January 22, 2020 • 42 mins
Rainbow Valentine visits with Grandma Bella whose family was torn apart after a disorganized smuggling trip. Rainbow Valentine also talks with a lifelong friend who went to federal prison in the 90’s for pot.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Okay, so it's the late eighties and
the Reagan's new minimum drug sentencing laws are in place,
and the nation is swept up in an anti drug
just Say No fever. Thanks to First Lady Nancy Reagan,
my pot smuggler dad has experienced his biggest smuggling success
(00:31):
followed by the biggest rip off of his career. So far,
He's doing primarily smaller local deals and fruitlessly waiting for
the Green Beret grifterer to clean and return Dad's foolishly
entrusted money. I'm headed towards high school and into the
rhythmics the Indigo Girls in comedy, watching a lot of
old Saturday Night Live with Gilda Belushi and the Cone Heads.
(00:55):
At the same time, my mom's friend's family gets into
a smuggling trip that goes terribly wrong. My parents had
a good friend younger than them who were calling the kid.
He was a carpenter and built my dad a custom
case for his pot weighing scales, which my dad used
to carry the scales in for local deals. Well, in
(01:17):
nineteen eighty eight, the kid and his brother, mister High
get busted bringing in thousands of pounds of pot via
Oregon's Columbia River. The kid calls my dad in a panic.
His brother's been busted, headed to prison, and instead of
joining his brother in prison, the kid's going to flee
the country with his wife and child. So the sister
(01:40):
of these busted brothers lived across the street from the
house I was born in. Remember that hippote hobbity house
with a secret room. So I've known the sister of
the busted brothers my whole life. She's in the rock
and roll industry, and I went to school with her kids.
Like the rest of the family friends I've recently discovered
were also smugglers. Had no idea that this former neighbor
(02:03):
and mother of my school friends was also involved in
pot smuggling, albeit peripherally. We'll call her Grandma Bella because today,
after years of working in San Francisco's rock and roll industry,
her favorite job as being a grandma. As her grandchildren
romped in the garden, I spoke to Grandma Bella about
the abrupt and catastrophic finale to her brother's pot smuggling careers.
(02:29):
In today's episode, we learn about the traumatic, real life
ramifications of the Reagan administration's drug laws as more smugglers
in our family circle were sent to prison or fled
the country. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime
smuggler's daughter and grooving far country boden Gan State making
(03:17):
it up. As part of this podcast is the history
and the laws changing and what happens. So it's the
eighties that the law had just changed two months earlier,
(03:37):
and with my mom talking to Grandma Bella. Grandma Bella
is my mom's friend whose two brothers were busted smuggling
afghany pot into Oregon via the Columbia River. They had
it all set up. It was a boat on the
Columbia River, and that was when paranoid sisters said, are
you sure you should be doing this? With a new
(03:58):
drug plaw changes and then my only applies to cold
So all these guys who've been dealing in bat for
all these years thought that it was nothing and that
only the crack people and so forth we're going to
be getting in trouble. A drug bust is the seizure
of illegal drugs by law enforcement. And after this bust,
(04:20):
Grandma Bella's role is to get her mom out of
Portland and bring her back to Mill Valley. Her mom
was staying in a rental apartment used as a safe
house for the trip, which means the apartment was filled
with all sorts of evidence of the trip, including paraphernalia, receipts,
and so much more. And whoever rents the safe house
(04:41):
could also go to prison for five to ten years.
The last thing Grandma Bella wants is for her senior
citizen mom to join the rest of the family in prison.
My mother to Portland and used her house, her apartment
as a meeting place. So my mother's apartment is full
of all this name of the boat stuff and just
(05:05):
do you name it? So my mom is kind of clueless.
She thinks it's cool because she smokes pot, doesn't think
anything of it, and she thinks that it's a wild ride.
And before by the time I see her again, she's
talking like a pot dealer. Grandmabella's mom is defiantly resisting
moving back down to Mill Valley. She has no idea
(05:27):
that she's in jeopardy of being busted as well, and
she's being totally uncooperative against her will. We're packing her up,
and I'm determined that we're going to get every single
thing out. So I'm going through books. Sure enough, there'd
be a plane ticket, all this kind of stuff. And
she's mad at meanwhile, and so I made my sister
(05:49):
and my sister in law stamp all night. I'm like, no,
you're not going to bed. Nobody's going to bed. So
this is clean, and I mean clean. I just was
petrified from my mother. So we get it all done.
We've got everything ready. The guy with the from Mill
Valley has arrived, ready to take her stuff. And by
(06:09):
that time I've sort of got her convinced you've got
to leave. Mom. She goes, oh, wait a bite. There
is one more space that we forgot to get to him.
Right outside her apartment is a storage area. So we
go outside to the storage area and none of us
are tall enough to get the stuff. So this guy
from upstairs, her friend, comes down and down falls this
(06:32):
big thing of rifles, yep, rifles, and possessing these rifles
could add nine years to the sentence of anyone who
had just gotten busted, which could be almost twenty years
in prison. And they all have the name of the
boat up gets funny, Hey, this is what I'm talking about.
(06:56):
So they're antique guns. And the reason that they are
not on the boat is because they got rid of them.
But they didn't want to get rid of them because
they're value. The first thing is I said, gotta get
rid of these, mom, so you gotta do it. Ill
I'm not gonna do it. Why the hell should I
have to do it. I didn't make this miss And
(07:17):
the guy who's supposed to be driving her stuff back goes,
I'll take them, Like your idiot, you can't take them.
They're part of a crime thing. You want to go
to jail. He's like, well, they're really good. What are
you gonna do it for? Like, I don't know, but
my mom is gonna get rid of them. You're gonna
drive her and she's gonna find she knows the area.
(07:37):
I don't. So they finally come back a few hours
later and I go, great, where'd you put them? She goes, well,
we just couldn't find any place satisfactory. So and so
we put them in somebody's backyard under a log, under
a log. It's just what Yeah? And I said, my mother,
(07:58):
what if the people have children? What if those guns
are loaded? Did you check them? No? I didn't want
to touch that, But Mom, what if somebody gets killed
as a result of this? You can't leave them there?
Are you kidding? All right, let's go. So Grandma Bella
and her mom rent a car to retrieve the guns
from under the log, but unfortunately her mom forgets where
(08:22):
the log is. I mean, Portland is an especially log
abundant city. Numerous times I said, Mom, I see over
there that there's another thoroughfare, another avenue. Are you sure
you weren't on that avenue? What do you think I'm
an idiot? Of course I was, and I tell you
if I were, they're on this avenue. So finally, after
(08:44):
we don't find them for hours, I go over to
the other avenue and we find them right off the bat.
Now I'm really ready to kill her. The next task
is to figure out where to put the guns, and
Grandma Bella decides to bury them in a hole in
some back road in rural Oregon, lush with forests and
BlackBerry brambles. We found plenty of deep poles. But the
(09:07):
problem is every time we pull over to drop them,
another car would go by. Who would then have seen
our car and be and you holding rifles? Yeah? How
can it be so difficult, and the movies it always
looks like, oh, we're just gonna throw his body overboard.
Everything's fine, And I was just so. We get all
(09:27):
the way back to Portland where we'd started from, and
we still have the damned bag of let's run the
la car. So we we end up finding, yes, an
industrial area that is nothing industrial and throwing them in
a you know, the dubster. Stressed, exhausted, and cranky, Grandma
(09:52):
Bella and her mom fight all the way back to
a motel where they meet with the rest of the
family to determine their next move. Now, the bust happened
the day before. Grandma Bella he's cleaning out her mom's apartment.
She explained to us what happened. The ship previously used
for research but converted and they were to meet out
(10:14):
in the middle of the ocean somewhere and exchange money
per hash And I'm nervous, but I think, well, they're
also smart, and they hired this guy who's was a
professor of drama at some university to be the captain
of the ship, and he's a smart guy. They're all hippies.
(10:35):
I just need to echo, Grandma Bella. These smugglers hired
a hippie drama teacher to be the ship captain, absurd.
The way they got arrested was there was too much
of the product, which means when the boat came back
to shore they had to spend three days making extra containers.
And my brother who got caught, had to rent a truck,
(10:58):
an extra flatbed truck. He put it his own name
in his own credit guard who was terrible as a smuggler.
I'm telling you now, this is absolutely taboo in smuggling.
Never use your real name. He knew that they were
following him when he pulled out, and the way they
had gotten caught was the DA and some customs officials
(11:22):
and somebody else were coming into port. They saw the
boat and the custom guy because I bet you that's
a smuggler boat, and the other one said, nah, it's
just a research ship. So they took a little bit
and they watched it, and my brother said, you know,
they were following him. He didn't know what to do.
(11:42):
This is mister high. He had millions of dollars worth
of stuff in the back of the truck that he
felt he was responsible for, because he said, if it
weren't for that, I would have driven a truck into
the bay, into the ocean and taken my chances. He
pulled over at a truck stop, and he kept trying
(12:03):
to get a hold of the other brother. He couldn't
get a hold of him. And then one of the
guys came over and said, don't you think this has
gone on long enough? And my brother said, yeah, late eighties,
And so he went out to the truck and he
gave them permission to search, which he shouldn't have done.
Oh God, but they would have just gotten it. He
just was sick of it too. Now. Grandma Bella's young brother,
(12:25):
my dad's friend who built him a customed scale carry case.
The kid was not on the ship when the DA
busted everyone. The kid and the rest of the family
were at the motel trying to figure out what to do.
And that's when the kid decides to flee with his
wife and kids to Central America. Meanwhile, Grandma Bella's family
(12:50):
bonded together to try and help her older brother, mister High,
with his impending trial. We hired a lawyer, we took
out a huge amount of money on our house to
pay for it, and his wife was going to pay
us back when she sold her house, but instead they
seized her house, even though it had nothing to do
(13:12):
with the bust man. They'll get anything they can, so
we went into debt just like and I learned that
it is your business what your family is doing, because
you pay for it too. They're not out there as
an island of like, oh, leave me be, You're just paranoid,
which is what the other brother liked to say to me.
(13:34):
And no, it turns out I wasn't paranoid enough. And
I mean I remember going into my Central American brother's
closet and just smelling his clothes and crying, knowing that
I wasn't going to see him till God knows when
he had to be on the run. My mom and
(14:02):
dad knew very little about this trip when it was happening.
They heard about it, but they didn't know any details
until now after we talked with Grandma Bella. What was
clear to my parents and to Grandma Bella was that
the trip was poorly executed. Grandma Bella's brothers took a
lot of extreme risks without taking extra precautions. I just
(14:36):
thought they overstretched their imagination. They didn't really know what
they were doing. They had, you know, antique guns didn't work.
It wasn't properly thought done by proper the proper way.
I mean, why are they taking a big boat into
a big river system that's you know where there's like
all those those gatekeepers, the Homeland Security people, I mean
(15:01):
they were there then to the coast guard. You just
didn't go round too thirty mile limit with your load
of rifles, and you know, they didn't know the rules.
You had to stay within your boundaries of knowing what
you were doing big time. You know. Probably that's why
(15:22):
we've survived because we were cautious. So you felt they
didn't They were not meticulous, they were I felt that
they weren't um professional. I mean they had all the
receipts for the boats and they had nothing together right
like they Grandma Bella told us they had made t
(15:44):
shirts with their smugall name. Yeah, oh god, yeah, that
was unbelievable. No, my parents never did trips like this,
which is one of the reasons they never got caught.
My dad remained in one role during his twenty two
years smuggling career as a distributor. My dad never won
(16:06):
on the boots he says he didn't want to get
that close to the flame. Well I knew was that
demandatory minimums were absolutely byzantine, you know, and that just
don't get caught. I mean there was there was one rule,
don't get caught. He asked me for help, and there
(16:29):
was nothing I knew to do there, I mean I didn't.
It was such that I had no details of any
kind other than he was scared to death and he
got out of down very quickly and with his wife
and kids. Grandma Bella's brothers were whiskier than my parents
and took fewer precautions. And also they did this Afghani
(16:54):
Hash Columbia River trip right after Reagan's minimum drug sentencing
laws were bolstered, and unfortunately they experienced the harshest consequences.
Grandma Bella's oldest brother, mister High, got out of prison
a couple of years early for good behavior. Her other brother,
my parents friend, the kid, still lives out of the country.
(17:19):
Coming up, we hear from another counterculture smuggler I've known
for forty years, a good friend of mine who spent
three years in a federal prison for poct I'm Rainbow Valentine.
This is disorganized crime. We'll be right back. When I
(17:56):
was sixteen, I worked for my hippie elder friend Gracie Albright,
making thousands of pounds of tabouli in five gallon buckets
for a music festival in exchange for free tickets and
VIP access. And despite being up to my elbows literally
in citrus soaked cracked wheat for a week, it was
the most fun I've had while doing manual labor. Okay,
(18:19):
I've just landed in Vencino County. There she is driving
up in her badass heavy duty truck. If I were
to cast Wonder Woman's mom, it would be Gracie Albright,
almost larger than life. Greasie Albright is strong, confident, brave,
enormously compassionate, brilliant, hilarious, and the most spectacular maker of amazing,
(18:41):
large scale things comparable to a Broadway spectacular, Burning Man
installation or Hollywood extravaganza. Gracie is the kind of person
you want with you during the apocalypse because she will
make sure you survive and thrive. I met her when
I was six via my hippie theater community, the same
place I'm at. Candy Can. A couple of years after
(19:03):
I helped her make thousands of pounds to Bouley, thousands
of pounds of pot caught up to my friend and employer,
Gracie Albright. She spent several years in federal prison in
the nineties for pot. Now Greasy experienced what my parents
luckily avoided, and I wanted to find out how she'd
been caught and what prison had been like for an
(19:24):
ethical counterculture outlaw. Well, one of the things that really
blew my mind is that when I walked in past
where the glass door shut, it was actually just a
big glass door. You walked in the door and went
banged behind you. I got this huge pain in my
breast and I said, oh my god, Patrick Henry, give
(19:44):
me liberty or give me death. Who knew that freedom
was something you actually physically felt in your breast. My
breast was sore for a few weeks until I got
used to it. It was the strangest thing. It was like,
I had no idea. It kind of blew me out
of the water that one. So. Gracie worked in pot
(20:09):
smuggling for about five years as a driver this is
the mid eighties. She also had her own business, a
straight job and pot smuggling was always a side hustle,
providing her with extra money for prasias centrals, like going
to the dentist. And I mean, it wasn't an intentional
move on my part to become somebody that was selling marijuana.
(20:29):
I was actually doing other things. Yeah, if you thought
asked me what I was doing, I wouldn't tell you
I was a marijuana person. And in fact, even when
I was doing a lot of it, it wasn't the
main thing about what I was doing. It was just
a side deal. You know. It was great. You could
fix your teeth, you could take a vacation, paint us
the picture of what you didged and walk us through
what you were doing, and then walk us through. I
(20:50):
was driving to the site and loading a rented RV
full of suitcases, and then coming up to San Francisco
and parking at the airport where suitcases are completely common,
and people would come pick it up, and a few
weeks later they I'd go down and collect the money
and drive back. I asked Greasie how they masked the
(21:11):
cannabis aroma on the road. Her answer is so simple,
so obvious, and totally brilliant. We'd load up for the
return trip, and we'd cook bacon and eggs and then
we'd have bacon hamburgers, and then we'd have bacon on
our steaks. And we know we were we wore plaid
shirts and we called it the bacon Mobile and bacon Moobile.
(21:33):
One time we were in a hotel and we had
a whole load in the hotel with us, and I
was spraying like deodorant spray in the air because he
could just smell it through everything. And I set up
smoke alarm and I went, you know, so there was
there was you know, moments did what happened? Nothing? Nothing
(21:55):
that you know what happened is we all got a
big adrenaline rush. Even though she wasn't a full time smuggler,
Greasie also had to figure out things like how to
launder her money. She worked in hospice in San Francisco
during the AIDS crisis of the nineteen eighties, and she
did a true fuck you to the man to clean
(22:17):
her money. Might be one of my favorite parts of
her story. So the gay boys were really pretty pissed off.
All the gay boys that were dying of AIDS. I
knew them because I'd been in the Castro working hospice shifts.
There was at that time a tremendous number of the
gay population. Their mates were already dead, their parents may
(22:39):
not accept them, and they didn't have children yet because
that hadn't gotten normalized, their actualized, and so boy did
they need hospice. And not only that, they were pretty
pissed off, many of them, because I mean, that whole thing,
if it's the gay disease, so it's not important to us.
Kind of attitude that seemed to exist on some level.
(23:00):
So if you give more than a nine nine hundred
and ninety nine dollars to a bank or to anybody,
they have to say where they got it, if it's cash.
So I got to give my lawyer nine hundred ninety
nine dollars because the government really wanted to know how
I was paying for my legal help. And my lawyer
said to me, they're gonna subpoena this information. You have
(23:21):
to get me personal checks. So I came home and
I went, oh my god, I've got to give him,
you know, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars or the
personal checks. And so I went and I gave cash.
The gay boys saved me to people that were dyeing
the whole community, the whole castro took. They went out
and found the dying boys to give me personal checks
for ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars and they took the cash.
(23:46):
And so when the government wanted to know where the
money had come from, there was like pictures of all
the texts, but all the people that had donated were
gone and then and it was just they loved that
they could do that last or they probably still did
more revolutionary acts after that. So Gracie never technically got busted.
(24:14):
There wasn't a moment where she was caught red handed
in the act, and there was no evidence she'd been
a smuggler, but the government got her on conspiracy. Gracie's
indictment transpired in the early nineties when the government was
avidly enacting Reagan's mandatory minimum sentencing laws, aiming to imprison
(24:35):
as many drug offenders as possible, and conspiracy to commit
a drug offense was considered as bad as executing the misdeed.
Here's Bill Panzer, the cannabis attorney I chatted with in
episode three. Conspiracy is when two or more people agree
to do something illegal. And they take at least one
(24:58):
step in furtherance of the conspiracy. But yeah, conspiracy as
a fell in the Under federal law, the conspiracy potential
penalty would be the same as if you completed the conspiracy.
So Gracie got caught because someone she worked with was
caught and facing imprisonment. They turned a dime. They rolled,
(25:19):
which means to turn in others to the cops in
exchange for freedom. With Reagan's harsh mandatory minimums, rolling on
your colleagues was one of the only ways to save
your own skin, you know, Mandatory minimum sentences, people going
away for her redness, amounts of time for cannabis, which
(25:39):
no one should go to jail for cannabis period, and
other drugs too. I mean, you know, it's you know,
it's like almost it's okay to kill somebody, just don't
smoke a joint while you're doing it. You had these
draconian sentences, which then because of the only way out
of it was to cooperate. It changed the industry. A
(26:01):
friend of mine who recently retired, who did this ship
for like forty or fifty years, you know, always had
a hat in his office, a little baseball cap that said,
nobody talks, everybody walks, and there was a lot to that.
And you know, and look when you when you got
a twenty one year old kid and you're threatening him
with five years in prison, Well, when you're twenty one
years old, five years last forever. When you're forty five
(26:26):
years ain't that long anymore, you know, So there wasn't
that much of a threat. And when you start talking
about mandatory ten, of which you're serving eighty five percent,
none of this two for one stuff. You're serving ten
years cents, you're going to serve eight and a half years.
You get fifty four days a year off good time,
fifteen percent. That's it. So when you're talking about a
(26:47):
mandatory ten, a mandatory twenty, you had a lot more
people cooperating, pointy fingers of people dropping dimes on people,
ratting people out. And that's really how the whole warren drugs,
you know, the criminal justice sne became it's just get someone,
tell them you're going to prison for the rest of
(27:08):
your life unless you give me someone else. And people
start giving up their wives, their brothers, their daughters, their husbands.
You know, it was horrendous Greasie and her lawyer worked
for a couple of years on the case. She poured
all her resources, time, energy, money into the tobacco. She
becomes broke, has to send her child to live with relatives.
(27:29):
The Feds threatened eight years, but with the effort she
and her lawyer pour into the case, Greasie manages to
only be sentenced to three years for conspiracy to smugglepot
sometime in the vague future. So Greasie prepares for prison.
She puts her business on hold, says goodbye to her
(27:49):
child and family, and reports to serve three years. Gracie
was allowed to select the first prison she went to.
Unlike any good hippie, she picks the prison with the
best vegetables. It was like looking through a book and
taking a college has salad are somebody wrote a little
book about all of them? Was your god? My lawyer yeah, said,
(28:09):
there's no guarantee, but you could pick your first and
second choice here and if there's room, I think they'll
try and place you there because they don't really want
to give you a hard time. Tell me about prison,
to walko, to paint us the picture. What does prison
look like? Where are you sleeping? What are you doing
day to day. What do you miss drinking water? You know?
(28:30):
One of my friends said, what would you like when
you get in there? And I said, but you tape
the birds that sing in the morning on the lake,
so that I've got that sound in the morning when
I wake up. And then I got to my cell
and when you opened the window, there was a marsh
and so right away I felt like that was a
(28:52):
gift from the universe. Gracie spent most of her three
years in a medium security prison, but she ended up
moving around several times, so I was moved around to
three different prisons in a short time. So I really
got to see kind of the different kind of institutions
America has, and a lot about how they run and
(29:13):
what goes on, and it's you know, tell us about
it wor well, you know, there's also really sweet moments
waking up after a little LSD trip because you have
to do something to alter your conscious and then you
just can't. I just needed some cheering up, so I
would take some. And you know, Sunday morning, waking up
(29:36):
or I hadn't been to sleep, but everybody else was
waking up and it was like just all these sweet
human beings running around and borrowing quarters from each other
and checking to see if everyone had enough. Long we
detergent because it was a day off, and it was
just the women were very kind to each other and
very sweet and very supportive, and the rules were different
(29:58):
in every prison. In some prisons there was cameras on
you and you couldn't touch each other, and that was
difficult because you could get in serious trouble for giving
somebody a hug when their mother died. And in other
places you could get in serious trouble for allowing yourself
to get a sunburn, even though they didn't provide hats
or sunscreen or sunglasses. And many times you had to
(30:21):
work outside, and you know what, the infraction was called
destruction of government property. Even though Greasy remembers sweet moments,
prison is not a slumber party. One prison she lived
in went through a crisis situation concerning a plan between
the guards and a male prisoner to blow up the
(30:44):
women's prison. At one point, some dude had stolen some too. Anyway,
he had a network, and there was a men's prison
and a women's prison, and this helicopter was aiming to
come into the men's side and escape with somebody. And
how they were going to do it was they were
going to bomb the women's side, distract everybody, and then
land and take the dude out. So they were just
(31:06):
gonna bomb us. And so all of a sudden, all
these fans rushed into the middle of the prison, all
armed with their guns drawn, and la la la and
low and behold, they took away a bunch of the guards,
and the guards had sold us. They had for six
figures agreed to put a bomb off on our side.
So that was one of the times I thought, oh
my gosh, wow, death for pot that would be a
(31:28):
wild thing. Gracie overwhelmingly feels her experience in prison was surreal,
just totally bizarre. I got to ride Conair. You know,
we were out there on the tarmac when they moved
us from one prison to another at the airport, like
got us chain, We're handcuffed, we're chain our hands are
(31:48):
chained to our waist. The chain goes down to our
feet and our ankles are chained so you can sort
of shuffle and you have to walk up the airplane
steps like that, and there's all these dudes standing around
with machine guns and you know, ah, there you are
and you think, oh gosh, I'm sent somebody else's movie.
One of the takeaways Gracie has from prison is the
(32:10):
absurdity of who was imprisoned federally. Some of her fellow
convicts include a woman who tried to assassinate President Ford.
Another prisoner worked in mail delivery and threw away the
junk mail because she wanted to go home early as
it was nine degrees outside. Then she was sent to
federal prison because throwing away mail, including junk mail, is
(32:33):
a federal crime. And there were other smugglers, a woman
serving fifty years for pot, plus a crew of parakeet smugglers.
And you know there was then the parakeet smugglers. Oh
you know, people that smuggled rare birds. I mean people
that had been busted pain in Yosemite in federal prison. Yeah,
because maybe a kid saw them do it. Most of
(32:55):
the people in women's prison are actually victims, and quite
a few of them were afraid to go when it
was their time to go because they just went out
set themselves up for it. I mean, no one was
working with these women are helping them figure out why
they maybe should stop making terrible choices or you know,
and they'd end up with these abusive boyfriends. And you know,
(33:16):
in prison, everyone is assigned a job. Gracie was in
charge of recreation, and she headed up a dedicated meditation group.
And one thing, another funny thing about prison is that
there's lots of prison literature in prison, so you go
to the library and you can read about everybody that
was ever in prison. Gracie was eventually transferred to a
penitentiary in the Pacific Northwest, where male prisoners were allowed
(33:38):
to hunt and would provide fresh meat for everyone else
locked up. Let's just take a moment on that. The
male prisoners were given guns to go out and hunt
for food. I've been watching and we didn't even have
to wear uniforms. And there was all these northwesterners, god
knows what they were in prison for. There were dudes
in there that had been busted for this or that
(33:59):
or the other thing. And they owned these giant ranches
that had walk in freezer to the next ranch, and
so they would fill our prison freezer. They couldn't feed
themselves unless they fed everybody. So we would get like
we would have salmon for dinner, and we would have
bear for dinner and we would have Elk for dinner
(34:21):
and Moose for dinner. I mean, it was sort of weird.
And we had karaoke night. You know. Oh, I had
plenty of fun. There was this one prison guard that said, oh,
you're having fun and he said, you're enjoying yourself And
I said, well why not? I mean, am I going
(34:43):
to be miserable? Why waste my time being miserable. I
spent a lot of time being outraged and how crazy
it all was. But when I got to the halfway house,
I remember they made me go to this counselor and
the councilor said, she said, I don't usually get people
that aren't bitter. I said, I'm not bitter. I knew
I was breaking the law. After release, Greasie gets sent
to a halfway house for how long were you there?
(35:05):
They held me for a while. But I work in
rock and rolls, who I got to go out in
the evenings and there is another great story about how
you're really being held by criminals even though you're not.
So I would come back in and there was only
a dude on at three in the morning when I
would come home from work. But it was a job.
They were required by law to let me go to work,
even if it was at the you know, rock and
(35:27):
roll palaces. And I would come in and they I
had to agree to a P test every single time
I came in with the mail guard watching. And so
you know what he did. He tried to sell me
his P for seventy dollars and I said, how do
I know your P is clean? I know mine is?
Fuck off? You know, I mean, really yeah, just kind
of nuts, I know. Just it was so surreal. I
(35:49):
called it marshmallow world. You look for where something is
and what it is just keeps moving. It's all moving.
Life is kind of like that. In the end, it
turns out, but it was like so extreme there. Now today,
(36:11):
after spending three years in prison and leaving pots smuggling behind,
Gracie says, what she feels most acutely is relief. In
the years since then, it was cool not to be frightened.
You know. At some point while I was in a
sweet Buddhist nun that used to come meditate with us
(36:31):
wrote a book about freedom, and she interviewed me and
I said, oh, I'm much freer now, And that made
her sort of curious, and I said, well, you know,
I'm free of all the little white lies because you
can't tell people that you're going to go sell a
pound a pot, so you tell people you're going to
the movies, and so you lie all the time to
protect people. So it's well motivated, but it's still little lies,
(36:53):
and they get heavy after a while, you know, and
so it's really, you know, I'm so glad that it's legal,
because it's a shame lies just they're not you know,
they are sort of unclean and they do have a
certain weight. And so it was a sacrifice to be
one of those people that insisted on being a beneficial
thing and you know, fock for laws basically, So like
(37:18):
my parents, Greasie lived a double life and it eventually
became overly burdensome. Neither she nor my parents regret being
pot smugglers because they believed in the product and the cause. However,
the mental hardship of working outside the law is real,
deeply taxing, and accumulates over time, no matter how honorable
(37:41):
you or the product are. And Gracie was fortunate because
she was part of a tight knit community that took
care of her and her child and she had a
great legal team, plus returned to her neighborhood as a hero.
I was really lucky so many of the women went home.
I mean, I got to come home a hero. So
(38:04):
I'd go dancing and there'd be one hundred dollar bill
in my pocket that I didn't know who'd put there.
I'd come to work and there would be a thousand
dollars in a brown paper bag on my desk, and
it was like, you know, none of my stuff disappeared
other than what it cost me to defend myself and
everybody else. And I spent plenty on that. I spent
(38:25):
everything on it. I was broke when I finally got there.
The reason I stopped fighting was because I was completely
out of money. But I didn't lose anything because of
my lifestyle, and people just took care of it for
me while I was gone, and they did my work
for me, and it just, you know, nothing left. But
I certainly had to develop a new sense of the
worth of a dollar when I got out. So watching
(38:50):
their colleagues and friends get busted, go to prison or
flee the country was horrifying for my parents. Along with
a sadness of watching their friends' lives between apart was
the terror that people would turn a dime. My par
could only hope that they would be spared if any
of their colleagues rolled like Gracie's associate. Growing up, because
(39:12):
I didn't know my parents were lawbreakers, I never felt
unsafe or worried that I would come home from school
and find my parents in jail or our bags packed
to flee the country. However, this podcast, Pilgrimage into Pandora's
pot Box, is continuously uncovering surprising disclosures and discoveries. Let
(39:32):
me scrape my jaw off the floor at once again
and share a recent one. I was talking with my
mom and she casually mentions in the late eighties they
could have been busted the same way as Gracie. When
a family friend with whom we'd vacationed in Kauai and
whose daughter gave me a Culture Club cassette tape for
my tenth birthday was busted and rolled on everyone but
(39:56):
my dad. She told on everybody but us, really all crew.
Why didn't he tell on you? Yeah, because we had
because you had a baby, and nobody else did. So
my mom thinks he busted associate didn't roll on my
dad because of me and my siblings. The busted colleague
(40:20):
was also a family man, and to save his skin
and keep his family intact, he turned a dime on
his bachelor associates. My dad, a fellow family man, remained unnamed.
It's fascinating a bizarre to consider I'd potentially been an
unwitting shield for my parents. In the next episode, Dad's
(40:44):
pot smuggling career takes a dangerous in devastating turn when
Dad goes to New York and does the trip that
ultimately becomes his final straw. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this
is Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is
written and recorded by Me Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are
(41:06):
Gabby Watts and Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr,
Brian Live and Elsie Crowley and Me at School of
Humans and Connel 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 story
(41:37):
Doing as with Me Tamble by steep and Princess of
the red Wood dreams, she says, keep it real. Handshake
seals the deal, wrap the ska sealed meal, going up
these old threads, golding to Doobie, Young, rich and groovy,
(42:04):
making it up. We roll along, rolling along for country roll,
rolling along for a country roll, Rolling along for a
(42:24):
country roll.
School of Humans. Okay, so it's the late eighties and
the Reagan's new minimum drug sentencing laws are in place,
and the nation is swept up in an anti drug
just Say No fever. Thanks to First Lady Nancy Reagan,
my pot smuggler dad has experienced his biggest smuggling success
(00:31):
followed by the biggest rip off of his career. So far,
He's doing primarily smaller local deals and fruitlessly waiting for
the Green Beret grifterer to clean and return Dad's foolishly
entrusted money. I'm headed towards high school and into the
rhythmics the Indigo Girls in comedy, watching a lot of
old Saturday Night Live with Gilda Belushi and the Cone Heads.
(00:55):
At the same time, my mom's friend's family gets into
a smuggling trip that goes terribly wrong. My parents had
a good friend younger than them who were calling the kid.
He was a carpenter and built my dad a custom
case for his pot weighing scales, which my dad used
to carry the scales in for local deals. Well, in
(01:17):
nineteen eighty eight, the kid and his brother, mister High
get busted bringing in thousands of pounds of pot via
Oregon's Columbia River. The kid calls my dad in a panic.
His brother's been busted, headed to prison, and instead of
joining his brother in prison, the kid's going to flee
the country with his wife and child. So the sister
(01:40):
of these busted brothers lived across the street from the
house I was born in. Remember that hippote hobbity house
with a secret room. So I've known the sister of
the busted brothers my whole life. She's in the rock
and roll industry, and I went to school with her kids.
Like the rest of the family friends I've recently discovered
were also smugglers. Had no idea that this former neighbor
(02:03):
and mother of my school friends was also involved in
pot smuggling, albeit peripherally. We'll call her Grandma Bella because today,
after years of working in San Francisco's rock and roll industry,
her favorite job as being a grandma. As her grandchildren
romped in the garden, I spoke to Grandma Bella about
the abrupt and catastrophic finale to her brother's pot smuggling careers.
(02:29):
In today's episode, we learn about the traumatic, real life
ramifications of the Reagan administration's drug laws as more smugglers
in our family circle were sent to prison or fled
the country. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime
smuggler's daughter and grooving far country boden Gan State making
(03:17):
it up. As part of this podcast is the history
and the laws changing and what happens. So it's the
eighties that the law had just changed two months earlier,
(03:37):
and with my mom talking to Grandma Bella. Grandma Bella
is my mom's friend whose two brothers were busted smuggling
afghany pot into Oregon via the Columbia River. They had
it all set up. It was a boat on the
Columbia River, and that was when paranoid sisters said, are
you sure you should be doing this? With a new
(03:58):
drug plaw changes and then my only applies to cold
So all these guys who've been dealing in bat for
all these years thought that it was nothing and that
only the crack people and so forth we're going to
be getting in trouble. A drug bust is the seizure
of illegal drugs by law enforcement. And after this bust,
(04:20):
Grandma Bella's role is to get her mom out of
Portland and bring her back to Mill Valley. Her mom
was staying in a rental apartment used as a safe
house for the trip, which means the apartment was filled
with all sorts of evidence of the trip, including paraphernalia, receipts,
and so much more. And whoever rents the safe house
(04:41):
could also go to prison for five to ten years.
The last thing Grandma Bella wants is for her senior
citizen mom to join the rest of the family in prison.
My mother to Portland and used her house, her apartment
as a meeting place. So my mother's apartment is full
of all this name of the boat stuff and just
(05:05):
do you name it? So my mom is kind of clueless.
She thinks it's cool because she smokes pot, doesn't think
anything of it, and she thinks that it's a wild ride.
And before by the time I see her again, she's
talking like a pot dealer. Grandmabella's mom is defiantly resisting
moving back down to Mill Valley. She has no idea
(05:27):
that she's in jeopardy of being busted as well, and
she's being totally uncooperative against her will. We're packing her up,
and I'm determined that we're going to get every single
thing out. So I'm going through books. Sure enough, there'd
be a plane ticket, all this kind of stuff. And
she's mad at meanwhile, and so I made my sister
(05:49):
and my sister in law stamp all night. I'm like, no,
you're not going to bed. Nobody's going to bed. So
this is clean, and I mean clean. I just was
petrified from my mother. So we get it all done.
We've got everything ready. The guy with the from Mill
Valley has arrived, ready to take her stuff. And by
(06:09):
that time I've sort of got her convinced you've got
to leave. Mom. She goes, oh, wait a bite. There
is one more space that we forgot to get to him.
Right outside her apartment is a storage area. So we
go outside to the storage area and none of us
are tall enough to get the stuff. So this guy
from upstairs, her friend, comes down and down falls this
(06:32):
big thing of rifles, yep, rifles, and possessing these rifles
could add nine years to the sentence of anyone who
had just gotten busted, which could be almost twenty years
in prison. And they all have the name of the
boat up gets funny, Hey, this is what I'm talking about.
(06:56):
So they're antique guns. And the reason that they are
not on the boat is because they got rid of them.
But they didn't want to get rid of them because
they're value. The first thing is I said, gotta get
rid of these, mom, so you gotta do it. Ill
I'm not gonna do it. Why the hell should I
have to do it. I didn't make this miss And
(07:17):
the guy who's supposed to be driving her stuff back goes,
I'll take them, Like your idiot, you can't take them.
They're part of a crime thing. You want to go
to jail. He's like, well, they're really good. What are
you gonna do it for? Like, I don't know, but
my mom is gonna get rid of them. You're gonna
drive her and she's gonna find she knows the area.
(07:37):
I don't. So they finally come back a few hours
later and I go, great, where'd you put them? She goes, well,
we just couldn't find any place satisfactory. So and so
we put them in somebody's backyard under a log, under
a log. It's just what Yeah? And I said, my mother,
(07:58):
what if the people have children? What if those guns
are loaded? Did you check them? No? I didn't want
to touch that, But Mom, what if somebody gets killed
as a result of this? You can't leave them there?
Are you kidding? All right, let's go. So Grandma Bella
and her mom rent a car to retrieve the guns
from under the log, but unfortunately her mom forgets where
(08:22):
the log is. I mean, Portland is an especially log
abundant city. Numerous times I said, Mom, I see over
there that there's another thoroughfare, another avenue. Are you sure
you weren't on that avenue? What do you think I'm
an idiot? Of course I was, and I tell you
if I were, they're on this avenue. So finally, after
(08:44):
we don't find them for hours, I go over to
the other avenue and we find them right off the bat.
Now I'm really ready to kill her. The next task
is to figure out where to put the guns, and
Grandma Bella decides to bury them in a hole in
some back road in rural Oregon, lush with forests and
BlackBerry brambles. We found plenty of deep poles. But the
(09:07):
problem is every time we pull over to drop them,
another car would go by. Who would then have seen
our car and be and you holding rifles? Yeah? How
can it be so difficult, and the movies it always
looks like, oh, we're just gonna throw his body overboard.
Everything's fine, And I was just so. We get all
(09:27):
the way back to Portland where we'd started from, and
we still have the damned bag of let's run the
la car. So we we end up finding, yes, an
industrial area that is nothing industrial and throwing them in
a you know, the dubster. Stressed, exhausted, and cranky, Grandma
(09:52):
Bella and her mom fight all the way back to
a motel where they meet with the rest of the
family to determine their next move. Now, the bust happened
the day before. Grandma Bella he's cleaning out her mom's apartment.
She explained to us what happened. The ship previously used
for research but converted and they were to meet out
(10:14):
in the middle of the ocean somewhere and exchange money
per hash And I'm nervous, but I think, well, they're
also smart, and they hired this guy who's was a
professor of drama at some university to be the captain
of the ship, and he's a smart guy. They're all hippies.
(10:35):
I just need to echo, Grandma Bella. These smugglers hired
a hippie drama teacher to be the ship captain, absurd.
The way they got arrested was there was too much
of the product, which means when the boat came back
to shore they had to spend three days making extra containers.
And my brother who got caught, had to rent a truck,
(10:58):
an extra flatbed truck. He put it his own name
in his own credit guard who was terrible as a smuggler.
I'm telling you now, this is absolutely taboo in smuggling.
Never use your real name. He knew that they were
following him when he pulled out, and the way they
had gotten caught was the DA and some customs officials
(11:22):
and somebody else were coming into port. They saw the
boat and the custom guy because I bet you that's
a smuggler boat, and the other one said, nah, it's
just a research ship. So they took a little bit
and they watched it, and my brother said, you know,
they were following him. He didn't know what to do.
(11:42):
This is mister high. He had millions of dollars worth
of stuff in the back of the truck that he
felt he was responsible for, because he said, if it
weren't for that, I would have driven a truck into
the bay, into the ocean and taken my chances. He
pulled over at a truck stop, and he kept trying
(12:03):
to get a hold of the other brother. He couldn't
get a hold of him. And then one of the
guys came over and said, don't you think this has
gone on long enough? And my brother said, yeah, late eighties,
And so he went out to the truck and he
gave them permission to search, which he shouldn't have done.
Oh God, but they would have just gotten it. He
just was sick of it too. Now. Grandma Bella's young brother,
(12:25):
my dad's friend who built him a customed scale carry case.
The kid was not on the ship when the DA
busted everyone. The kid and the rest of the family
were at the motel trying to figure out what to do.
And that's when the kid decides to flee with his
wife and kids to Central America. Meanwhile, Grandma Bella's family
(12:50):
bonded together to try and help her older brother, mister High,
with his impending trial. We hired a lawyer, we took
out a huge amount of money on our house to
pay for it, and his wife was going to pay
us back when she sold her house, but instead they
seized her house, even though it had nothing to do
(13:12):
with the bust man. They'll get anything they can, so
we went into debt just like and I learned that
it is your business what your family is doing, because
you pay for it too. They're not out there as
an island of like, oh, leave me be, You're just paranoid,
which is what the other brother liked to say to me.
(13:34):
And no, it turns out I wasn't paranoid enough. And
I mean I remember going into my Central American brother's
closet and just smelling his clothes and crying, knowing that
I wasn't going to see him till God knows when
he had to be on the run. My mom and
(14:02):
dad knew very little about this trip when it was happening.
They heard about it, but they didn't know any details
until now after we talked with Grandma Bella. What was
clear to my parents and to Grandma Bella was that
the trip was poorly executed. Grandma Bella's brothers took a
lot of extreme risks without taking extra precautions. I just
(14:36):
thought they overstretched their imagination. They didn't really know what
they were doing. They had, you know, antique guns didn't work.
It wasn't properly thought done by proper the proper way.
I mean, why are they taking a big boat into
a big river system that's you know where there's like
all those those gatekeepers, the Homeland Security people, I mean
(15:01):
they were there then to the coast guard. You just
didn't go round too thirty mile limit with your load
of rifles, and you know, they didn't know the rules.
You had to stay within your boundaries of knowing what
you were doing big time. You know. Probably that's why
(15:22):
we've survived because we were cautious. So you felt they
didn't They were not meticulous, they were I felt that
they weren't um professional. I mean they had all the
receipts for the boats and they had nothing together right
like they Grandma Bella told us they had made t
(15:44):
shirts with their smugall name. Yeah, oh god, yeah, that
was unbelievable. No, my parents never did trips like this,
which is one of the reasons they never got caught.
My dad remained in one role during his twenty two
years smuggling career as a distributor. My dad never won
(16:06):
on the boots he says he didn't want to get
that close to the flame. Well I knew was that
demandatory minimums were absolutely byzantine, you know, and that just
don't get caught. I mean there was there was one rule,
don't get caught. He asked me for help, and there
(16:29):
was nothing I knew to do there, I mean I didn't.
It was such that I had no details of any
kind other than he was scared to death and he
got out of down very quickly and with his wife
and kids. Grandma Bella's brothers were whiskier than my parents
and took fewer precautions. And also they did this Afghani
(16:54):
Hash Columbia River trip right after Reagan's minimum drug sentencing
laws were bolstered, and unfortunately they experienced the harshest consequences.
Grandma Bella's oldest brother, mister High, got out of prison
a couple of years early for good behavior. Her other brother,
my parents friend, the kid, still lives out of the country.
(17:19):
Coming up, we hear from another counterculture smuggler I've known
for forty years, a good friend of mine who spent
three years in a federal prison for poct I'm Rainbow Valentine.
This is disorganized crime. We'll be right back. When I
(17:56):
was sixteen, I worked for my hippie elder friend Gracie Albright,
making thousands of pounds of tabouli in five gallon buckets
for a music festival in exchange for free tickets and
VIP access. And despite being up to my elbows literally
in citrus soaked cracked wheat for a week, it was
the most fun I've had while doing manual labor. Okay,
(18:19):
I've just landed in Vencino County. There she is driving
up in her badass heavy duty truck. If I were
to cast Wonder Woman's mom, it would be Gracie Albright,
almost larger than life. Greasie Albright is strong, confident, brave,
enormously compassionate, brilliant, hilarious, and the most spectacular maker of amazing,
(18:41):
large scale things comparable to a Broadway spectacular, Burning Man
installation or Hollywood extravaganza. Gracie is the kind of person
you want with you during the apocalypse because she will
make sure you survive and thrive. I met her when
I was six via my hippie theater community, the same
place I'm at. Candy Can. A couple of years after
(19:03):
I helped her make thousands of pounds to Bouley, thousands
of pounds of pot caught up to my friend and employer,
Gracie Albright. She spent several years in federal prison in
the nineties for pot. Now Greasy experienced what my parents
luckily avoided, and I wanted to find out how she'd
been caught and what prison had been like for an
(19:24):
ethical counterculture outlaw. Well, one of the things that really
blew my mind is that when I walked in past
where the glass door shut, it was actually just a
big glass door. You walked in the door and went
banged behind you. I got this huge pain in my
breast and I said, oh my god, Patrick Henry, give
(19:44):
me liberty or give me death. Who knew that freedom
was something you actually physically felt in your breast. My
breast was sore for a few weeks until I got
used to it. It was the strangest thing. It was like,
I had no idea. It kind of blew me out
of the water that one. So. Gracie worked in pot
(20:09):
smuggling for about five years as a driver this is
the mid eighties. She also had her own business, a
straight job and pot smuggling was always a side hustle,
providing her with extra money for prasias centrals, like going
to the dentist. And I mean, it wasn't an intentional
move on my part to become somebody that was selling marijuana.
(20:29):
I was actually doing other things. Yeah, if you thought
asked me what I was doing, I wouldn't tell you
I was a marijuana person. And in fact, even when
I was doing a lot of it, it wasn't the
main thing about what I was doing. It was just
a side deal. You know. It was great. You could
fix your teeth, you could take a vacation, paint us
the picture of what you didged and walk us through
what you were doing, and then walk us through. I
(20:50):
was driving to the site and loading a rented RV
full of suitcases, and then coming up to San Francisco
and parking at the airport where suitcases are completely common,
and people would come pick it up, and a few
weeks later they I'd go down and collect the money
and drive back. I asked Greasie how they masked the
(21:11):
cannabis aroma on the road. Her answer is so simple,
so obvious, and totally brilliant. We'd load up for the
return trip, and we'd cook bacon and eggs and then
we'd have bacon hamburgers, and then we'd have bacon on
our steaks. And we know we were we wore plaid
shirts and we called it the bacon Mobile and bacon Moobile.
(21:33):
One time we were in a hotel and we had
a whole load in the hotel with us, and I
was spraying like deodorant spray in the air because he
could just smell it through everything. And I set up
smoke alarm and I went, you know, so there was
there was you know, moments did what happened? Nothing? Nothing
(21:55):
that you know what happened is we all got a
big adrenaline rush. Even though she wasn't a full time smuggler,
Greasie also had to figure out things like how to
launder her money. She worked in hospice in San Francisco
during the AIDS crisis of the nineteen eighties, and she
did a true fuck you to the man to clean
(22:17):
her money. Might be one of my favorite parts of
her story. So the gay boys were really pretty pissed off.
All the gay boys that were dying of AIDS. I
knew them because I'd been in the Castro working hospice shifts.
There was at that time a tremendous number of the
gay population. Their mates were already dead, their parents may
(22:39):
not accept them, and they didn't have children yet because
that hadn't gotten normalized, their actualized, and so boy did
they need hospice. And not only that, they were pretty
pissed off, many of them, because I mean, that whole thing,
if it's the gay disease, so it's not important to us.
Kind of attitude that seemed to exist on some level.
(23:00):
So if you give more than a nine nine hundred
and ninety nine dollars to a bank or to anybody,
they have to say where they got it, if it's cash.
So I got to give my lawyer nine hundred ninety
nine dollars because the government really wanted to know how
I was paying for my legal help. And my lawyer
said to me, they're gonna subpoena this information. You have
(23:21):
to get me personal checks. So I came home and
I went, oh my god, I've got to give him,
you know, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars or the
personal checks. And so I went and I gave cash.
The gay boys saved me to people that were dyeing
the whole community, the whole castro took. They went out
and found the dying boys to give me personal checks
for ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars and they took the cash.
(23:46):
And so when the government wanted to know where the
money had come from, there was like pictures of all
the texts, but all the people that had donated were
gone and then and it was just they loved that
they could do that last or they probably still did
more revolutionary acts after that. So Gracie never technically got busted.
(24:14):
There wasn't a moment where she was caught red handed
in the act, and there was no evidence she'd been
a smuggler, but the government got her on conspiracy. Gracie's
indictment transpired in the early nineties when the government was
avidly enacting Reagan's mandatory minimum sentencing laws, aiming to imprison
(24:35):
as many drug offenders as possible, and conspiracy to commit
a drug offense was considered as bad as executing the misdeed.
Here's Bill Panzer, the cannabis attorney I chatted with in
episode three. Conspiracy is when two or more people agree
to do something illegal. And they take at least one
(24:58):
step in furtherance of the conspiracy. But yeah, conspiracy as
a fell in the Under federal law, the conspiracy potential
penalty would be the same as if you completed the conspiracy.
So Gracie got caught because someone she worked with was
caught and facing imprisonment. They turned a dime. They rolled,
(25:19):
which means to turn in others to the cops in
exchange for freedom. With Reagan's harsh mandatory minimums, rolling on
your colleagues was one of the only ways to save
your own skin, you know, Mandatory minimum sentences, people going
away for her redness, amounts of time for cannabis, which
(25:39):
no one should go to jail for cannabis period, and
other drugs too. I mean, you know, it's you know,
it's like almost it's okay to kill somebody, just don't
smoke a joint while you're doing it. You had these
draconian sentences, which then because of the only way out
of it was to cooperate. It changed the industry. A
(26:01):
friend of mine who recently retired, who did this ship
for like forty or fifty years, you know, always had
a hat in his office, a little baseball cap that said,
nobody talks, everybody walks, and there was a lot to that.
And you know, and look when you when you got
a twenty one year old kid and you're threatening him
with five years in prison, Well, when you're twenty one
years old, five years last forever. When you're forty five
(26:26):
years ain't that long anymore, you know, So there wasn't
that much of a threat. And when you start talking
about mandatory ten, of which you're serving eighty five percent,
none of this two for one stuff. You're serving ten
years cents, you're going to serve eight and a half years.
You get fifty four days a year off good time,
fifteen percent. That's it. So when you're talking about a
(26:47):
mandatory ten, a mandatory twenty, you had a lot more
people cooperating, pointy fingers of people dropping dimes on people,
ratting people out. And that's really how the whole warren drugs,
you know, the criminal justice sne became it's just get someone,
tell them you're going to prison for the rest of
(27:08):
your life unless you give me someone else. And people
start giving up their wives, their brothers, their daughters, their husbands.
You know, it was horrendous Greasie and her lawyer worked
for a couple of years on the case. She poured
all her resources, time, energy, money into the tobacco. She
becomes broke, has to send her child to live with relatives.
(27:29):
The Feds threatened eight years, but with the effort she
and her lawyer pour into the case, Greasie manages to
only be sentenced to three years for conspiracy to smugglepot
sometime in the vague future. So Greasie prepares for prison.
She puts her business on hold, says goodbye to her
(27:49):
child and family, and reports to serve three years. Gracie
was allowed to select the first prison she went to.
Unlike any good hippie, she picks the prison with the
best vegetables. It was like looking through a book and
taking a college has salad are somebody wrote a little
book about all of them? Was your god? My lawyer yeah, said,
(28:09):
there's no guarantee, but you could pick your first and
second choice here and if there's room, I think they'll
try and place you there because they don't really want
to give you a hard time. Tell me about prison,
to walko, to paint us the picture. What does prison
look like? Where are you sleeping? What are you doing
day to day. What do you miss drinking water? You know?
(28:30):
One of my friends said, what would you like when
you get in there? And I said, but you tape
the birds that sing in the morning on the lake,
so that I've got that sound in the morning when
I wake up. And then I got to my cell
and when you opened the window, there was a marsh
and so right away I felt like that was a
(28:52):
gift from the universe. Gracie spent most of her three
years in a medium security prison, but she ended up
moving around several times, so I was moved around to
three different prisons in a short time. So I really
got to see kind of the different kind of institutions
America has, and a lot about how they run and
(29:13):
what goes on, and it's you know, tell us about
it wor well, you know, there's also really sweet moments
waking up after a little LSD trip because you have
to do something to alter your conscious and then you
just can't. I just needed some cheering up, so I
would take some. And you know, Sunday morning, waking up
(29:36):
or I hadn't been to sleep, but everybody else was
waking up and it was like just all these sweet
human beings running around and borrowing quarters from each other
and checking to see if everyone had enough. Long we
detergent because it was a day off, and it was
just the women were very kind to each other and
very sweet and very supportive, and the rules were different
(29:58):
in every prison. In some prisons there was cameras on
you and you couldn't touch each other, and that was
difficult because you could get in serious trouble for giving
somebody a hug when their mother died. And in other
places you could get in serious trouble for allowing yourself
to get a sunburn, even though they didn't provide hats
or sunscreen or sunglasses. And many times you had to
(30:21):
work outside, and you know what, the infraction was called
destruction of government property. Even though Greasy remembers sweet moments,
prison is not a slumber party. One prison she lived
in went through a crisis situation concerning a plan between
the guards and a male prisoner to blow up the
(30:44):
women's prison. At one point, some dude had stolen some too. Anyway,
he had a network, and there was a men's prison
and a women's prison, and this helicopter was aiming to
come into the men's side and escape with somebody. And
how they were going to do it was they were
going to bomb the women's side, distract everybody, and then
land and take the dude out. So they were just
(31:06):
gonna bomb us. And so all of a sudden, all
these fans rushed into the middle of the prison, all
armed with their guns drawn, and la la la and
low and behold, they took away a bunch of the guards,
and the guards had sold us. They had for six
figures agreed to put a bomb off on our side.
So that was one of the times I thought, oh
my gosh, wow, death for pot that would be a
(31:28):
wild thing. Gracie overwhelmingly feels her experience in prison was surreal,
just totally bizarre. I got to ride Conair. You know,
we were out there on the tarmac when they moved
us from one prison to another at the airport, like
got us chain, We're handcuffed, we're chain our hands are
(31:48):
chained to our waist. The chain goes down to our
feet and our ankles are chained so you can sort
of shuffle and you have to walk up the airplane
steps like that, and there's all these dudes standing around
with machine guns and you know, ah, there you are
and you think, oh gosh, I'm sent somebody else's movie.
One of the takeaways Gracie has from prison is the
(32:10):
absurdity of who was imprisoned federally. Some of her fellow
convicts include a woman who tried to assassinate President Ford.
Another prisoner worked in mail delivery and threw away the
junk mail because she wanted to go home early as
it was nine degrees outside. Then she was sent to
federal prison because throwing away mail, including junk mail, is
(32:33):
a federal crime. And there were other smugglers, a woman
serving fifty years for pot, plus a crew of parakeet smugglers.
And you know there was then the parakeet smugglers. Oh
you know, people that smuggled rare birds. I mean people
that had been busted pain in Yosemite in federal prison. Yeah,
because maybe a kid saw them do it. Most of
(32:55):
the people in women's prison are actually victims, and quite
a few of them were afraid to go when it
was their time to go because they just went out
set themselves up for it. I mean, no one was
working with these women are helping them figure out why
they maybe should stop making terrible choices or you know,
and they'd end up with these abusive boyfriends. And you know,
(33:16):
in prison, everyone is assigned a job. Gracie was in
charge of recreation, and she headed up a dedicated meditation group.
And one thing, another funny thing about prison is that
there's lots of prison literature in prison, so you go
to the library and you can read about everybody that
was ever in prison. Gracie was eventually transferred to a
penitentiary in the Pacific Northwest, where male prisoners were allowed
(33:38):
to hunt and would provide fresh meat for everyone else
locked up. Let's just take a moment on that. The
male prisoners were given guns to go out and hunt
for food. I've been watching and we didn't even have
to wear uniforms. And there was all these northwesterners, god
knows what they were in prison for. There were dudes
in there that had been busted for this or that
(33:59):
or the other thing. And they owned these giant ranches
that had walk in freezer to the next ranch, and
so they would fill our prison freezer. They couldn't feed
themselves unless they fed everybody. So we would get like
we would have salmon for dinner, and we would have
bear for dinner and we would have Elk for dinner
(34:21):
and Moose for dinner. I mean, it was sort of weird.
And we had karaoke night. You know. Oh, I had
plenty of fun. There was this one prison guard that said, oh,
you're having fun and he said, you're enjoying yourself And
I said, well why not? I mean, am I going
(34:43):
to be miserable? Why waste my time being miserable. I
spent a lot of time being outraged and how crazy
it all was. But when I got to the halfway house,
I remember they made me go to this counselor and
the councilor said, she said, I don't usually get people
that aren't bitter. I said, I'm not bitter. I knew
I was breaking the law. After release, Greasie gets sent
to a halfway house for how long were you there?
(35:05):
They held me for a while. But I work in
rock and rolls, who I got to go out in
the evenings and there is another great story about how
you're really being held by criminals even though you're not.
So I would come back in and there was only
a dude on at three in the morning when I
would come home from work. But it was a job.
They were required by law to let me go to work,
even if it was at the you know, rock and
(35:27):
roll palaces. And I would come in and they I
had to agree to a P test every single time
I came in with the mail guard watching. And so
you know what he did. He tried to sell me
his P for seventy dollars and I said, how do
I know your P is clean? I know mine is?
Fuck off? You know, I mean, really yeah, just kind
of nuts, I know. Just it was so surreal. I
(35:49):
called it marshmallow world. You look for where something is
and what it is just keeps moving. It's all moving.
Life is kind of like that. In the end, it
turns out, but it was like so extreme there. Now today,
(36:11):
after spending three years in prison and leaving pots smuggling behind,
Gracie says, what she feels most acutely is relief. In
the years since then, it was cool not to be frightened.
You know. At some point while I was in a
sweet Buddhist nun that used to come meditate with us
(36:31):
wrote a book about freedom, and she interviewed me and
I said, oh, I'm much freer now, And that made
her sort of curious, and I said, well, you know,
I'm free of all the little white lies because you
can't tell people that you're going to go sell a
pound a pot, so you tell people you're going to
the movies, and so you lie all the time to
protect people. So it's well motivated, but it's still little lies,
(36:53):
and they get heavy after a while, you know, and
so it's really, you know, I'm so glad that it's legal,
because it's a shame lies just they're not you know,
they are sort of unclean and they do have a
certain weight. And so it was a sacrifice to be
one of those people that insisted on being a beneficial
thing and you know, fock for laws basically, So like
(37:18):
my parents, Greasie lived a double life and it eventually
became overly burdensome. Neither she nor my parents regret being
pot smugglers because they believed in the product and the cause. However,
the mental hardship of working outside the law is real,
deeply taxing, and accumulates over time, no matter how honorable
(37:41):
you or the product are. And Gracie was fortunate because
she was part of a tight knit community that took
care of her and her child and she had a
great legal team, plus returned to her neighborhood as a hero.
I was really lucky so many of the women went home.
I mean, I got to come home a hero. So
(38:04):
I'd go dancing and there'd be one hundred dollar bill
in my pocket that I didn't know who'd put there.
I'd come to work and there would be a thousand
dollars in a brown paper bag on my desk, and
it was like, you know, none of my stuff disappeared
other than what it cost me to defend myself and
everybody else. And I spent plenty on that. I spent
(38:25):
everything on it. I was broke when I finally got there.
The reason I stopped fighting was because I was completely
out of money. But I didn't lose anything because of
my lifestyle, and people just took care of it for
me while I was gone, and they did my work
for me, and it just, you know, nothing left. But
I certainly had to develop a new sense of the
worth of a dollar when I got out. So watching
(38:50):
their colleagues and friends get busted, go to prison or
flee the country was horrifying for my parents. Along with
a sadness of watching their friends' lives between apart was
the terror that people would turn a dime. My par
could only hope that they would be spared if any
of their colleagues rolled like Gracie's associate. Growing up, because
(39:12):
I didn't know my parents were lawbreakers, I never felt
unsafe or worried that I would come home from school
and find my parents in jail or our bags packed
to flee the country. However, this podcast, Pilgrimage into Pandora's
pot Box, is continuously uncovering surprising disclosures and discoveries. Let
(39:32):
me scrape my jaw off the floor at once again
and share a recent one. I was talking with my
mom and she casually mentions in the late eighties they
could have been busted the same way as Gracie. When
a family friend with whom we'd vacationed in Kauai and
whose daughter gave me a Culture Club cassette tape for
my tenth birthday was busted and rolled on everyone but
(39:56):
my dad. She told on everybody but us, really all crew.
Why didn't he tell on you? Yeah, because we had
because you had a baby, and nobody else did. So
my mom thinks he busted associate didn't roll on my
dad because of me and my siblings. The busted colleague
(40:20):
was also a family man, and to save his skin
and keep his family intact, he turned a dime on
his bachelor associates. My dad, a fellow family man, remained unnamed.
It's fascinating a bizarre to consider I'd potentially been an
unwitting shield for my parents. In the next episode, Dad's
(40:44):
pot smuggling career takes a dangerous in devastating turn when
Dad goes to New York and does the trip that
ultimately becomes his final straw. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this
is Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is
written and recorded by Me Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are
(41:06):
Gabby Watts and Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr,
Brian Live and Elsie Crowley and Me at School of
Humans and Connel 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 story
(41:37):
Doing as with Me Tamble by steep and Princess of
the red Wood dreams, she says, keep it real. Handshake
seals the deal, wrap the ska sealed meal, going up
these old threads, golding to Doobie, Young, rich and groovy,
(42:04):
making it up. We roll along, rolling along for country roll,
rolling along for a country roll, Rolling along for a
(42:24):
country roll.
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