January 8, 2020 • 44 mins
Pot smuggling comes with its own financial issues as it's exclusively a cash industry. Where do you store a million dollars in cash? The yard (known as Savings & Loam)? In a futon? In a safe under the sink? And how do you clean your money (literally and illegally)? In this episode, Rainbow Valentine learns all the tips and tricks of a cash-based illegal industry.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of humans. I'm getting epiphanis just too late. I know,
that's what it's all about. Well, it's it's it's just
fucking amazing, you know, because all I did was live,
or mom did, was live and followed our nose. I mean,
(00:31):
all I did was was want to survive, want to
take care of my lady and our child or children.
And I was always I get obviously, I've always been
very good at making money. Okay, So it's the nineteen
(00:51):
eighties in Mill Valley, California, and my dad's pots smuggling
career is going very well. After quitting in the mid
seventies and then getting back into the game with a
Lebanese hash trip in the late seventies, my dad is
now doing smuggling trips a few weeks or so. Nothing
was regular, but the best my dad can guess. On average,
he's moving five hundred to a thousand pounds of pot
(01:14):
locally and one thousand to two thousand pounds cross country
now and again, remember there's no normal or average in
pot smuggling, and my dad doesn't want his pals who
are listening to think bad as guy's will as shit.
It's important to be at least not too much bullshit,
because I mean, I'll get shipped from my pals about
(01:37):
what is this scrap if I don't get the average right, well,
if I don't get you know, numbers, But the numbers
were always whom the funk knew, you know, I mean,
you didn't add it up all the time. Now he
isn't sure of the exact numbers he's smuggling. But by
the eighties, Dad's career is thriving. There's a lot of
pot and a lot of cash, so there's a shitload
of cash around all the time. There is cash around, yes,
(02:02):
ums cash, and but ergo the erging the safe. Okay,
we'll get to the safe in a moment. So my
parents recently got ATM cards. Now by recent, I mean
in the last ten years or so. Even though the
automated Teller machine aka ATM was invented in the sixties,
they just got these cards. The ATM was first used
(02:24):
in Europe in the late sixties, before making its way
to Australia and then the US in the seventies and
becoming ubiquitous in the nineties. Now, of course, my parents
weren't into ATM cards because being pot smugglers. They lived
a primarily cash life, so it was common for them
to unfurl a thick spiral of cash for the many
grown up errands they had to accomplish. Now, you can't
(02:46):
store all this money at the bank. The smugglers bank
is deep in the earth called savings and loam, a
term coined by my smuggler dad's colleague. In today's episode,
we're talking all about cash from bricks of hundreds to
rolls of quarters, and how my parents and other smugglers
used it, where they put it, and how they made
(03:06):
it seem like the money they made was from an
honest living. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime.
Smuggler's daughter to Doube, young, rich and groovy making it
(03:26):
up as well alone rulling love, o count following the
sunshine as they go chasing the dunting kids and kilos
making it up as One issue particular to pot smugglers
(04:00):
is volume. First, of course, in terms of the product
we heard about the ways my dad had to transport
and hide pot. Volume is also an issue when it
comes to dealing with cash. You have to come up
with clever ways to transport big sums of money and
a place to stash it. My parents had difficulty figuring
out where to store all their cash at our Mill
(04:22):
Valley home. Remember in the first episode when we talked
about my dad misplacing half a million dollars in the
yard from the Lebanese hash deal. Well, he had buried
the safe under a BlackBerry bush, but then the yard
was reallyandscaped and he lost his landmarks. This is actually
a fairly common practice for smugglers. Everybody does bury their
(04:42):
money in the barry. We used to bury our money
because there slective vikings, savings and loam. My dad's colleague
from his biggest trip ever, we'll get to that story.
A singular artist and smuggler will call baseball title of
the practice of burying cash in the backyard, savings and
(05:05):
low home. I love that. It's hilarious. There's a quintessential
Mill Valley story that went around the smuggler's grape vine.
This story is bursting with the first world opulence and
absurdity of smuggler problems in Mill Valley. This was a
story that I heard from another person in Mill Valley,
and it was this guy had a bunch of money
(05:30):
this guy was a smuggler. So he went for a
vacation in Thailand specifically, I remember, and he had his
father watch his house. Then the guy like six months
later he got back from Taireland and his dad told him, Hey,
I have a really big surprise for you. Come outside,
(05:50):
let's see the tennis court. So the smuggler returns home
to find that his dad built him a surprised tennis
court in his backyard. Okay, the problem was in the
middle of the tennis court. Now buried underneath tennis court
cement lay the smuggler's treasure trove of cash. And so
they paved paradise. They put up a parking lot. They
(06:11):
paved over his money. You know. So I don't know
whether that guy ever found his money. I never heard
them that the next part of the story. You don't
know if he like hammered up his hammered up to
ten of sparks, would I would have. I'm sure he did,
because it was at least a half a mail. It
(06:32):
was a lot of money. In the eighties, my dad
came up with an alternative to savings and loam aka
bearing cash in the yard. And my childhood house had
two bathrooms, one for the kids, which had a wall
sized vintage map of the world across from the toilet
(06:53):
so we could learn geography. And my parents' bathroom, called
the Flamingo Bathroom as my mom decorated it with vintage
Flamingo kitch. The Flamingo bathroom had a copper sink handcrafted
by my uncle, my mom's brother, the same one who
left my dad at his sister's house to recover from
the big sur acid trip we talked about in episode two.
(07:13):
So when my parents redo the Flamingo bathroom, they embedded
a safe in concrete under the copper sink in the bathroom.
I loved the Flamingo bathrooms vibrant pink mummy birds, and
I would frequently poke around under the sink for band aids,
toilet paper, and neo sporn for my many wounds. Due
to innate clumsiness, I had no idea that under the
(07:36):
first aid supplies beneath a false sinc floor lived a
safe stuffed with the Himalayas in cash. Well. This also
ends up being a terrible idea. Well it was. It
was really well thought out except for one issue, but
(07:58):
it was a great stash place until that happened, So
it happens. Basically, they have over half a million in
cal hidden in the safe under the sink. But what
my parents didn't know was the water district was installing
high pressure lines in our neighborhood so water could flow
uphill faster. So all of a sudden, on a beautiful
(08:19):
mill valley afternoon, my dad, here's a big boom coming
from the flamingo bathroom wherever I was. I came into
the bathroom and it's fucking flooding under the sink, and
I was rather crazed. I mean, just seeing this thing.
This is how you learn how to deal with emergencies,
and I was just crazed, wondering what the fuck happened.
(08:42):
My dad doesn't remember the water department's warning that they
were installing new high power pressure lines. So torrents of
water are gushing into the bathroom, flowing right under the
sink where the safe is buried. My dad can't get
the water turned off inside because the water valves in
the bathroom have exploded off their hinges. So the next
(09:03):
place to go was outside, where my water turnoff was,
and I got to that, but not before I mean
a pile of water, and it was like a swimming pool.
The same the safe, right, so the whole thing, which
was full of cash, because that's how the universe works,
of course, it's so you know, and I mean, while
(09:26):
I was uptight, it was just absurd. You could not
fucking write this, create this, you imagine, you really couldn't
imagine this happening. So I got the water shut off,
that's the first thing. Then I opened the safe and
I took out just all these bills and men that
(09:47):
were swimming and they're thick. Well they're yeah, they're in
packets of fifty or one hundred bills of whatever the
bills were, well, they're they're they're more than saggy. I
mean they're water log completely, and it's like, oh fuck,
what do I do now? I mean, what do you
do now? How do you dry out? You know, if
(10:09):
you're going to dry out a thousand dollars in twenties
or whatever, you've got fifty bills. But if you're going
to dry out a lot of money, yeah, you know.
And so it required obviously great create ivan, great creativity.
It required a fucking solutions. What are required? The solution? Ah, well,
(10:30):
my childhood bedroom with its bestickered door, was right next
to the laundry room, which was always humming with loads
of clothing on cold days. I loved immersing myself as
fully as possible into a dryer load of hot fabric.
I think I even tried, unsuccessfully to squeeze myself into
the dryer once for fun. So how is my dad
(10:52):
going to dry all this money? He could blow dry
it with a hair dryer, but he decides to throw
the cash in the clothes dryer and literally launder the money.
How do we get it in your dryer? I can't
just dump it in the dryer because you couldn't just
dump bully soaking bills. You needed to have them in clothes.
So I put them in socks. I undid all of
(11:13):
these bands and so that they would be loose in
the sack, and you couldn't fill a sock too full
because they wouldn't be air between the bills and stuff.
And I just started filling socks and putting them in
the dryer. My mom says they didn't end up ironing
the bills, but she did consider it. So. Living a
(11:36):
cash only life presented ongoing issues for not only my parents,
but also most colleagues in their professional circles in Mill
Valley in New York. Apparently in New York people often
dealt in fives. Fives were a big issue in my
dad's line of work. It's very heavy, lots of fives,
so nobody wanted them, so like I always had like
(11:58):
pockets of fives. You can imagine how hard fives were
to process. Imagine twenty thousand dollars in five's awesome because
it's twenty thousand dollars, but weighty and taking up a
lot of space. Quite a few smugglers seemed to have
a hard time keeping track of all their cash. My
mom remembers a New York smuggling associate who once brought
(12:20):
her a broom for a housewarming gift, having a major
cash issue that any absent minded and very stoned person
can relate to. This guy we used to call the
ferret the weasel. He was very weasely, but you know,
he was really trying hard, and he he must have
(12:42):
gotten to to wracked one day because he put his
briefcase on top of the car and forgot about it.
Oh yeah, so what was in the briefcase? And did
he drive away? And what was lost. Oh what was
in the briefcase with cash? Fifty thousand dollars And by
(13:03):
the time he realized he didn't have his brief case,
she turned around and went and got up. But it
wasn't there New York City. You know it's like then
you told everybody and we thought it was ah. Yes,
yet another reason to stay sober while working in the
cash only smuggling world. So losing money was a part
(13:24):
of a cash only life. One of the Mary Jane
Mama's candy can from the last episode told me that
in the life of a smuggler, you lose money as
fast as you make it. She told me a ridiculous
tale of losing a lot of cash after a spring
cleaning Goneray at a stash house. I'm in the stash house.
I bring in a garbage bag with eighty thousand cash
(13:48):
in and I had given the boys a huge lecture
on cleaning the house and on cleaning the house. But
I left this garbage bag in the kitchen the night
before so we could clean it up in the morning
and count it. And I didn't want to, you know,
take it anywhere else, so I left it there like
a cat would leave a mouse. So the partner gets
(14:09):
up early and decides to surprise and takes the garbage
bag out to the trash well. I wake up after
you know, being up all night, and I go, where's
the garbage back? Well? I took the garbage out, and
she'd be so happy, and I said, that was eighty
(14:29):
thousand dollars. And we proceeded to get in a physical
fight with hands around people's necks, and the only reason
that I wasn't choked was because my arms were longer
and I was able to get so in the early seventies,
(14:50):
eighty thousand dollars was worth about half a million dollars
in today's money. What happened with the eighty thousand the
garbage bag we scoured at the dumps we went to,
it was gone. Okay. So the guy who threw out
Candy Can's garbage bag of eighty thousand dollars and then
tried to strangle her turns out he's the dad of
my third grade best friend who I used to play
Strawberry Shortcake with. The pot smuggling world just keeps getting smaller,
(15:21):
so and all cash life was more common back in
the olden days, but it could still be suspicious, Like
my dad was paying big sums of money all in cash.
How did you do things like pay for my private school? Well,
you know, paying for your private school in the early
days was not that big a deal. I would either
(15:44):
get cash, here's checks, I opened bank accounts, I had
bank accounts. I ran just enough money through, you know.
And I think Evan in the seventies and eighties, things
were fairly easygoing. The seventies, they were really easygoing, and
we were always very cautious compared to lots of other
nutcases who just didn't give a shit. All. We always
(16:07):
drove BMW's. Yeah did you pay cash for it? Yeah? Wow,
they didn't give a shit. I mean the first BMW
I bought in nineteen seventy two, I bought a new
two thousand and two because that was the car of
the world. And I just walked into the BMW dealer
in San Raphel I said I want that, and I
(16:29):
gave him four grand in cash. My dad makes a
point that in Marin County, buying a BMW with cash
wasn't atypical, because as we're doing this podcast, we're discovering
that tons of people in Marin we're doing the same
thing as my dad. Now, Northern Marin is more conservative,
populated by people living traditional lives with conventional jobs. But
(16:51):
West and southern Marin is where all the psychedelic pioneers
of the sixties moved to raise kids in the seventies
and eighties, so it was chock full of rock stars, artists,
and drug smugglers. And Mill Valley, specifically with its close
proximity to many secluded beaches and the seaside tourist town
of Saslito, prime locations for drugloads to boat into, is
(17:15):
thought by old school Mill Valley peeps to have had
a population of fifty percent smugglers and drug dealers. That's
half half the population. My dad didn't realize this at
the time because no one openly talked about the drug
smuggling industry, but eventually it became clear that everyone was
in the industry. It was the culture of Morin County
(17:38):
and it still is the culture of much of northern California,
I guess everybody else. But just because a lot of
people in Mill Valley were doing the same thing, that
doesn't mean my dad wasn't totally stressed. We've heard of
several smugglers who ended up in prison because they got busted,
but not during a trip after when the irs asked
(18:01):
where they got their money from. You could put some
money in the bank for cashier's check or buy a BMW,
But how do you hide hundreds of thousands of funny
money from the government. For my dad, the answer to
that was also found in wine country. I'm Rainbow Valentine,
and this is disorganized crime. We'll be right back a
(18:32):
northern California known for its pot, the scenery, and its wine.
The only alcohol I grew up around was fine wines.
Drinking wasn't part of the culture I grew up in,
except for very expensive wine, champagne, and occasionally imported beer.
When I went back East for college, I was amazed
(18:54):
at the prominence alcohol played in the lives of my
college friends and surprised that pot was taboo in their homes.
They had all spent their high school years reading their
parents home home bar. I didn't know anyone with a
home bar in their house until I went back East,
where boxed wine and well stocked home bars were the norm.
(19:15):
I didn't know I was bougie until then because I
didn't know there was such a thing as cheap alcohol
whose sole purpose is escapism rather than flavor and experience.
So my dad became a wine enthusiast through his close
friend Neil. Neil was another nice Brooklyn Jewish kid who
loved music and getting high. Neil was also a smuggler
(19:36):
based in New York and supplied drugs to big bands
like The Grateful Dad and Blondie. Neil is one of
the people my dad worked with in New York when
he would deliver cross country from Mill Valley. He later
became my little brother's godfather. Neil was wonderful and he
enlightened my dad on the finer things in life, like wine.
(19:57):
Because Neil pointed out that fine wine collecting and reselling
was the perfect place to clean your money. Okay. So
I'd make a hunk of of twenty five grand okay
on a trip, and I always at the same time,
I was always thinking about how to clean it, and
so I started buying more wine at a time. As
(20:20):
these haunts would come in, I would start buying five
or ten cases of something. My dad was always under
pressure to make his money appear earned from an honest living.
In other words, how to launder his money, not literally
like the money that got soaked under the bathroom sink,
but money laundering the illegal process of concealing the origins
(20:45):
of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex
sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions. Of course, the
overall goal returns the money to the launderer in an
obscure and indirect way. So under the Bank Secrecy Act,
banks and other financial institution must report to the government
(21:07):
cash deposits greater than ten thousand dollars. Plus banks are
also supposed to report any suspicious transactions like unusual deposit
patterns below ten thousand dollars. So my dad could never
park his cash at the bank without arousing suspicion. So
we could ever dive into traditional investments like cd s, stocks, bonds,
(21:29):
et cetera. He had to find another way to make
money out of his money. My parents launder their money
in a variety of ways, in commercial transactions, buying art, gemstones,
antique books, and rugs and rugs. Yeah rugs, these were
antique tribal rugs, not arrange, not Persian rugs, so yeah,
(21:53):
I mean, maybe we didn't use them on the floor
I mean, you've seen several of the different ones we
have hanging. These were all really collectible items then and
they're still collectible now, you know. I mean what we
have is really old carpets now. Other ways to launder
cash are buying vintage cars, jewelry, storing it offshore in
(22:13):
the Cayman Islands or Switzerland. Of course you have to
transport it there, hence smuggling, cashing yarn balls on planes,
or a simple cash only retail business like an ice
cream shop, bookstore or sandwitchery. Wine, however, was my dad's
primary commercial transaction. He became a bit of a connoisseur
with all the collectible vintages, buying in bulk for future
(22:36):
resale when the wine had aged, becoming more valuable. Did
you have an inkling where my dad got use cash? Frum?
Did you ever? Did it matter? Didn't care? Did you
do everything about it? Well? I didn't think about it
until I was involved in it. This is Sunset, a
wine gormand who sold my dad wine throughout the eighties
(22:59):
and became a close family friend. And to be clear,
he had no idea that my dad's initial interest in
wine was fueled by money. Laundering. Always told me that
his primary source of income was introducing entrepreneurs to people
who supplied money, and that he got a commission for
doing so. That was but you know, he would offer
(23:21):
and introduce me to people and say we've got we've
got a deal in the works. And I never felt
any reasoned to discount that. He does remember that one
time my dad showed up to pick up some wine
in a long pickup truck with a dome over the back.
That's our family yellow truck. It smelled like pot, but
he didn't think twice about it, because again, this is
(23:42):
Mill Valley. Pot like wine was part of the fabric
of Marin County. Well. Heah, My fresh impression of him
was he was really enthusiastic about he was He had
discovered fine wines, and I don't know for how long
prior to that, he might have been drinking them with
friends for years. But he was really enthusiastic and he
(24:03):
loved to hear about them and talk about them. As
you can see, I like to talk about them, and
very personable, and I thought your mom was a sweetheart.
It never felt anything but warmth. Did I ever get
the feeling that there was that this was funny money
that I was being handed No, but then I was
(24:25):
very naive on that subject. Now, the thing was, it
wasn't not unusual for people to come in shelling out
hunks of cash to invest in wine. Marine County was
and still is an absurdly wealthy place, one of the
five wealthiest counties in the nation, and in the eighties
it was chock full of cash only shoppers from the sex,
(24:47):
drugs and rock and roll industries. As we mentioned before,
at one point it was estimated that half of Mill
Valley was involved in the smuggling business. It wasn't weird
for Barria big spenders to shell out thousands in cash
on a single visit to the wine shop. My dad
was definitely not the only one spending briefcases of cash
on wine, but suspicions aside wine and food became the
(25:11):
focus of the relationship between my dad and Sunset. Dad
says the first time he visited Sunset's wine shop was
with Neil. Sunset swore they would see God after taking
one sip of a fancy French wine, and it was
really incredibly rich and not like you think of sparkly
(25:32):
of champagne as it's very light, but it was very
thick and unbelievably flavorful. Did you see God, Taffy? No
you did you not see God? Or did you? What
(25:55):
did you think? Mom? Of dad buying putting his money
in wine? I thought it was stupid. I just thought
it was like a worse should I I thought we
should buy old cars now. According to Wine's Spectator magazine,
only a small percentage of wines have the potential to
improve with age, and within this group, only a small
percentage have the ability to appreciate in value. These elite
(26:19):
wines are considered quote worthy of collecting. From an investment
point of view, Sunset would help my dad decide which
wines to invest in in hopes that their value would
increase exponentially over time. Sunset was constantly getting various new
wines in the latest vintages of Blah blah and reading
(26:39):
about it because it was his beers, so he was
really knowledgeable. And at one point he's reading about the
fact that he says, Listen Walter, the eighty two vintage
of French wines is said to be the greatest vintage
of the twentieth century, and we can get futures of
(27:02):
buying bottles of Lafitte and Muton eighty two and Petruce
and Leoville was cass and we can get the most
expensive in futures. We can buy them now, they'll deliver
it in three years when they're ready to be delivered,
and I could get the futures at fifty bucks a
bottle for the Lafite and Mouton, which ultimately ends up selling.
(27:26):
If you look at eighty two Mouton right now, it's
probably somewhere between thirty five hundred and five grand a bottle.
To give you an idea of how much wine my
dad bought, he had to rent a storage unit for
the enormous collection. Let's just be clear. We had a
wine storage unit and a pot storage unit. There are
always ten to twenty bottles at home, but the thousands
(27:47):
of other bottles and cases lived in a special climate
controlled locker specifically for wine, which I never visited. Probably
a good thing, since I'm super clumsy. My dad had
thousands of bottles of wine, and he became a bit
addicted to collecting it. That started to get me more
(28:08):
and more addicted. I mean, I liked drinking wine, and
it was really nice, but I just realized one. I'm
not a big drinker and never have been anyway, but
we would drink, you know, we'd drink our we'd have
our caviare so we'd we'd we'd go have parties with
not a lot of people, just a few people because
we were drinking really expensive champagne and Triple O beluga,
(28:32):
which Mom really did love. I'd never got a taste
for the beluga either. Yeah, champagne great, sup. Now wine
was an awesome investment, but both my parents regret not
buying more California land and real estate with her cash.
(28:52):
My dad did buy our family a wonderful vacation home
in Lake Tahoe where I'd bring all my friends for
weeks long slumber parties. Me and Petunia from episode one
built a mini golf course over several summers at our
Tahoe house. No here, they're there. I think I think
we should have bought land for cash. It's what I
think now looking back on it, you know, right, Yeah,
(29:15):
hindsight tells us that we I was not clear back
then that oh much property actually can be bought directly
for cash because lots of people own stuff oral properties, right,
royal properties, or whatever, and so that's okay. Yeah, we
(29:36):
still made a ton of money on the Yeah, but
it's I always thought it was pretty decoradent to drink champagne.
Any prevent from doing it, But we didn't do it
that often. We were just we were not that, you know.
Every once in we do some and we were never
(29:58):
quite you know. And for me it was strictly an investment.
My parents don't think there's any sense to regret what
they didn't invest in, or regret the ways they cleaned
their cash or dried it as the case. Maybe I'm
Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime. And we'll be
right back we headed towards the end of this episode,
(30:24):
but before we get there, I want to talk about
the tiniest currency that was the most important to my parents,
and it turned out to me so a visceral kid
memory this podcast has jostled is one of tons of
quarters around our house all the time. They were in drawers,
(30:44):
on countertops, and in like every nook and cranny of
all our cars. And they were not only in the carpet,
they were in all the vehicles. Yet we had two Chevies, right,
two Chevy and palace, and we had a big yellow truck,
and so they were always in those because those were
the working vehicles. One summer, we rented a house in
(31:07):
Stintson Beach and my parents hired a neighbor girl to
be my babysitter. I was probably eight. The beach house
was down the street from a snack shack that sold
forbidden junk food. So, sensing light at the end of
my junk food deprivation tunnel, I showed the babysitter the
rolls of quarters located in my dad's car door side pockets,
(31:27):
and we took a roll to buy frozen snickers. A
few weeks later, after the beach vacation, the neighbor babysitter
was caught sneaking up our long, hilly dirt driveway and
stealing rolls of quarters from my dad's car. I was
so embarrassed that I had shown her where my dad's
money was, and I was surprised she had stolen from
(31:47):
our family. Later, as in Like now, while producing this podcast,
all these quarters in my life fall into place by
learning the rules of quarters were an important tool of
the trade for my dad's business because he made most
of his important smuggling deals on pay phones before pagers.
They'd call you at home and say, hey, man, why
(32:10):
don't you you know, let's go to the office, Meeta.
At the office, you will talk. Oh you call the
pay phones offices? Yeah, I mean it was. It was
an office, so, you know, at the Western Office. Whatever.
Oh my god, that's hilarious. I was a kid. I
was deeply absorbed in my fantasy world and considered grown
up errands profoundly boring and barely tolerable. I was a
(32:35):
drama queen child, and I couldn't fathom why my parents
didn't have aaron running British servants like Mary Poppins, Jeeves
or mister Belvedere. Of course, the seventies and eighties were
before the Internet, so all errands had to be run
in person with the kids in tow. I have vivid
memories of frequent trips to the bank, waiting in line
(32:55):
and chewing on the fumy vinyl ropes dividing the banking cues.
I loved the spongy texture of the chunky bank cords,
the only saving grace of what I considered the most
boring errand on earth. You always made your your boredness
known one way or another. I recall swinging on the
(33:15):
cushiony ropes and remember my mom's mortification at my public
animal behavior. Well, now I realized my parents needed to
go to the bank a lot to get roles of
quarters for my dad's many pay phone calls. Getting quarters
was a trip in a bank that well, you know,
I'm trying to think about it, because when you think
(33:36):
about it, um, what do you need a million quarters for?
You know, you'd go in and buy one hundred dollars
worth of causeed roll was twenty dollars worth of quarters,
so you'd buy five rolls a hundred dollars? You know?
Did you have different banks so they wouldn't suspect that
you were? Why was this person getting so many rolls
of quarters all the time? When I when I would
(33:57):
get quarters, I'd just go into a bank that didn't
know me, that was somewhere else. I didn't walk into
my Mill Valley bank. Every local yeah, you know, and
there were enough banks in the county to just pop
in now and again. Another common errand I loathed was
(34:18):
my dad stopping for phone calls. We lived in a
semi rural area and drove a lot as school and
my many after school activities were fifteen to fifteen minutes
away from home. My chauffeur dad always had to stop
for a call after gymnastics tap to answer play practice.
When I was tired and cranky and totally had to pee, disgruntled,
(34:40):
but surrounded by rolls of car quarters poised for the spotlight,
I'd wait in the car and play pretend, turning the
coins into anthropomorphic characters and my elaborate melodramas. Once, while
waiting for my dad to make a call, I broke
the car windshield by mistake. Do you remember that time
I mistakenly broke the windshield of the car with your
(35:00):
feet up? You just put your feet up and went blood. Yeah,
I do remember so. Basically, while I sat waiting in
the car near my bulove and McDonald's, I was in
the front seat of our jeep Cherokee, and I put
my bare feet on the inner windshield, leaned back and
pressed slash stretched out well. I stretched my legs a
bit too firmly, and horrified, watched the entire windshield crack.
(35:25):
It was a long ten minutes waiting for my dad
to return from the payphone to the windshield I just destroyed.
It probably wasn't the best thing to do, bringing attention
to my dad as he was making deals at the payphone. Now,
my dad went to plenty of different offices payphones, and
his favorite was in tam Junction, near my childhood home.
Tam Valley, adjacent to Mill Valley, is where I learned
(35:47):
to ride a bike, drive a car, and its crossroads.
Tam Junction is the gateway to the windy road over
Mount tamil Pious to Mure Woods, the famed National monument.
Tam Valley used to be considered kind of like the
slums of Mill Valley, with its hub, the scrudgy Shoreline
shopping plot and the gaudy rug store Flantic, a giant curved,
(36:08):
aquatile storefront that resembled a vertical swimming pool. So the
Shoreline shopping center where my dad's favorite payphone was located,
consisted of the Calum Market where we picked up last
minute groceries, the Shoreline Coffee Shop, and the Video Droid,
my little brother's favorite place. I just had a visceral
memory of being left at the Video Droid a lot.
(36:32):
You were probably on the phone and we'd be at
the video droid because right around the tam junction there
were several you leave us a video droid so we
could look at videos and you'd go make a phone call. Yeah,
that happened all the time. Now. Other smuggling errands, which
I enjoyed more because they involved snacks, included shopping at
the cheese store, Jerry's meat Market and Valley Market, and
(36:52):
the hippie health food store Living Foods, where we'd get
treats like frozen yogurt or tiger milk bars. You know,
smugglers got to eat, and my parents are gourmet cooks,
so I thought I remembered plastic wrapped chunks of hash
in the freezer alongside the frozen bagels. But my parents
are adamant they wouldn't have left drugs in the freezer
for me to eat. By mistake. Do you have hash
(37:14):
wrapped in plastic in the freezer like all the time, right?
Hash wrapped in thee Yeah. No, they're always weird things
in the freezer that were like little bricks of like
brown things, even money, money in the freezer. I mean,
we didn't put stutt We didn't keep drugs in the freezer.
(37:36):
That is really I have seen drugs in your freezer. Yeah,
but not I mean recently. You know, pot brownies and stuff.
I wouldn't leave those around. You would have eaten them all.
I don't know what I saw, but my parents always
have kind of weird things in the freezer, like maybe
old psychedelic mushrooms or an old withered pot brownies some
old hippie left. You gotta be careful what you eat
in my parents freezer. Smuggling as a word sounds so
(38:00):
intriguing and mysterious, and it's hilarious to realize that, in fact,
the most worrying activity of my childhood, running errands with
my parents with plenty of quarters in tow, was actually
part of a cinematically spine tingling act. Smuggling. My parents
should have been like, come on, let's go smuggling, rather
than let's go run errands. We gotta run errands like
(38:21):
we gotta do smuggling. I probably would have been much
more excited. A question we've gotten from some listeners is
that if my dad was pulling in so much money
doing these pot deals, why did he keep smuggling. Well,
(38:42):
my dad was a freelancer, meaning he would win big,
but then there would be months without work or income
coming in, and life with three kids is expensive. I've
paid my rent being a lifelong freelancer thanks to principles
my freelancer dad drilled into me. And number one is
failure is unfortunately a frequent visitor. But on the bright side,
(39:08):
you've got to know failure to no success. In the
smuggling business, you need to spend money to make money.
So cash was used to invest in another trip to
bring in more money, and so on and so forth.
My dad's colleague, the driver Sandwich, calls it chasing the rainbow.
He told me the smuggling business was difficult to get
(39:29):
out of because smugglers were continuously chasing the rainbow with
each new trip promising to bring in more money than
ever before. But also very much I have boundaries about
what I will or won't do in my life, even
in making money, which is the most delicious ice cream.
(39:51):
I know, I mean money, you know, and the money
makes our world be free. Making money drove my dad.
Plus I believe my parents are adrenaline junkies. They love
river rafting, scuba diving, dancing, the rush from the extreme
high of making a quarter of a million dollars in
a month, and that's an adrenaline. But the money went
(40:12):
fast to support a family of five plus pets. My
parents were set on sending us all to private schools
and providing us with bounteous opportunities like sailing, skiing, singing lessons.
Plus my dad supported his family of origin on the
East Coast, and my parents always needed enough money for
smugglers insurance, a attaining fee for the best criminal attorney
(40:35):
on the West Coast. I mean, I gave Bernie Sego
a five thousand dollars retainer and said if I call
help except for I remember that I was sitting on
some money and it was fifty thousand dollars. You were
sitting on fifty grand? Well, yeah, I was, Yeah, of
whose what are you trying? No farm money? Yeah? Where
(40:58):
was it? It was in a piece of furniture that
was had a secret entrance. What the safe? Which the
bad remember the bad bout? No? Well, I remember the
bad we built, but I don't remember and you could
open Yeah, but you know everybody knew that day anyway, Yeah, anyway,
(41:19):
I remember. The money also disappeared because my dad was
a tidbit overly generous. He's a staunch supporter of the
arts and often gave away product and money to fellow artists.
I mean he was rolling in it. I gave way
lots of the product to our artist friends. I mean
(41:40):
how I viewed a whole bunch of that was the
importance of the patronage for the artists and even and musicians.
You know. For me, In my dad's business, money, pot
and trust were commodities. They were handshake deals, friendship, and
an assurance that cash would flow when it needed to
(42:01):
flow until it didn't. So the eighties roll around and
the Reagan administration starts changing the pot laws. Sticks are
getting higher, but my parents continue business as usual regardless
of the danger, because money is freedom. However, money can
(42:26):
also bring out the very worst in people. On the
next episode of Disorganized Crime, my dad conducts his biggest
trip yet, takes us on a triumphant vacation, and then
puts his trust in the wrong hands, leading to disastrous consequences.
I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is Disorganized Crime. Disorganized Crime
(42:53):
Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded by me, Rainbow Valentine.
Our producers are Gabby Watts, and Taylor Church. Executive producers
are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, 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
(43:15):
us online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com. Right lovel
the story, do it as with Me tamble by steeping
Princess of the red Wood dreams. She counts us, keep
(43:39):
it real. Handshake seals the deal, Wrap the stack, sealed meal,
and road up these old breads, rolling the Doobie, Young,
rich and groovy, making it up. We roll along, Rolling Country, Roll,
(44:07):
Rolling along, far Country, Roll, Rolling along far a country
Low
School of humans. I'm getting epiphanis just too late. I know,
that's what it's all about. Well, it's it's it's just
fucking amazing, you know, because all I did was live,
or mom did, was live and followed our nose. I mean,
(00:31):
all I did was was want to survive, want to
take care of my lady and our child or children.
And I was always I get obviously, I've always been
very good at making money. Okay, So it's the nineteen
(00:51):
eighties in Mill Valley, California, and my dad's pots smuggling
career is going very well. After quitting in the mid
seventies and then getting back into the game with a
Lebanese hash trip in the late seventies, my dad is
now doing smuggling trips a few weeks or so. Nothing
was regular, but the best my dad can guess. On average,
he's moving five hundred to a thousand pounds of pot
(01:14):
locally and one thousand to two thousand pounds cross country
now and again, remember there's no normal or average in
pot smuggling, and my dad doesn't want his pals who
are listening to think bad as guy's will as shit.
It's important to be at least not too much bullshit,
because I mean, I'll get shipped from my pals about
(01:37):
what is this scrap if I don't get the average right, well,
if I don't get you know, numbers, But the numbers
were always whom the funk knew, you know, I mean,
you didn't add it up all the time. Now he
isn't sure of the exact numbers he's smuggling. But by
the eighties, Dad's career is thriving. There's a lot of
pot and a lot of cash, so there's a shitload
of cash around all the time. There is cash around, yes,
(02:02):
ums cash, and but ergo the erging the safe. Okay,
we'll get to the safe in a moment. So my
parents recently got ATM cards. Now by recent, I mean
in the last ten years or so. Even though the
automated Teller machine aka ATM was invented in the sixties,
they just got these cards. The ATM was first used
(02:24):
in Europe in the late sixties, before making its way
to Australia and then the US in the seventies and
becoming ubiquitous in the nineties. Now, of course, my parents
weren't into ATM cards because being pot smugglers. They lived
a primarily cash life, so it was common for them
to unfurl a thick spiral of cash for the many
grown up errands they had to accomplish. Now, you can't
(02:46):
store all this money at the bank. The smugglers bank
is deep in the earth called savings and loam, a
term coined by my smuggler dad's colleague. In today's episode,
we're talking all about cash from bricks of hundreds to
rolls of quarters, and how my parents and other smugglers
used it, where they put it, and how they made
(03:06):
it seem like the money they made was from an
honest living. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime.
Smuggler's daughter to Doube, young, rich and groovy making it
(03:26):
up as well alone rulling love, o count following the
sunshine as they go chasing the dunting kids and kilos
making it up as One issue particular to pot smugglers
(04:00):
is volume. First, of course, in terms of the product
we heard about the ways my dad had to transport
and hide pot. Volume is also an issue when it
comes to dealing with cash. You have to come up
with clever ways to transport big sums of money and
a place to stash it. My parents had difficulty figuring
out where to store all their cash at our Mill
(04:22):
Valley home. Remember in the first episode when we talked
about my dad misplacing half a million dollars in the
yard from the Lebanese hash deal. Well, he had buried
the safe under a BlackBerry bush, but then the yard
was reallyandscaped and he lost his landmarks. This is actually
a fairly common practice for smugglers. Everybody does bury their
(04:42):
money in the barry. We used to bury our money
because there slective vikings, savings and loam. My dad's colleague
from his biggest trip ever, we'll get to that story.
A singular artist and smuggler will call baseball title of
the practice of burying cash in the backyard, savings and
(05:05):
low home. I love that. It's hilarious. There's a quintessential
Mill Valley story that went around the smuggler's grape vine.
This story is bursting with the first world opulence and
absurdity of smuggler problems in Mill Valley. This was a
story that I heard from another person in Mill Valley,
and it was this guy had a bunch of money
(05:30):
this guy was a smuggler. So he went for a
vacation in Thailand specifically, I remember, and he had his
father watch his house. Then the guy like six months
later he got back from Taireland and his dad told him, Hey,
I have a really big surprise for you. Come outside,
(05:50):
let's see the tennis court. So the smuggler returns home
to find that his dad built him a surprised tennis
court in his backyard. Okay, the problem was in the
middle of the tennis court. Now buried underneath tennis court
cement lay the smuggler's treasure trove of cash. And so
they paved paradise. They put up a parking lot. They
(06:11):
paved over his money. You know. So I don't know
whether that guy ever found his money. I never heard
them that the next part of the story. You don't
know if he like hammered up his hammered up to
ten of sparks, would I would have. I'm sure he did,
because it was at least a half a mail. It
(06:32):
was a lot of money. In the eighties, my dad
came up with an alternative to savings and loam aka
bearing cash in the yard. And my childhood house had
two bathrooms, one for the kids, which had a wall
sized vintage map of the world across from the toilet
(06:53):
so we could learn geography. And my parents' bathroom, called
the Flamingo Bathroom as my mom decorated it with vintage
Flamingo kitch. The Flamingo bathroom had a copper sink handcrafted
by my uncle, my mom's brother, the same one who
left my dad at his sister's house to recover from
the big sur acid trip we talked about in episode two.
(07:13):
So when my parents redo the Flamingo bathroom, they embedded
a safe in concrete under the copper sink in the bathroom.
I loved the Flamingo bathrooms vibrant pink mummy birds, and
I would frequently poke around under the sink for band aids,
toilet paper, and neo sporn for my many wounds. Due
to innate clumsiness, I had no idea that under the
(07:36):
first aid supplies beneath a false sinc floor lived a
safe stuffed with the Himalayas in cash. Well. This also
ends up being a terrible idea. Well it was. It
was really well thought out except for one issue, but
(07:58):
it was a great stash place until that happened, So
it happens. Basically, they have over half a million in
cal hidden in the safe under the sink. But what
my parents didn't know was the water district was installing
high pressure lines in our neighborhood so water could flow
uphill faster. So all of a sudden, on a beautiful
(08:19):
mill valley afternoon, my dad, here's a big boom coming
from the flamingo bathroom wherever I was. I came into
the bathroom and it's fucking flooding under the sink, and
I was rather crazed. I mean, just seeing this thing.
This is how you learn how to deal with emergencies,
and I was just crazed, wondering what the fuck happened.
(08:42):
My dad doesn't remember the water department's warning that they
were installing new high power pressure lines. So torrents of
water are gushing into the bathroom, flowing right under the
sink where the safe is buried. My dad can't get
the water turned off inside because the water valves in
the bathroom have exploded off their hinges. So the next
(09:03):
place to go was outside, where my water turnoff was,
and I got to that, but not before I mean
a pile of water, and it was like a swimming pool.
The same the safe, right, so the whole thing, which
was full of cash, because that's how the universe works,
of course, it's so you know, and I mean, while
(09:26):
I was uptight, it was just absurd. You could not
fucking write this, create this, you imagine, you really couldn't
imagine this happening. So I got the water shut off,
that's the first thing. Then I opened the safe and
I took out just all these bills and men that
(09:47):
were swimming and they're thick. Well they're yeah, they're in
packets of fifty or one hundred bills of whatever the
bills were, well, they're they're they're more than saggy. I
mean they're water log completely, and it's like, oh fuck,
what do I do now? I mean, what do you
do now? How do you dry out? You know, if
(10:09):
you're going to dry out a thousand dollars in twenties
or whatever, you've got fifty bills. But if you're going
to dry out a lot of money, yeah, you know.
And so it required obviously great create ivan, great creativity.
It required a fucking solutions. What are required? The solution? Ah, well,
(10:30):
my childhood bedroom with its bestickered door, was right next
to the laundry room, which was always humming with loads
of clothing on cold days. I loved immersing myself as
fully as possible into a dryer load of hot fabric.
I think I even tried, unsuccessfully to squeeze myself into
the dryer once for fun. So how is my dad
(10:52):
going to dry all this money? He could blow dry
it with a hair dryer, but he decides to throw
the cash in the clothes dryer and literally launder the money.
How do we get it in your dryer? I can't
just dump it in the dryer because you couldn't just
dump bully soaking bills. You needed to have them in clothes.
So I put them in socks. I undid all of
(11:13):
these bands and so that they would be loose in
the sack, and you couldn't fill a sock too full
because they wouldn't be air between the bills and stuff.
And I just started filling socks and putting them in
the dryer. My mom says they didn't end up ironing
the bills, but she did consider it. So. Living a
(11:36):
cash only life presented ongoing issues for not only my parents,
but also most colleagues in their professional circles in Mill
Valley in New York. Apparently in New York people often
dealt in fives. Fives were a big issue in my
dad's line of work. It's very heavy, lots of fives,
so nobody wanted them, so like I always had like
(11:58):
pockets of fives. You can imagine how hard fives were
to process. Imagine twenty thousand dollars in five's awesome because
it's twenty thousand dollars, but weighty and taking up a
lot of space. Quite a few smugglers seemed to have
a hard time keeping track of all their cash. My
mom remembers a New York smuggling associate who once brought
(12:20):
her a broom for a housewarming gift, having a major
cash issue that any absent minded and very stoned person
can relate to. This guy we used to call the
ferret the weasel. He was very weasely, but you know,
he was really trying hard, and he he must have
(12:42):
gotten to to wracked one day because he put his
briefcase on top of the car and forgot about it.
Oh yeah, so what was in the briefcase? And did
he drive away? And what was lost. Oh what was
in the briefcase with cash? Fifty thousand dollars And by
(13:03):
the time he realized he didn't have his brief case,
she turned around and went and got up. But it
wasn't there New York City. You know it's like then
you told everybody and we thought it was ah. Yes,
yet another reason to stay sober while working in the
cash only smuggling world. So losing money was a part
(13:24):
of a cash only life. One of the Mary Jane
Mama's candy can from the last episode told me that
in the life of a smuggler, you lose money as
fast as you make it. She told me a ridiculous
tale of losing a lot of cash after a spring
cleaning Goneray at a stash house. I'm in the stash house.
I bring in a garbage bag with eighty thousand cash
(13:48):
in and I had given the boys a huge lecture
on cleaning the house and on cleaning the house. But
I left this garbage bag in the kitchen the night
before so we could clean it up in the morning
and count it. And I didn't want to, you know,
take it anywhere else, so I left it there like
a cat would leave a mouse. So the partner gets
(14:09):
up early and decides to surprise and takes the garbage
bag out to the trash well. I wake up after
you know, being up all night, and I go, where's
the garbage back? Well? I took the garbage out, and
she'd be so happy, and I said, that was eighty
(14:29):
thousand dollars. And we proceeded to get in a physical
fight with hands around people's necks, and the only reason
that I wasn't choked was because my arms were longer
and I was able to get so in the early seventies,
(14:50):
eighty thousand dollars was worth about half a million dollars
in today's money. What happened with the eighty thousand the
garbage bag we scoured at the dumps we went to,
it was gone. Okay. So the guy who threw out
Candy Can's garbage bag of eighty thousand dollars and then
tried to strangle her turns out he's the dad of
my third grade best friend who I used to play
Strawberry Shortcake with. The pot smuggling world just keeps getting smaller,
(15:21):
so and all cash life was more common back in
the olden days, but it could still be suspicious, Like
my dad was paying big sums of money all in cash.
How did you do things like pay for my private school? Well,
you know, paying for your private school in the early
days was not that big a deal. I would either
(15:44):
get cash, here's checks, I opened bank accounts, I had
bank accounts. I ran just enough money through, you know.
And I think Evan in the seventies and eighties, things
were fairly easygoing. The seventies, they were really easygoing, and
we were always very cautious compared to lots of other
nutcases who just didn't give a shit. All. We always
(16:07):
drove BMW's. Yeah did you pay cash for it? Yeah? Wow,
they didn't give a shit. I mean the first BMW
I bought in nineteen seventy two, I bought a new
two thousand and two because that was the car of
the world. And I just walked into the BMW dealer
in San Raphel I said I want that, and I
(16:29):
gave him four grand in cash. My dad makes a
point that in Marin County, buying a BMW with cash
wasn't atypical, because as we're doing this podcast, we're discovering
that tons of people in Marin we're doing the same
thing as my dad. Now, Northern Marin is more conservative,
populated by people living traditional lives with conventional jobs. But
(16:51):
West and southern Marin is where all the psychedelic pioneers
of the sixties moved to raise kids in the seventies
and eighties, so it was chock full of rock stars, artists,
and drug smugglers. And Mill Valley, specifically with its close
proximity to many secluded beaches and the seaside tourist town
of Saslito, prime locations for drugloads to boat into, is
(17:15):
thought by old school Mill Valley peeps to have had
a population of fifty percent smugglers and drug dealers. That's
half half the population. My dad didn't realize this at
the time because no one openly talked about the drug
smuggling industry, but eventually it became clear that everyone was
in the industry. It was the culture of Morin County
(17:38):
and it still is the culture of much of northern California,
I guess everybody else. But just because a lot of
people in Mill Valley were doing the same thing, that
doesn't mean my dad wasn't totally stressed. We've heard of
several smugglers who ended up in prison because they got busted,
but not during a trip after when the irs asked
(18:01):
where they got their money from. You could put some
money in the bank for cashier's check or buy a BMW,
But how do you hide hundreds of thousands of funny
money from the government. For my dad, the answer to
that was also found in wine country. I'm Rainbow Valentine,
and this is disorganized crime. We'll be right back a
(18:32):
northern California known for its pot, the scenery, and its wine.
The only alcohol I grew up around was fine wines.
Drinking wasn't part of the culture I grew up in,
except for very expensive wine, champagne, and occasionally imported beer.
When I went back East for college, I was amazed
(18:54):
at the prominence alcohol played in the lives of my
college friends and surprised that pot was taboo in their homes.
They had all spent their high school years reading their
parents home home bar. I didn't know anyone with a
home bar in their house until I went back East,
where boxed wine and well stocked home bars were the norm.
(19:15):
I didn't know I was bougie until then because I
didn't know there was such a thing as cheap alcohol
whose sole purpose is escapism rather than flavor and experience.
So my dad became a wine enthusiast through his close
friend Neil. Neil was another nice Brooklyn Jewish kid who
loved music and getting high. Neil was also a smuggler
(19:36):
based in New York and supplied drugs to big bands
like The Grateful Dad and Blondie. Neil is one of
the people my dad worked with in New York when
he would deliver cross country from Mill Valley. He later
became my little brother's godfather. Neil was wonderful and he
enlightened my dad on the finer things in life, like wine.
(19:57):
Because Neil pointed out that fine wine collecting and reselling
was the perfect place to clean your money. Okay. So
I'd make a hunk of of twenty five grand okay
on a trip, and I always at the same time,
I was always thinking about how to clean it, and
so I started buying more wine at a time. As
(20:20):
these haunts would come in, I would start buying five
or ten cases of something. My dad was always under
pressure to make his money appear earned from an honest living.
In other words, how to launder his money, not literally
like the money that got soaked under the bathroom sink,
but money laundering the illegal process of concealing the origins
(20:45):
of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex
sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions. Of course, the
overall goal returns the money to the launderer in an
obscure and indirect way. So under the Bank Secrecy Act,
banks and other financial institution must report to the government
(21:07):
cash deposits greater than ten thousand dollars. Plus banks are
also supposed to report any suspicious transactions like unusual deposit
patterns below ten thousand dollars. So my dad could never
park his cash at the bank without arousing suspicion. So
we could ever dive into traditional investments like cd s, stocks, bonds,
(21:29):
et cetera. He had to find another way to make
money out of his money. My parents launder their money
in a variety of ways, in commercial transactions, buying art, gemstones,
antique books, and rugs and rugs. Yeah rugs, these were
antique tribal rugs, not arrange, not Persian rugs, so yeah,
(21:53):
I mean, maybe we didn't use them on the floor
I mean, you've seen several of the different ones we
have hanging. These were all really collectible items then and
they're still collectible now, you know. I mean what we
have is really old carpets now. Other ways to launder
cash are buying vintage cars, jewelry, storing it offshore in
(22:13):
the Cayman Islands or Switzerland. Of course you have to
transport it there, hence smuggling, cashing yarn balls on planes,
or a simple cash only retail business like an ice
cream shop, bookstore or sandwitchery. Wine, however, was my dad's
primary commercial transaction. He became a bit of a connoisseur
with all the collectible vintages, buying in bulk for future
(22:36):
resale when the wine had aged, becoming more valuable. Did
you have an inkling where my dad got use cash? Frum?
Did you ever? Did it matter? Didn't care? Did you
do everything about it? Well? I didn't think about it
until I was involved in it. This is Sunset, a
wine gormand who sold my dad wine throughout the eighties
(22:59):
and became a close family friend. And to be clear,
he had no idea that my dad's initial interest in
wine was fueled by money. Laundering. Always told me that
his primary source of income was introducing entrepreneurs to people
who supplied money, and that he got a commission for
doing so. That was but you know, he would offer
(23:21):
and introduce me to people and say we've got we've
got a deal in the works. And I never felt
any reasoned to discount that. He does remember that one
time my dad showed up to pick up some wine
in a long pickup truck with a dome over the back.
That's our family yellow truck. It smelled like pot, but
he didn't think twice about it, because again, this is
(23:42):
Mill Valley. Pot like wine was part of the fabric
of Marin County. Well. Heah, My fresh impression of him
was he was really enthusiastic about he was He had
discovered fine wines, and I don't know for how long
prior to that, he might have been drinking them with
friends for years. But he was really enthusiastic and he
(24:03):
loved to hear about them and talk about them. As
you can see, I like to talk about them, and
very personable, and I thought your mom was a sweetheart.
It never felt anything but warmth. Did I ever get
the feeling that there was that this was funny money
that I was being handed No, but then I was
(24:25):
very naive on that subject. Now, the thing was, it
wasn't not unusual for people to come in shelling out
hunks of cash to invest in wine. Marine County was
and still is an absurdly wealthy place, one of the
five wealthiest counties in the nation, and in the eighties
it was chock full of cash only shoppers from the sex,
(24:47):
drugs and rock and roll industries. As we mentioned before,
at one point it was estimated that half of Mill
Valley was involved in the smuggling business. It wasn't weird
for Barria big spenders to shell out thousands in cash
on a single visit to the wine shop. My dad
was definitely not the only one spending briefcases of cash
on wine, but suspicions aside wine and food became the
(25:11):
focus of the relationship between my dad and Sunset. Dad
says the first time he visited Sunset's wine shop was
with Neil. Sunset swore they would see God after taking
one sip of a fancy French wine, and it was
really incredibly rich and not like you think of sparkly
(25:32):
of champagne as it's very light, but it was very
thick and unbelievably flavorful. Did you see God, Taffy? No
you did you not see God? Or did you? What
(25:55):
did you think? Mom? Of dad buying putting his money
in wine? I thought it was stupid. I just thought
it was like a worse should I I thought we
should buy old cars now. According to Wine's Spectator magazine,
only a small percentage of wines have the potential to
improve with age, and within this group, only a small
percentage have the ability to appreciate in value. These elite
(26:19):
wines are considered quote worthy of collecting. From an investment
point of view, Sunset would help my dad decide which
wines to invest in in hopes that their value would
increase exponentially over time. Sunset was constantly getting various new
wines in the latest vintages of Blah blah and reading
(26:39):
about it because it was his beers, so he was
really knowledgeable. And at one point he's reading about the
fact that he says, Listen Walter, the eighty two vintage
of French wines is said to be the greatest vintage
of the twentieth century, and we can get futures of
(27:02):
buying bottles of Lafitte and Muton eighty two and Petruce
and Leoville was cass and we can get the most
expensive in futures. We can buy them now, they'll deliver
it in three years when they're ready to be delivered,
and I could get the futures at fifty bucks a
bottle for the Lafite and Mouton, which ultimately ends up selling.
(27:26):
If you look at eighty two Mouton right now, it's
probably somewhere between thirty five hundred and five grand a bottle.
To give you an idea of how much wine my
dad bought, he had to rent a storage unit for
the enormous collection. Let's just be clear. We had a
wine storage unit and a pot storage unit. There are
always ten to twenty bottles at home, but the thousands
(27:47):
of other bottles and cases lived in a special climate
controlled locker specifically for wine, which I never visited. Probably
a good thing, since I'm super clumsy. My dad had
thousands of bottles of wine, and he became a bit
addicted to collecting it. That started to get me more
(28:08):
and more addicted. I mean, I liked drinking wine, and
it was really nice, but I just realized one. I'm
not a big drinker and never have been anyway, but
we would drink, you know, we'd drink our we'd have
our caviare so we'd we'd we'd go have parties with
not a lot of people, just a few people because
we were drinking really expensive champagne and Triple O beluga,
(28:32):
which Mom really did love. I'd never got a taste
for the beluga either. Yeah, champagne great, sup. Now wine
was an awesome investment, but both my parents regret not
buying more California land and real estate with her cash.
(28:52):
My dad did buy our family a wonderful vacation home
in Lake Tahoe where I'd bring all my friends for
weeks long slumber parties. Me and Petunia from episode one
built a mini golf course over several summers at our
Tahoe house. No here, they're there. I think I think
we should have bought land for cash. It's what I
think now looking back on it, you know, right, Yeah,
(29:15):
hindsight tells us that we I was not clear back
then that oh much property actually can be bought directly
for cash because lots of people own stuff oral properties, right,
royal properties, or whatever, and so that's okay. Yeah, we
(29:36):
still made a ton of money on the Yeah, but
it's I always thought it was pretty decoradent to drink champagne.
Any prevent from doing it, But we didn't do it
that often. We were just we were not that, you know.
Every once in we do some and we were never
(29:58):
quite you know. And for me it was strictly an investment.
My parents don't think there's any sense to regret what
they didn't invest in, or regret the ways they cleaned
their cash or dried it as the case. Maybe I'm
Rainbow Valentine and this is disorganized crime. And we'll be
right back we headed towards the end of this episode,
(30:24):
but before we get there, I want to talk about
the tiniest currency that was the most important to my parents,
and it turned out to me so a visceral kid
memory this podcast has jostled is one of tons of
quarters around our house all the time. They were in drawers,
(30:44):
on countertops, and in like every nook and cranny of
all our cars. And they were not only in the carpet,
they were in all the vehicles. Yet we had two Chevies, right,
two Chevy and palace, and we had a big yellow truck,
and so they were always in those because those were
the working vehicles. One summer, we rented a house in
(31:07):
Stintson Beach and my parents hired a neighbor girl to
be my babysitter. I was probably eight. The beach house
was down the street from a snack shack that sold
forbidden junk food. So, sensing light at the end of
my junk food deprivation tunnel, I showed the babysitter the
rolls of quarters located in my dad's car door side pockets,
(31:27):
and we took a roll to buy frozen snickers. A
few weeks later, after the beach vacation, the neighbor babysitter
was caught sneaking up our long, hilly dirt driveway and
stealing rolls of quarters from my dad's car. I was
so embarrassed that I had shown her where my dad's
money was, and I was surprised she had stolen from
(31:47):
our family. Later, as in Like now, while producing this podcast,
all these quarters in my life fall into place by
learning the rules of quarters were an important tool of
the trade for my dad's business because he made most
of his important smuggling deals on pay phones before pagers.
They'd call you at home and say, hey, man, why
(32:10):
don't you you know, let's go to the office, Meeta.
At the office, you will talk. Oh you call the
pay phones offices? Yeah, I mean it was. It was
an office, so, you know, at the Western Office. Whatever.
Oh my god, that's hilarious. I was a kid. I
was deeply absorbed in my fantasy world and considered grown
up errands profoundly boring and barely tolerable. I was a
(32:35):
drama queen child, and I couldn't fathom why my parents
didn't have aaron running British servants like Mary Poppins, Jeeves
or mister Belvedere. Of course, the seventies and eighties were
before the Internet, so all errands had to be run
in person with the kids in tow. I have vivid
memories of frequent trips to the bank, waiting in line
(32:55):
and chewing on the fumy vinyl ropes dividing the banking cues.
I loved the spongy texture of the chunky bank cords,
the only saving grace of what I considered the most
boring errand on earth. You always made your your boredness
known one way or another. I recall swinging on the
(33:15):
cushiony ropes and remember my mom's mortification at my public
animal behavior. Well, now I realized my parents needed to
go to the bank a lot to get roles of
quarters for my dad's many pay phone calls. Getting quarters
was a trip in a bank that well, you know,
I'm trying to think about it, because when you think
(33:36):
about it, um, what do you need a million quarters for?
You know, you'd go in and buy one hundred dollars
worth of causeed roll was twenty dollars worth of quarters,
so you'd buy five rolls a hundred dollars? You know?
Did you have different banks so they wouldn't suspect that
you were? Why was this person getting so many rolls
of quarters all the time? When I when I would
(33:57):
get quarters, I'd just go into a bank that didn't
know me, that was somewhere else. I didn't walk into
my Mill Valley bank. Every local yeah, you know, and
there were enough banks in the county to just pop
in now and again. Another common errand I loathed was
(34:18):
my dad stopping for phone calls. We lived in a
semi rural area and drove a lot as school and
my many after school activities were fifteen to fifteen minutes
away from home. My chauffeur dad always had to stop
for a call after gymnastics tap to answer play practice.
When I was tired and cranky and totally had to pee, disgruntled,
(34:40):
but surrounded by rolls of car quarters poised for the spotlight,
I'd wait in the car and play pretend, turning the
coins into anthropomorphic characters and my elaborate melodramas. Once, while
waiting for my dad to make a call, I broke
the car windshield by mistake. Do you remember that time
I mistakenly broke the windshield of the car with your
(35:00):
feet up? You just put your feet up and went blood. Yeah,
I do remember so. Basically, while I sat waiting in
the car near my bulove and McDonald's, I was in
the front seat of our jeep Cherokee, and I put
my bare feet on the inner windshield, leaned back and
pressed slash stretched out well. I stretched my legs a
bit too firmly, and horrified, watched the entire windshield crack.
(35:25):
It was a long ten minutes waiting for my dad
to return from the payphone to the windshield I just destroyed.
It probably wasn't the best thing to do, bringing attention
to my dad as he was making deals at the payphone. Now,
my dad went to plenty of different offices payphones, and
his favorite was in tam Junction, near my childhood home.
Tam Valley, adjacent to Mill Valley, is where I learned
(35:47):
to ride a bike, drive a car, and its crossroads.
Tam Junction is the gateway to the windy road over
Mount tamil Pious to Mure Woods, the famed National monument.
Tam Valley used to be considered kind of like the
slums of Mill Valley, with its hub, the scrudgy Shoreline
shopping plot and the gaudy rug store Flantic, a giant curved,
(36:08):
aquatile storefront that resembled a vertical swimming pool. So the
Shoreline shopping center where my dad's favorite payphone was located,
consisted of the Calum Market where we picked up last
minute groceries, the Shoreline Coffee Shop, and the Video Droid,
my little brother's favorite place. I just had a visceral
memory of being left at the Video Droid a lot.
(36:32):
You were probably on the phone and we'd be at
the video droid because right around the tam junction there
were several you leave us a video droid so we
could look at videos and you'd go make a phone call. Yeah,
that happened all the time. Now. Other smuggling errands, which
I enjoyed more because they involved snacks, included shopping at
the cheese store, Jerry's meat Market and Valley Market, and
(36:52):
the hippie health food store Living Foods, where we'd get
treats like frozen yogurt or tiger milk bars. You know,
smugglers got to eat, and my parents are gourmet cooks,
so I thought I remembered plastic wrapped chunks of hash
in the freezer alongside the frozen bagels. But my parents
are adamant they wouldn't have left drugs in the freezer
for me to eat. By mistake. Do you have hash
(37:14):
wrapped in plastic in the freezer like all the time, right?
Hash wrapped in thee Yeah. No, they're always weird things
in the freezer that were like little bricks of like
brown things, even money, money in the freezer. I mean,
we didn't put stutt We didn't keep drugs in the freezer.
(37:36):
That is really I have seen drugs in your freezer. Yeah,
but not I mean recently. You know, pot brownies and stuff.
I wouldn't leave those around. You would have eaten them all.
I don't know what I saw, but my parents always
have kind of weird things in the freezer, like maybe
old psychedelic mushrooms or an old withered pot brownies some
old hippie left. You gotta be careful what you eat
in my parents freezer. Smuggling as a word sounds so
(38:00):
intriguing and mysterious, and it's hilarious to realize that, in fact,
the most worrying activity of my childhood, running errands with
my parents with plenty of quarters in tow, was actually
part of a cinematically spine tingling act. Smuggling. My parents
should have been like, come on, let's go smuggling, rather
than let's go run errands. We gotta run errands like
(38:21):
we gotta do smuggling. I probably would have been much
more excited. A question we've gotten from some listeners is
that if my dad was pulling in so much money
doing these pot deals, why did he keep smuggling. Well,
(38:42):
my dad was a freelancer, meaning he would win big,
but then there would be months without work or income
coming in, and life with three kids is expensive. I've
paid my rent being a lifelong freelancer thanks to principles
my freelancer dad drilled into me. And number one is
failure is unfortunately a frequent visitor. But on the bright side,
(39:08):
you've got to know failure to no success. In the
smuggling business, you need to spend money to make money.
So cash was used to invest in another trip to
bring in more money, and so on and so forth.
My dad's colleague, the driver Sandwich, calls it chasing the rainbow.
He told me the smuggling business was difficult to get
(39:29):
out of because smugglers were continuously chasing the rainbow with
each new trip promising to bring in more money than
ever before. But also very much I have boundaries about
what I will or won't do in my life, even
in making money, which is the most delicious ice cream.
(39:51):
I know, I mean money, you know, and the money
makes our world be free. Making money drove my dad.
Plus I believe my parents are adrenaline junkies. They love
river rafting, scuba diving, dancing, the rush from the extreme
high of making a quarter of a million dollars in
a month, and that's an adrenaline. But the money went
(40:12):
fast to support a family of five plus pets. My
parents were set on sending us all to private schools
and providing us with bounteous opportunities like sailing, skiing, singing lessons.
Plus my dad supported his family of origin on the
East Coast, and my parents always needed enough money for
smugglers insurance, a attaining fee for the best criminal attorney
(40:35):
on the West Coast. I mean, I gave Bernie Sego
a five thousand dollars retainer and said if I call
help except for I remember that I was sitting on
some money and it was fifty thousand dollars. You were
sitting on fifty grand? Well, yeah, I was, Yeah, of
whose what are you trying? No farm money? Yeah? Where
(40:58):
was it? It was in a piece of furniture that
was had a secret entrance. What the safe? Which the
bad remember the bad bout? No? Well, I remember the
bad we built, but I don't remember and you could
open Yeah, but you know everybody knew that day anyway, Yeah, anyway,
(41:19):
I remember. The money also disappeared because my dad was
a tidbit overly generous. He's a staunch supporter of the
arts and often gave away product and money to fellow artists.
I mean he was rolling in it. I gave way
lots of the product to our artist friends. I mean
(41:40):
how I viewed a whole bunch of that was the
importance of the patronage for the artists and even and musicians.
You know. For me, In my dad's business, money, pot
and trust were commodities. They were handshake deals, friendship, and
an assurance that cash would flow when it needed to
(42:01):
flow until it didn't. So the eighties roll around and
the Reagan administration starts changing the pot laws. Sticks are
getting higher, but my parents continue business as usual regardless
of the danger, because money is freedom. However, money can
(42:26):
also bring out the very worst in people. On the
next episode of Disorganized Crime, my dad conducts his biggest
trip yet, takes us on a triumphant vacation, and then
puts his trust in the wrong hands, leading to disastrous consequences.
I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is Disorganized Crime. Disorganized Crime
(42:53):
Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded by me, Rainbow Valentine.
Our producers are Gabby Watts, and Taylor Church. Executive producers
are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, 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
(43:15):
us online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com. Right lovel
the story, do it as with Me tamble by steeping
Princess of the red Wood dreams. She counts us, keep
(43:39):
it real. Handshake seals the deal, Wrap the stack, sealed meal,
and road up these old breads, rolling the Doobie, Young,
rich and groovy, making it up. We roll along, Rolling Country, Roll,
(44:07):
Rolling along, far Country, Roll, Rolling along far a country
Low
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.