Acid King Owsley, who had moved to
Australia in the eighties. This was a somewhat common place
for the psychedelic Pioneers or my subculture to go when
things got too hot at home, visit Owsley in Australia.
(34:19):
So once things settle down and became less hot, Candy
Can heads back to the States. Yet again, she gets
straight jobs, but once again, a single mother of two
needs money to live on, so once again she jumps
back into smuggling. It's the early nineteen nineties, so we
get a good run. We're bringing in shit left and right,
(34:43):
and the man is on our tail. Like Tom and Jerry.
We slip out the door there over there. Everything was
just surreal to think that I lived that life. As
my lawyer told me later, no one would believe it.
She's on a delivery job and she hires this dry
(35:05):
on recommendation from a friend. And that's when everything falls apart.
I hired a driver from a friend. He goes into
the bar and drinking and he starts. Somebody in the
bar said, hey, do you know where I can get
some hash? I'm really looking for hash and want to
(35:26):
buy hash. And he's in the bar and he says, sure,
I can get you, and he said how much you want?
As a man knew it was in one hundred pounds.
So he comes back and he lies. He says, I
one of my good buddies that I've known forever cash
for a hundred pounds, and I said, look, it's already sold.
(35:47):
We're transporting it. It's leaving town. We never sell in town.
You know, that's not the way the rules work. People
have DIBs on this, and really, I know a lot
of distributors, and it's really important to keep that under
our hat. That's why we were doing and so good.
And he goes, no, no, no. So he convinces everybody
(36:11):
to let him have this hundred pounds. He gets busted.
This guy at the bar turns him in and he
immediately rolls. When somebody rolls, they say, I'll tell you anything,
I'll do anything. Just let me go, let me go,
let me go, let me go. So he calls me
up and I meet him in a parking lot and
we're talking, and he said, can you talk louder? I go,
(36:33):
what's wrong? Just speak? Come here, closer, let's talk louder. Well,
one thing leads to another, and the next thing I know,
I'm sitting in federal detention and they're sending me notes
underneath the door that I'm facing twenty five years to life.
(36:54):
Oh my god, And would I talk about it? And
I the only questions that I answered is what about
my children? What about my children. You have kids. I
have kids, and the only thing I would talk about
was my kids. I stayed in prison and I prayed,
(37:18):
and I meditated, and I made the walls speak to me,
and I did every magical incantation in my mind and
in my heart, and they stuck me with really terrible people.
The lady who was in my cell said if you
touch me, I'll kill you. And she was a violent,
abusive person. And every woman I met in there was
(37:42):
drug addicted or poor. Mostly they got poor women in
there because they couldn't afford a phone to call their
probation officer, and they kept breaking parole. And then there
was a homeless woman I met who gets herself arrested
every winter, so she has a warm place to sleep
and a meal and a shower. I was in a
(38:05):
room where you couldn't lay down, and they kept it
at about fifty two and they wouldn't give you a blanket,
and you were in the little cotton things, so you
were frozen. And somebody would sit outside the door and say,
do you want something hot to drink? You want to talk?
And there was not a toilet in there either. So
(38:30):
I hire a lawyer and he said they got you.
They got you with the keys. The warehouse had sixteen tons.
It was four hundred grand in the van. They got you.
Let's start negotiating a deal. Candy Can's parents are able
(38:55):
to post bail, and her lawyers recommend that she take
a deal. Remember, they're threatening twenty five years to life
for pot, and her lawyers are saying, maybe they can
get her off with just eight. But Candy Can has
two young kids. She is determined to keep her family
(39:16):
intact and remain free. My lawyer says, I can't do this,
and it's a week before the trial. I can't change it.
And a friend of mine from my network said, call
this guy. So I call him and he goes, well,
you know, once a year I like to do a
big case for free. Oh my god, I'll do this
(39:39):
case for you. So it's one week to trial and
he goes, you know, you have a ninety nine point
nine percent chance of going to jail. I go, yeah,
that means I have a point zero one percent chance
of being free. Candy Can decides to tell them the truth.
(40:02):
She doesn't use real names, but she's telling the jury
her whole life, every deal, every smuggle, I was being
adopted psychically by this prosecutor in the attorney who was
trying to make me out as a villain for society,
for somebody who was not worthy of being a mother
(40:22):
to my children. The prosecuting attorney said, she did it.
We know she did it. This is a hail Mary pass.
You must convict her. She takes the stand to fight
for her life and the lives of her children. And
I cry, and I talk about all the years said
(40:46):
as a mother and a parent and struggling to survive,
and how I thought of one bananas okay, a truckload
of bananas is fine, meaning you know you think a
joint's okay? Well, why is a truckload of joints not okay?
(41:07):
And I cry, and I pray. I have mirrors inside
my shoes. I have every soul on the jury I'm
communicating with. I'm using it, all of my psychic energy.
My mother and father were there, my kids. The jury
(41:36):
came back not guilty on all four counts, and I
walked out of the courtroom. Candy Cann mentioned having mirrors
on the bottom of her shoes. Now, there's a superstition
that mirrors reflect negative energy, so having them on the
bottom of shoes reflects the negative energy away from the wearer,
(42:00):
allowing the positive energy to flow in. Did we mention
that I come from the Hippies? Before the trial, Candy
Can was under house arrest for thirteen months. The trial
took an enormous mental and financial toll on her family
and kids. At one point, her parents encouraged her to
flee and be a fugitive, but that wasn't a life.
(42:22):
She wanted. A life where you're always looking behind your back,
looking away from your family and for what a plant
that in our household we like to joke is a vegetable.
Candy Cann thinks of it as much more than a vegetable.
It's not a vegetable. It alters your mind, and that's
why they make it illegal. It alters your consciousness, it
(42:45):
heals your body. It's not a vegetable. It's mind altering.
It's spiritual. It's my sacred plant. Candy Cann's story blows
my mind because it's an amazing story exposing the extreme
risk undertaken by the pot smugglers of YR and affirms
that at any moment in my childhood something similar could
(43:07):
have happened to my parents. Kenny Can also reveals to
me that my parents, especially my dad, were like her
actors storytellers like me. Kenny Can Saga reminds me that
my family was incredibly lucky for the most part. In
(43:29):
the next episode, we talk about the main reason my
parents were smugglers money cash, where to put it, how
to clean it, and how to conceal hundreds of thousands
in cash from your kids, Plus a new storage unit
stuffed with my dad's secret money laundering weapon. I'm Rainbow
(43:50):
Valentine and this is Disorganized Crime. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter
is written and recorded by Me, Rainbow Valentine. Our producers
are Abby Watts and Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr,
Ryan Live and Elsie Crowley and Me at School of
(44:12):
Humans and Connell Burn and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our
music is by Gabby Lala and Claire Campbell, with original
theme by Mark Karen and Me. You can follow us
online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com. Right novel the
(44:34):
story Do It as We Be tam by Steep and
Princess of the Red streams us Keep It Real, Handshake
Seals the Deal, Wrap the stacks sealed meal going up.
(44:54):
These all gres roling the doobie, young, rich and groovy
making it up. We roll oh, rolling along for country roll,
Rolling along for a country roll, Rolling along for a
(45:22):
country roll.
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