February 9, 2023 • 50 mins
Chester was part of an elite circle of prolific smuggling pilots who ruled the air in the early 80s. A man known as Happy Miles was also one of the power players that sprang from Coconut Grove - and he recalls some of the incredible and illicit adventures they shared.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on
Murder in Miami.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
So it's nineteen eighty two and I decided how to
go back to Washington, DC. Along the way, it had
occurred to me that the people I considered the real
criminals were the people who were running things in Washington
and other places like that.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
The Christic Institute was a nonprofit public interest law firm.
They sought to wield the law as a weapon of
progressive change against a number of daunting targets.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
What I told Danny was that Bob Adams had been
part of a military intelligence unit that provided logistical support
for assassinations conducted by the United States. And in any case,
Danny offered me a monthly stipend of twenty five hundred
dollars a month, and I put everything in the car
again and went back to Miami.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Now, you're basically working as a private investigator, investigative journalist,
investigating intercept a private investigation.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, I suppose. So the funny part is that when
I got back, I went out to the office in
Perne and it was closed. So finally I tracked down Bob,
and Bob tells me turns out that Lamar has been
under federal investigation for some time now, something called Operation
Loan Star, and it's a very big deal. The next
(01:26):
thing I know, I get this call from Bob saying
that Lamar wants to meet me at the mutiny. When,
out of the blue, Lamar says, well, I just want
you to know that I appreciate what you're doing here,
but I sure as i'll wish you and your boys
back in Washington would get a move on it. I
don't know what to make of it, and he says, oh,
come on, now, you're with the CIA.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Right?
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Wait? He thought you were with the CIA. Why?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I had no idea at the time.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
So if Bob Adams led Phil to believe Intercept was
connected with drug smuggling through Lamar Chester, who was Chester's connection,
the man you're about to meet would definitely know because
he claims he facilitated one of Chester's notable expansions in
the drug trade.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Did you quit loving me?
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Happy Miles here?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Give me a call.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
That's mister Happy Miles, a man who's led a pretty
fantastical life when peppered with some very unique professions. He's
also very active on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Happy here, give me a call.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
On Facebook, his dormant Twitter self describes Happy as a
lifelong adventurer, pilot, sailor, boat builder, plane builder, and a
purveyor of the finer things in life.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Judge spuggling was born than a job. It was an adventure.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Mister Miles was also a close business associate and friend
of Intercept's biggest client, Lamar Chester, the man indicted as
a marijuana smuggler, although Happy himself never bothered much with marijuana.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
I don't like doing around pot because I hate the
smell of it.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Cocaine was Happy. He's preferred cargo.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
It is. It is bulky, and it's not as messy.
Coke is all nice and clean and wrapped up. You
just put it in Duffel bags.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
What do you miss about those times?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
The money?
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I'm Lauren brad Pacheco, and this is murder in Miami.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
When I started working in an Intercept, I was just
like mister Magoo, stumbling around there. I didn't know anything,
and I certainly had no idea that at the time
they were already under federal investigation.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
All I really knew about Lamar Chester was what Bob
Adams had told me. And I wouldn't meet Happy Miles
till years later, when I figured I'd better start looking
into this thing.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
What was your initial take on Happy Miles.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He was a very eccentric, interesting guy. He had a
lot of great stories. He had an island in the
Bahamas for a while. One story that sticks with me
is that when he was making a lot of money
in the drug business, like all of those guys, he
had a lot of disposable income, he gave a fifteen
thousand dollars tip to a waitress and a lunch counter
(04:52):
down in the Keys. It's quite a life he's lived.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yeah, he's such a character.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
He strikes me as this purely like Dionysian person.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
There's a reason why they called himself Happy Miles.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And over the course of many months, I've grown used
to hearing Happy Miles share the stories woven into that life,
which spans eighty three years.
Speaker 5 (05:23):
When I tell people about my life, they don't believe me.
Nobody could have done all the things I've done.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
He's not kidding, you know.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
I produced a record you did, what is it? Called
The Songwriter with Michael dunafon the ex wide receiver for
the Denver Broncos. He's dead now, But I wrote you
heard the song Coyote Ugly.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
There's a movie called Coyote Ugly.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
I should see the Bastards because it's a copyrighted name.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
What's the song kyote yug So you order up the
shot and you order of a here and hopes that
it'll bring her bit.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
There you're you, yah, the old woman. I went with
an eight, kind of woke up with three. What dead
this woman do to deserve me?
Speaker 3 (06:22):
And then it goes on to say just how ugly
was she?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
I'm telling you she could drop them mag it off
of me wagon.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Well, this woman is what you call.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Cow cowd. The ugly is when you roll over in
the morning, you take a look at her and you
chew your arm off to keep from waking her up.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
No, that's coyote ugly.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
You wrote that, yeah, Mike, and I did. I owned
the copy right.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, not exactly a feminist anthem. The song does appear
on the album Happy Nailed Me, complete with a nineteen
eighty one cop be right, and the singer Michael Dunavan
was indeed on the roster of the Broncos in nineteen
seventy six and seventy seven, before becoming mayor of Glendale, Colorado,
and running for governor in twenty fourteen. The thing about
(07:15):
Happy his stories check out. Happy's kind of like the
dose ekis guy of decadence.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
Well, la world knows Vias Happy H Miles.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
What does the H stand for?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Horny?
Speaker 5 (07:30):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
And, as my voicemail can attest, most every Happy Miles
story leads to another.
Speaker 5 (07:37):
Hey, I saw a real funny story.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Give me a call.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
If you'd wager a former cocaine smuggler with eighty three
years under their belt would have some pretty interesting stories
to share with Happy, you'd hit the jackpot.
Speaker 5 (07:52):
I didn't tell you the red sheetcase story, did I?
Speaker 4 (07:56):
No?
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Okay? When I flew for another.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Guy, he had this Arab that would take samsoried suitcases,
the lining out and leticulously with bag the cocaine and
very small bags like a small condom. Kind of okay,
(08:21):
and he would line the vertical edges of the suitcase
with it glue in ice cream sticks to hold everything
in place, and then put the lining back in. NIA
couldn't tell just by glancing that anything it had done
(08:42):
to the suitcase unless you picked it up and it
would be twenty pounds heavier right than it should be.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Happy's job was to fly into Venezuela and pick up
the suitcases containing the hidden cocaine. But when the courier
arrived did his hotel. Happy had immediate issues.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
The suitcases were empty, and I said, hold it, hold it,
I'm not carrying these seaitcases out past immigration and customs
to the airplane. I'm not going to do it these
empty suitcases. This is ridiculous. And what man owns red suitcases?
Speaker 4 (09:27):
They were both red.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
Yeah, brand new sampsodite red suitcases with twenty keys of
coch in each one, made them by twenty pounds more.
So I went down to the Habitashery in the hotel,
very swank Habiitashery, and I bought arrows shirts enough to
(09:52):
fill up these big suitcases, probably four or five grand
worth because they were like five dollars apiece.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
They weren't cheap.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
How big were these suitcases?
Speaker 5 (10:05):
They were big suitcases. I filled these up with shirts,
so now they had all these unwrapped shirts in it.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Right, So I buy a a flight plan out for.
Speaker 5 (10:18):
The morning at the stun up at dawned because nobody
will be out there right, and I paid customs off
ahead of time, so I felt rather secure. But I
had a hanging bag. I had a duffel bag. I
had my flight bag and two fucking red suitcases. Well
(10:42):
that's quite a load.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
For one to carry.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
Yeah, So next morning, I carry the shit downstairs, grab
a tap to the airport, and I'm walking out to
the airplane.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
It's about a four hundred foot truck. I get about
halfway there to the airplane.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And that's exactly when mister Miles says. A young army
guard shows up to offer a huffing and puffing happy
assistance with his heavy load.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
Now, the last thing guy wanted him doing is carrying
one of these suitcases, right. So he says, kak Enny
and the suitcase. What do you got in the suitcases?
So I laid him down and opened them right away,
and he looks really puzzled. I've got all these brown
(11:36):
new shirts. And he says to me in Spanish, he says,
kiddy enters, you stead him contrabandista to come. He says,
what are you a smuggler of shirts?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I said, yeah, he caught me. But look, just.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Take whatever shirt you want and you can have them. Well,
this kid never saw a thirty dollars shirt and there's light,
so he took two shirts and told me on Spanish,
I have to go quick before the sergeant seized me.
And he takes off of a couple of shirts and
I take off for the airplane loaded, jump in, light
(12:19):
it up and go. But he had caught a smuggler
of shirts.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Who had a lot of cocaine stuffed underneath the shirts.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:32):
Anyway, so that was the story.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And middle initial aside. There's also a story behind the
Happy Miles name.
Speaker 5 (12:52):
Well, people started calling me Happy while I was dating
amm Margaret.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
You should be a happy man if you're and Margaret yes,
and Margaret that and Margaret Viva Las Vegas as in
Elvis and Margaret. But as Happy tells it, this was
a few years before she found fame.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
In the sixties. I had just gotten out of the
Marine Corps and then I met Anne Margaret. She went
to work at the Villa Marina, and I took her
to breakfast every morning after she got off work at
midnight or two, because they didn't have any money to eat.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
The They is the band she was singing with at
the time.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
They didn't even have money to put gas in their
car to get to the gig. I took her to Catalina,
earned two of the guys from the subtle tone her band.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
We had a rough ship coming back.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
We had to drift all night because it was so
rough you couldn't go either way.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Happy so he offered to keep Ms. Margaret warm under
a tarp during the night.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
We got in about nine o'clock in the morning and
the guy said, boy, it looks like you've had a
lot of Happy Miles and the name just stuck.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Does your driver's license say Happy Miles.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
My driver's license says it. I have two names on
my passport and my pilot's licenses in the name of
Happy Miles. When I crashed on the mountain top in Bolivia,
they told me that they were going to suspend my
license because I wasn't Happy Miles. I was John Anthony Mahalo.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
In order to avoid a formal hearing, Happy says he
was given the option of providing the Bolivian officials with
character references confirming he was an upstanding citizen known as
Happy Miles. He figures he collected about three signatures.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
Yeah, I had everybody sign it. I had the Mayor
of Miami Beach. I had the Mayor of Miami Maurice Foray.
I had the customs officers where I cleared customs with
the airplane all the time. I had the Fire Department
and Coral Gables police Chief. And I had tons of
(15:25):
members from the Adventures Club.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Sign It nestled in Coconut Grove in the mid to
late nineteen seventies, the Adventurers Yacht and Sailing Club offered
participants a clever combination of an exclusive membership with outdoor adventures,
complete with instruction and rentals for sailing and eventually flying.
At the time, the Adventurers Club was a fixture on
(15:51):
the Miami social scene, and so was its flashy founder,
mister Happy Miles.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
Coca At Grove was a great place to live. And
you know, having the Adventures Club, I was Miammies fair
haired boy. I was on a first named basis with
the Mayor of the city, attorney and manager.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Happy shared a ton of pictures with me from all
different stages of his life. Many are set in tropical
or social situations where he's smiling next to an assortment
of beautiful women in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Happy stood about six feet.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Tall, with a wavy head of dark hair and a
devious smile that competed with the bright blue of his
eyes for attention, which competed with the sparkle of his
taste in gold chains, expensive watches, and at one point
a diamond studded bracelet that spelled out his name.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
It was a nugget bracelet. I'll send you a picture
of me wearing it, and also wearing a gold Rolettes
was a nugget band that I paid forty thousand for.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Wouldn't that kind of be a dead giveaway as to
what you did for a living?
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Well, catch me if you can.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
He sent the picture.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
You can see why in his younger days, Happy was
often mistaken for Teddy Kennedy. He's seated at a desk,
arms resting in front of him, golden bling popping out
from both the dazzled wrist, and a medallion in chain
resting atop his chest hair. He's wearing a confident grin
and a sleek white collared shirt generously unbuttoned at the neck.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
I was a pretty good dresser. I mean I had
a lot of Western seats. I still learned the boots
from that.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Era, and those boots seem made for walkin'. Considering the
number of times Happy he's been married.
Speaker 5 (17:48):
Some people that are in better know than I am
say it's been a Baker's dozen, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
Thirteen.
Speaker 5 (17:56):
Wow, Well, in my case, there were tons of tons
of women around as the commodore.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
You know, Happy was known as the commodore of the
Adventurers Club, which at its height posted more than twenty
five hundred members, including the then mayor of Miami.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
And international drug smuggler Lamar Chester. That's where their paths
first crossed.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
Lamar Chester joined my yacht club to sail, and I
get such a good job of running boats. He thought
I should be in the airplane business, and he had
a bunch of airplanes he couldn't pay for, so I
bought him.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
And that's how I met Lamar.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
He was flying for Eastern Airlines, but he had overextended himself.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
And you guys ended up becoming pretty good friends, right.
Speaker 5 (18:50):
Yeah. I was the only outsider at his wedding because
it was only family relatives. I was the only non
family member there. It was an Indian theme.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And by Indian mister miles means Native American.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
I got a picture of it Artists and Lamar, okay,
let me get up so I can describe it. Artists
was a she was tall by pianner or something like that.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
She west eighty and others.
Speaker 5 (19:25):
Lamar's kind of been a eisenhowerd tight jacket, but a
Western like and he stands about three quarters of a head,
two thirds of the head taller than Artist.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Why was there a theme to the wedding just for fun?
Speaker 5 (19:43):
No, it was both of their second marriages, and they
were like that.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
The photo was faded to a soft pastel blow. Lamar
and Artists are looking at the camera, likely held by
happy Chester's right arm resting on his bride's lower back.
Both are wearing wide grins, and Artists is indeed wearing
what appears to be Native American garb and a band
across her forehead.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
Chester smile is topped by.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
A thin mustache that gives off an earl Flynn sort
of vibe. He's wearing his dark hair meticulously slipped back
and a yellow rose on his left lapel.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
They look like a very happy couple.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
Well, I think they were very much in love with
each other. I know she was going with some mafia.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Also when Lamar met her.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
Lamar used to buy roses and fly over there a
yacht and dump the roses out from his nose at
the mafia.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
He wasn't afraid.
Speaker 5 (20:41):
Lamar wasn't afraid of anything. He stood about two or
three inches taller than I, long, lanky, kind of a
farm boy type, and he wasn't afraid of anybody or anything.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
That fearlessness would be on full display during a double date.
Happy remembers as memorable on multiple levels.
Speaker 5 (21:05):
One time we went for Paiea in Cuban Town in
my Cadillac and Lamar and artists were in the back seat,
and I'd pull up to a stop sign and a
guy would pull up alongside of us and then want
a drag racist to the next light. And I didn't
know Lamar.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Was giving him the finger of the whole time.
Speaker 5 (21:30):
And when we came to stop, he had a three
point fifty seven pointed at me.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
And I was in the right lane, so I made
the right.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Turn and tried to lose them. And here we were,
at one hundred miles an hour, going through Cubantown, all
the residential.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Roads, and I was open for.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
A cop to see us. We finally locked him and
we got back to his apartment on Brickell Avenue on
the water there, and I went up to his apartment
and he opened a foot locker and got a couple
machine guns out of it uzzis and said, let's go
(22:10):
find the bastard. I said, Lamar, you're crazy. We're not
going looking for any trouble. And he was flying guns
then to Nicaragua.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
You heard that, right, machine guns that were being flown
from Miami to Nicaragua in the late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
They were military foot lockers in the living room, stacked
one on top of the other, standard military foot lockers,
the issue you in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
A foot locker is about.
Speaker 5 (22:44):
Two feet high and two feet deep and four feet
long or something like that.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
And they were just filled with guns.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
Yeah, there were probably at least twenty thirty guns of
each one.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
And what kind of guns.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
Sixteen's I guess and M one and stuff.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Like that, so military grade stuff.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Yeah, all military grade.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
And did he tell you who he was running the
guns for?
Speaker 5 (23:17):
This IA? I would imagine the CIA was running that.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Show those guns and Chester's claim of running them for
the government will play a major role as history in Foles,
and that remains one of the pieces Bill Stamford is
still trying to place and one that will eventually play
out in a court of law.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, that was one of the stories that struck me
as very important because it was evidence that Chester was
running guns. I mean, there were crates of guns, and
is Happy says, no one has that many guns for
personal use. I mean they were in these crates for shipping.
And apparently he told Happy that he was flying them
(24:02):
to Nicaragua.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Remember that story because it'll come up again. But in
terms of our timeline, Happy's hold on Miami social scene
was coming to an end by the time Phil relocated there,
which is why their paths wouldn't cross until years later.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
When I finally tracked him down. It turned out he
was living about ninety miles from me in Albany, Oregon,
in an abandoned aircraft hangar building a plane.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
Very happy asque.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
He has remarkable abilities. I mean he's completely unschooled, but
there's a little bit of certainly mechanical genius about him.
He was able to put together huge deals. He was
able to master several crafts. I think he started out
as a sail maker, and then that got him into
the boat rental business, and then he got into the
aircraft business, and he was modifying planes and god knows,
(24:54):
flying them too, without a commercial pilot's license.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Now, no, he's dyslexi, so he can't get his instrumental
flight certificate.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
He gets mixed up. That's why he said that it
was scary.
Speaker 5 (25:08):
I didn't like it. Oh, I mean, you're coming back
at night time. Sometimes it was just scary as shit
being dyslexic. I'd almost killed myself a couple times. The
airplay lost it in the clouds and it went out
of control, and just a good Lord to save my ass,
(25:29):
I guess I don't know.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, good, that's happy.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Did I ever tell you that he ended up going
into the movie business as well, both as a producer
and in Caddyshack, there is that scene where Ted Knight
is on the boat and Rodney Dangerfield is trying to
rev up his boat and come see him, and all
of this chaos ensues and somebody throws a fishing rod
(25:59):
and he gets hot to the boat and he goes
flying through the air, and at that moment a plane
comes and swoops down, almost brushing Ted Knight on the
top of the head.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
And guess who's flying that plane.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
That's happy? Yeah, sure, that's happy.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Miles and flirting with risky flying seems to be a
running theme with the Coconut Grove guys. Here's happy.
Speaker 5 (26:20):
In fact, Lamar at one time let me land a
seventy seven at National Airport.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
No way, not with people on the flight. Oh yeah,
how did that come about?
Speaker 5 (26:34):
That?
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Lamar? Let you fly a passenger plane.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
I was on a trip with Lamar.
Speaker 5 (26:40):
Back in those days, they could take somebody up into
the cockpit, even take him on the airplane without.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Paying for him.
Speaker 5 (26:49):
And when the chief plot Freester said what do you doing?
He said, I didn't think he could fly? Do you
think I'd let him fly my airplanes? And I have
had eleven thousand hours probably at that point in my life.
And we took off from Miami and the co pilot
got out of the seat and I got in and
(27:11):
then flew the airplane. I flew the approach and then
what we got, I don't know, down five hundred feet
or something.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
He said, my airplane and he landed it.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Oh so he landed it.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yeah, but I could have landed.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
It back to Phil.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Did he also tell you a story about an air
drop in the Everglades where Lamar talked his way out
of an arrest.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yes, it's a great story. One morning they're doing another
drop and Happy's up doing the lookout, and here come
two planes headed from Jamaica or wherever they were coming from.
They flew together because they'd create one radar signature, and
the idea was that the plane carrying the dope would
drop down and the other one would take off, so
(28:00):
that people watching radar would think that just one plane
had passed over the Everglades and would be landing at
the whatever airport sometime later. So here comes the plane
landing on the road and Lamar is driving a.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Truck, but there's a police presence nearby, and so the
gang had to get a message to Chester in code,
I'll let happ you pick it up from here.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
They didn't use aircraft radios to talk to back and forth.
They used marine boat radios, and they would talk about fishing.
You know, I hope you got your license with you today,
because the game warden's checking licenses. It looks to be
about five minutes away or something like that anyway. So
(28:51):
Lamar landing was offloading the load. He had a truck.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
And not just any truck, this one was cussed demized.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
It was painted green, and it had a Florida state
seal on the door that said Florida hyacin Control. Nothing
suspicious about that, except there's no Florida hyacin control.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
They had the logo and everything just made up.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
Yeah, yeah, And they had this truck jacked up way
off the ground so you couldn't see in the bed
of it. So they landed, unloaded the load, threw a
tarp over it, and Lamar said, you fly the airplane
to his son and I'll drive the truck because a
(29:43):
sheriff was coming. So five minutes later they meet going
the opposite direction and Lamar waves him down.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
That's when Chester informs the sheriff about suspicious activity he'd
passed a while back, and graciously offers to phone it
into the state and.
Speaker 5 (30:04):
The sheriff said, would you be so kind? He said, yeah,
I'll do that for you.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Back to phil and Lamar drives off, and of course,
Happy learns about it later when they all stop for drinks,
probably outside Opa Loca air Airport and They all have
a good laugh about that one.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
So there was no hyacinthe patrol.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
No, no, I mean, these guys have a lot of
time to sit around scheming. And Lamar was and Happy.
They were both schemers.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
That's kind of brilliant because they weren't impersonating an actual
arm of law enforcement.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
They created their own.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, yeah, no, it was a good dope smuggler story.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Lamar Chester would also introduce Happy Miles to a legendary
marijuana smuggler, Ron Elliott.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Well On and Lamar both slew through Eastern Airlines, were
both captains and they both joined my club. Ron is
one of these guys that overthinks everything and makes it
too complicated. He was an astronaut, you know, wow, But
(31:18):
when they shut down the Skylab program, we went to
work flying for Eastern and he and his wife had
had a baby that had some weird disease where the
baby never got out of diapers. He wasn't supposed to
live for a year or two, and he lived to
(31:39):
be seven, and she was a nurse and both of
them were just frazzled by the time the kid died.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
And Ron Elliott said, fuck, I was so teed up.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
I'd have robbed a bank, but he decided he'd find
a buy in Jamay and he did so.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
That pretty much explains how Lamar, Chester, Happy Miles, and
Ron Elliott knew each other and why they were eventually
known by their swagger sounding nicknames.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Back to Phil there was Captain America of course, as
Lamar the commodore, Happy because he had this boat rental business,
and Ron Elliott his nickname was the Astronaut because at
one time he'd actually been part of the US government
astronaut program. He's a very vivid character. I hadn't met
(32:33):
him yet either. He was like Happy. I didn't meet
him till later. He had grown up in northern Florida,
like Lamar and Daredevil. Like Lamar, he'd been flying crop
dusting jobs while he was still in high school, and
about the time he graduated from high school went into
the Service and ended up flying special operations missions in
(32:55):
Vietnam and laws and besides that, he was flying in
the Mid East for intelligence off the book stuff, but
he was a pilot for Eastern just like Lamar, And
that's actually how they met.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Elliott told Stamford about the meeting, which he remembers occurring
in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
He had a layover in Boston for about four hours,
and I was in the pilot's lounge and who should
come in but Lamar. Lamar wasn't flying that day, so
he'd come up just to see Ron. And they started
talking and at a certain point, Laura said, how'd you
like to do some hanky panky flying? And Ron says
he played dumb at first, didn't know what he was
(33:35):
talking about. And Lamar smiled at him and put his
government records folder with its government records on the table
in front of them, and Ron looked at it, and
so he knew that Lamar was already familiar with all
the off the books flying he was already doing. He
agreed to hook up with Lamar and for the next
several days, he said they were down in the Bahamas,
(33:56):
and Lamar showed him where the safe houses were where
he could get gas and that sort of thing, and
they turned out to be best friends. He was Lamar's
best buddy.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
How did Lamar get Elliott's records?
Speaker 2 (34:11):
He would have had some sort of connection. It's pretty clear.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Did Elliott's name come up? If I'm not mistaken, in
the Black Tuna trial too.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Oh yeah, he was actually among the indictees in the
Black Tuna trial, but eventually dropped. And I don't know
whether it's because he had the government connections or because
he wasn't really part of the Black Tuna organization. He wasn't.
He was brought in at the very end by Bobby Plattshorn,
who'd filled a duty to rescue a couple of pilots
(34:50):
who'd gone down in Central America. And so he got
Ron Elliott and another guy who turned out to be
ad informant to fly down and get the two down pilots.
And when they landed, they were arrested, and Ron Elliott
was charged and initially on the Blacktooning indictment, but.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Then the charges were dropped.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, And as I say, it's not clear whether it
was because he had the government connections, which is quite possible,
or because he wasn't really part of the Blacktoona gang.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
So Elliot the charges or drops and platt Shorn gets
sixty years under the kingpin. Yeah yeah, Captain America, the
Commodore and the Astronaut, along with another smuggler named Jack Devo,
would very much rule the Miami Skies of nineteen seventies
drug smuggling.
Speaker 5 (35:44):
Here's happy Jack was Captain Jack from Dick Tracy. He
came in to join the club and very impressionable guy.
He came and talked to me about joining the club.
I told him it was one hundred and fifty six
dollars up front for his first year dues and I
(36:07):
would waive the initiation fee and of four hundred and
he went and he got a check for one hundred
and fifty six dollars signed by his mother. He was
a great pilot, good IFR pilot.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
What is an IFR pilot?
Speaker 5 (36:24):
Instrument flight rules? Where you go into the clouds and
you can't see anything and you have to drive the
airplane on instruments only.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (36:36):
So what happened was Jack joined my club and then
he borrowed my Lake Amphibian and wrecked it.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
Did so much damage to it that I don't know
how he got it home.
Speaker 5 (36:51):
And then the government came and said, do you know
that he's using your airplanes?
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Because he was using the planes from the Adventurers Club
to run trips where.
Speaker 5 (37:04):
Well I think he he originally was, I'm not sure,
probably flying out at Jamaica, but Denny went to Columbia.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Then the DA comes to you, right and starts asking
questions about Jack's travel.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
Yeah, yeah, the task Force. He got on the task
forces radar.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
And that's when Happy says, the task Force leaned on
him to keep tabs on devo. But when Happy realized
they were taping his office at the Adventurers Club, mister
Miles returned to the favor.
Speaker 5 (37:42):
I recorded the guys at Johnson Aviation, which was the
DEA in their office next to my office.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
They were trying to get evidence on mate.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
So while they're recording you, you're recording them.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (37:57):
Except I did a better job than they did, and
I never talked.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
In my office again.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
Instead, I taped everything that went on in their office.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
And what were they up to?
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Anything but the right thing?
Speaker 5 (38:13):
I mean I had cakes of them marketing product over
the telephone and stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yeah, and by marketing products, mister Miles means making drug deals.
So again, they're actually committing the crimes they're trying to enforce. Right,
Oh yeah, yeah, Happy he kept those tapes as insurance,
which could explain the unique immunity deal he wound up getting.
(38:43):
We'll dive more deeply into Jack Develle in future episodes,
and how he eventually ended up testifying against Manuel Noriega,
the former CIA spy turned drug running dictator.
Speaker 5 (38:56):
Yep testified before Congress with all his face wow, with
the black hood over his head.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
We'll circle back to all of that a bit later,
but back to our story. Armed with an innate sense
of both engineering and ingenuity, mister Happy Miles would take
credit for a hack that was an absolute game changer
for this high flying drug smuggling set.
Speaker 5 (39:22):
You know, everybody credits Later with stop in the Islands
and figuring out how to get cocaine from Colombia to
the US, But it was me far ahead of them.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Carlos Later was a German Colombian drug trafficker and one
of the founding members of the.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
Made Aene cartel.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
He's considered to be one of the most important Colombian
drug kingpins to have ever been successfully prosecuted in the
United States.
Speaker 5 (39:52):
I'm the guy that built the airplanes with four thousand
mile range. It wasn't for me building to came Clippers,
so airplane that'll fly forever, reliable twin engine Hypercomanche.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Usually, although I built.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
Other ones Skymasters with two hundred gallons of fuel on them,
well over that two hundred and fifty gallons.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Of fuel on them.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Inspired by a book about a legendary long distance pilot
who'd broken records by retrofitting planes with additional fuel capacity,
Happy employed the innovation to smuggling by artfully disguising the
additional tanks to avoid detection.
Speaker 5 (40:39):
They carried so much fuel, but nobody knew it. I mean,
I just had a few more filler caps up the
airplane the average comanche, but instead of carrying ninety gallons
I carried three hundred plus.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
And more fuel.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Means less stops on the way back from Columbia or
Jamaica for planes filled with drugs, which meant less risk
of customs discovering those drugs and less money spent on
bribing those customs agents. Fewer stops, lowered risk, and increased profits.
So happ these huge, yet hidden tanks were a huge
hit with the Coconut Grove smuggling set and a time
(41:19):
when smuggling was a bit simpler and safer.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
We're just a bunch of good old boys, Jack devoed
Lamar and Ron Elliott myself. None of us were bang bangs,
sheet them up. The only one I had ever seen
with a gun was Ron Elliott. When he pulled it
on me, threatened to blow my brains out. Said I
(41:46):
owed him money, but I didn't, but I.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Paid him anyway.
Speaker 5 (41:50):
And I never made enemies or had vendettis against anybody
because life was too short and you never know when
you might need them.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
But that happened a bit later, back to more innocent times.
Speaker 5 (42:06):
It was three cocaine cowboy Era and Grisel de Blanca.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Grisel de Blanco was a notorious Colombian cocaine trafficker known
as La Madrina, the Godmother of Cocaine, and the Black
Widow because she murdered all three of her husbands.
Speaker 5 (42:27):
There wasn't a lot of bang bangs, shoot them up,
if any. The head of the DEA, Jean Frankr, used
to call me the last of the oldie goldies. And
DEA was underfunded. They had no money, so they were
(42:48):
pretty hamstrong of what they could do, and surveillance wasn't
what it is now.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
So in a way, it was a simpler, more safe
time to get involved in that business.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yeah, I mean, the chances of you getting caught if
you knew what you were doing were pretty slim.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
And I'm sure that the rewards were pretty high.
Speaker 5 (43:16):
Well yeah, I mean you're getting basically ten percent.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Value of the load.
Speaker 5 (43:23):
Whoever your Columbian connection is, you're splitting six thousand dollars
of kilo basically, So I was getting three thousand and
five hundred.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
A kilo in the end.
Speaker 5 (43:39):
That's not what I got in the beginning, but that's
what I got after i'd worked for.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
In a while.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
How much at your peak would you say you were
bringing in a month.
Speaker 5 (43:51):
I was making it at least three hundred and fifty
thousand a month.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
I'd go one time, So.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
You were making three hundred fifty dollars a trip a trip.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Yeah, that's over four million a year in the nineteen seventies,
and that's what basically put the Coconut Grove guys on
the radar of law enforcement money.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Apparently, after Lamar made the hookup with the cartel people
and got into cocaine, which was really big money. It
was Ron Elliott who walked Duffel bags of money through
customs in Panama to launder it in the banks down there,
and he was the one who was chosen to do
(44:38):
that because he wore a suit better than any of
the others. He could look like a real businessman. That
was his job, besides regular smuggling flying duties is taking
the money into Panama to be laundered.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
According to Happy, fuel takes weren't the only influence he
wielded over Chester. He claims to have given the former
dope smuggler his cocaine connection.
Speaker 5 (45:01):
And when I fixed him up with that load of cocaine,
he made more money off of me that load than
the entire time he had been running marijuana.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
That's another story and a significant turning point in ours.
Back to Happy and his impact on the coconut grove
smuggling set.
Speaker 5 (45:21):
Believe it or not, I was the tremsetter. None of
them had airplanes as sophisticated as my cocaine clippers were
mich Coman cheese. I mean they followed me all the time.
I had the Adventures Club and then the Flying Club,
and then Jack started a flying operation out at Opalaca
(45:45):
after me.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Opa Laca is a city of Miami Dade with an
airport the coconut grove smugglers favored.
Speaker 5 (45:52):
I was living at the Miami Lakes Country Club and
I moved to Ocean Reef, and then Lamar moved to
Ocean Reef. Then Jack moved to Ocean Reef.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yes happy, he's referring to the exclusive Ocean Reef club
in North Key Largo.
Speaker 5 (46:13):
I had two hangars at Ocean Reef. Lamar had one
hanger at Ocean Reef. I guess after I left, Jack
took over one of my hangers.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
He's also implying the group smuggled drugs there via private hangars.
Speaker 5 (46:29):
You got to remember I started in what seventy four
or five. The first load I ever made, I carried
five kilos from Bolivia of cocaine. So off and on
one form or another. I had functioned in the industry
(46:50):
for over five years. That's a long time to get
away with doing what we were doing.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
But as this shifted into the eighties, the good old
boys dynamic was shifting too. Like Icarus, all these guys,
the Commodore, Captain America, the astronaut, and Captain Jack would
eventually fly a bit too close to the sun and
one would actually crash and burn, but only after all
had had some very real run ins with the law.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
They all got burned except Happy, Except Happy. Yeah. When
I was talking to Happy, it was pretty clear that
he was very clever. He was always a jump ahead
of the law. He was as much involved as any
of the others, maybe even more.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
So, and that level of involvement would ultimately let Happy
play both sides. What's the biggest misconception people have about
the war on drugs?
Speaker 5 (47:48):
Oh, that the government wants to do something about it.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
They don't.
Speaker 5 (47:54):
Everybody that works in the industry wants to keep it
going and make it bigger and bigger.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
The more money they pump at it.
Speaker 5 (48:03):
The niser choice that the guys have to play with.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
In the cars that they seize, they get the drive.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
So you think there was never any real intention to
win the war on drugs.
Speaker 4 (48:17):
Once they realized how lucratific could be to fight.
Speaker 5 (48:20):
It, well, it was all for show.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
On the next murder in Miami, the long standing history
of prohibition pushing illicit profits.
Speaker 5 (48:33):
When later moved into the Bahamas, he paid a lot
of money to be able to operate out in normal steal.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
While the War on drugs makes for some very bizarre
bed partners.
Speaker 5 (48:48):
He told me that the CIA had been attempted to
observe the government in the.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Bahamas and how the coconut grove smuggling set wound up
in such hot water.
Speaker 5 (48:59):
The color dry from their faces as there was a
photograph of Lamar on there and it said master criminal
or secret agent.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Murder of Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers
are Lauren Brett Pacheco, Taylor Chackoine, and Phil Stamford.
Speaker 4 (49:17):
Written by Phil Stamford and.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Lauren Brett Pacheco, Audio editing and sound design by Nicholas Harder,
Evan Tyer, and Taylor Chacoine, featuring music by Evan Tyre,
Phil Meyer, John Murchison and Taylor Chacoine. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get the stories that matter to you.
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on
Murder in Miami.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
So it's nineteen eighty two and I decided how to
go back to Washington, DC. Along the way, it had
occurred to me that the people I considered the real
criminals were the people who were running things in Washington
and other places like that.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
The Christic Institute was a nonprofit public interest law firm.
They sought to wield the law as a weapon of
progressive change against a number of daunting targets.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
What I told Danny was that Bob Adams had been
part of a military intelligence unit that provided logistical support
for assassinations conducted by the United States. And in any case,
Danny offered me a monthly stipend of twenty five hundred
dollars a month, and I put everything in the car
again and went back to Miami.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Now, you're basically working as a private investigator, investigative journalist,
investigating intercept a private investigation.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, I suppose. So the funny part is that when
I got back, I went out to the office in
Perne and it was closed. So finally I tracked down Bob,
and Bob tells me turns out that Lamar has been
under federal investigation for some time now, something called Operation
Loan Star, and it's a very big deal. The next
(01:26):
thing I know, I get this call from Bob saying
that Lamar wants to meet me at the mutiny. When,
out of the blue, Lamar says, well, I just want
you to know that I appreciate what you're doing here,
but I sure as i'll wish you and your boys
back in Washington would get a move on it. I
don't know what to make of it, and he says, oh,
come on, now, you're with the CIA.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Right?
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Wait? He thought you were with the CIA. Why?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I had no idea at the time.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
So if Bob Adams led Phil to believe Intercept was
connected with drug smuggling through Lamar Chester, who was Chester's connection,
the man you're about to meet would definitely know because
he claims he facilitated one of Chester's notable expansions in
the drug trade.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Did you quit loving me?
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Happy Miles here?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Give me a call.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
That's mister Happy Miles, a man who's led a pretty
fantastical life when peppered with some very unique professions. He's
also very active on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Happy here, give me a call.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
On Facebook, his dormant Twitter self describes Happy as a
lifelong adventurer, pilot, sailor, boat builder, plane builder, and a
purveyor of the finer things in life.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Judge spuggling was born than a job. It was an adventure.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Mister Miles was also a close business associate and friend
of Intercept's biggest client, Lamar Chester, the man indicted as
a marijuana smuggler, although Happy himself never bothered much with marijuana.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
I don't like doing around pot because I hate the
smell of it.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Cocaine was Happy. He's preferred cargo.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
It is. It is bulky, and it's not as messy.
Coke is all nice and clean and wrapped up. You
just put it in Duffel bags.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
What do you miss about those times?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
The money?
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I'm Lauren brad Pacheco, and this is murder in Miami.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
When I started working in an Intercept, I was just
like mister Magoo, stumbling around there. I didn't know anything,
and I certainly had no idea that at the time
they were already under federal investigation.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
All I really knew about Lamar Chester was what Bob
Adams had told me. And I wouldn't meet Happy Miles
till years later, when I figured I'd better start looking
into this thing.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
What was your initial take on Happy Miles.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He was a very eccentric, interesting guy. He had a
lot of great stories. He had an island in the
Bahamas for a while. One story that sticks with me
is that when he was making a lot of money
in the drug business, like all of those guys, he
had a lot of disposable income, he gave a fifteen
thousand dollars tip to a waitress and a lunch counter
(04:52):
down in the Keys. It's quite a life he's lived.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yeah, he's such a character.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
He strikes me as this purely like Dionysian person.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
There's a reason why they called himself Happy Miles.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And over the course of many months, I've grown used
to hearing Happy Miles share the stories woven into that life,
which spans eighty three years.
Speaker 5 (05:23):
When I tell people about my life, they don't believe me.
Nobody could have done all the things I've done.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
He's not kidding, you know.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
I produced a record you did, what is it? Called
The Songwriter with Michael dunafon the ex wide receiver for
the Denver Broncos. He's dead now, But I wrote you
heard the song Coyote Ugly.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
There's a movie called Coyote Ugly.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
I should see the Bastards because it's a copyrighted name.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
What's the song kyote yug So you order up the
shot and you order of a here and hopes that
it'll bring her bit.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
There you're you, yah, the old woman. I went with
an eight, kind of woke up with three. What dead
this woman do to deserve me?
Speaker 3 (06:22):
And then it goes on to say just how ugly
was she?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
I'm telling you she could drop them mag it off
of me wagon.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Well, this woman is what you call.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Cow cowd. The ugly is when you roll over in
the morning, you take a look at her and you
chew your arm off to keep from waking her up.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
No, that's coyote ugly.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
You wrote that, yeah, Mike, and I did. I owned
the copy right.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, not exactly a feminist anthem. The song does appear
on the album Happy Nailed Me, complete with a nineteen
eighty one cop be right, and the singer Michael Dunavan
was indeed on the roster of the Broncos in nineteen
seventy six and seventy seven, before becoming mayor of Glendale, Colorado,
and running for governor in twenty fourteen. The thing about
(07:15):
Happy his stories check out. Happy's kind of like the
dose ekis guy of decadence.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
Well, la world knows Vias Happy H Miles.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
What does the H stand for?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Horny?
Speaker 5 (07:30):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
And, as my voicemail can attest, most every Happy Miles
story leads to another.
Speaker 5 (07:37):
Hey, I saw a real funny story.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Give me a call.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
If you'd wager a former cocaine smuggler with eighty three
years under their belt would have some pretty interesting stories
to share with Happy, you'd hit the jackpot.
Speaker 5 (07:52):
I didn't tell you the red sheetcase story, did I?
Speaker 4 (07:56):
No?
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Okay? When I flew for another.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Guy, he had this Arab that would take samsoried suitcases,
the lining out and leticulously with bag the cocaine and
very small bags like a small condom. Kind of okay,
(08:21):
and he would line the vertical edges of the suitcase
with it glue in ice cream sticks to hold everything
in place, and then put the lining back in. NIA
couldn't tell just by glancing that anything it had done
(08:42):
to the suitcase unless you picked it up and it
would be twenty pounds heavier right than it should be.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Happy's job was to fly into Venezuela and pick up
the suitcases containing the hidden cocaine. But when the courier
arrived did his hotel. Happy had immediate issues.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
The suitcases were empty, and I said, hold it, hold it,
I'm not carrying these seaitcases out past immigration and customs
to the airplane. I'm not going to do it these
empty suitcases. This is ridiculous. And what man owns red suitcases?
Speaker 4 (09:27):
They were both red.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
Yeah, brand new sampsodite red suitcases with twenty keys of
coch in each one, made them by twenty pounds more.
So I went down to the Habitashery in the hotel,
very swank Habiitashery, and I bought arrows shirts enough to
(09:52):
fill up these big suitcases, probably four or five grand
worth because they were like five dollars apiece.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
They weren't cheap.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
How big were these suitcases?
Speaker 5 (10:05):
They were big suitcases. I filled these up with shirts,
so now they had all these unwrapped shirts in it.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Right, So I buy a a flight plan out for.
Speaker 5 (10:18):
The morning at the stun up at dawned because nobody
will be out there right, and I paid customs off
ahead of time, so I felt rather secure. But I
had a hanging bag. I had a duffel bag. I
had my flight bag and two fucking red suitcases. Well
(10:42):
that's quite a load.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
For one to carry.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
Yeah, So next morning, I carry the shit downstairs, grab
a tap to the airport, and I'm walking out to
the airplane.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
It's about a four hundred foot truck. I get about
halfway there to the airplane.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And that's exactly when mister Miles says. A young army
guard shows up to offer a huffing and puffing happy
assistance with his heavy load.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
Now, the last thing guy wanted him doing is carrying
one of these suitcases, right. So he says, kak Enny
and the suitcase. What do you got in the suitcases?
So I laid him down and opened them right away,
and he looks really puzzled. I've got all these brown
(11:36):
new shirts. And he says to me in Spanish, he says,
kiddy enters, you stead him contrabandista to come. He says,
what are you a smuggler of shirts?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I said, yeah, he caught me. But look, just.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
Take whatever shirt you want and you can have them. Well,
this kid never saw a thirty dollars shirt and there's light,
so he took two shirts and told me on Spanish,
I have to go quick before the sergeant seized me.
And he takes off of a couple of shirts and
I take off for the airplane loaded, jump in, light
(12:19):
it up and go. But he had caught a smuggler
of shirts.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Who had a lot of cocaine stuffed underneath the shirts.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:32):
Anyway, so that was the story.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And middle initial aside. There's also a story behind the
Happy Miles name.
Speaker 5 (12:52):
Well, people started calling me Happy while I was dating
amm Margaret.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
You should be a happy man if you're and Margaret yes,
and Margaret that and Margaret Viva Las Vegas as in
Elvis and Margaret. But as Happy tells it, this was
a few years before she found fame.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
In the sixties. I had just gotten out of the
Marine Corps and then I met Anne Margaret. She went
to work at the Villa Marina, and I took her
to breakfast every morning after she got off work at
midnight or two, because they didn't have any money to eat.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
The They is the band she was singing with at
the time.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
They didn't even have money to put gas in their
car to get to the gig. I took her to Catalina,
earned two of the guys from the subtle tone her band.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
We had a rough ship coming back.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
We had to drift all night because it was so
rough you couldn't go either way.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Happy so he offered to keep Ms. Margaret warm under
a tarp during the night.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
We got in about nine o'clock in the morning and
the guy said, boy, it looks like you've had a
lot of Happy Miles and the name just stuck.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Does your driver's license say Happy Miles.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
My driver's license says it. I have two names on
my passport and my pilot's licenses in the name of
Happy Miles. When I crashed on the mountain top in Bolivia,
they told me that they were going to suspend my
license because I wasn't Happy Miles. I was John Anthony Mahalo.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
In order to avoid a formal hearing, Happy says he
was given the option of providing the Bolivian officials with
character references confirming he was an upstanding citizen known as
Happy Miles. He figures he collected about three signatures.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
Yeah, I had everybody sign it. I had the Mayor
of Miami Beach. I had the Mayor of Miami Maurice Foray.
I had the customs officers where I cleared customs with
the airplane all the time. I had the Fire Department
and Coral Gables police Chief. And I had tons of
(15:25):
members from the Adventures Club.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Sign It nestled in Coconut Grove in the mid to
late nineteen seventies, the Adventurers Yacht and Sailing Club offered
participants a clever combination of an exclusive membership with outdoor adventures,
complete with instruction and rentals for sailing and eventually flying.
At the time, the Adventurers Club was a fixture on
(15:51):
the Miami social scene, and so was its flashy founder,
mister Happy Miles.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
Coca At Grove was a great place to live. And
you know, having the Adventures Club, I was Miammies fair
haired boy. I was on a first named basis with
the Mayor of the city, attorney and manager.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Happy shared a ton of pictures with me from all
different stages of his life. Many are set in tropical
or social situations where he's smiling next to an assortment
of beautiful women in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Happy stood about six feet.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Tall, with a wavy head of dark hair and a
devious smile that competed with the bright blue of his
eyes for attention, which competed with the sparkle of his
taste in gold chains, expensive watches, and at one point
a diamond studded bracelet that spelled out his name.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
It was a nugget bracelet. I'll send you a picture
of me wearing it, and also wearing a gold Rolettes
was a nugget band that I paid forty thousand for.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Wouldn't that kind of be a dead giveaway as to
what you did for a living?
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Well, catch me if you can.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
He sent the picture.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
You can see why in his younger days, Happy was
often mistaken for Teddy Kennedy. He's seated at a desk,
arms resting in front of him, golden bling popping out
from both the dazzled wrist, and a medallion in chain
resting atop his chest hair. He's wearing a confident grin
and a sleek white collared shirt generously unbuttoned at the neck.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
I was a pretty good dresser. I mean I had
a lot of Western seats. I still learned the boots
from that.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Era, and those boots seem made for walkin'. Considering the
number of times Happy he's been married.
Speaker 5 (17:48):
Some people that are in better know than I am
say it's been a Baker's dozen, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
Thirteen.
Speaker 5 (17:56):
Wow, Well, in my case, there were tons of tons
of women around as the commodore.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
You know, Happy was known as the commodore of the
Adventurers Club, which at its height posted more than twenty
five hundred members, including the then mayor of Miami.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
And international drug smuggler Lamar Chester. That's where their paths
first crossed.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
Lamar Chester joined my yacht club to sail, and I
get such a good job of running boats. He thought
I should be in the airplane business, and he had
a bunch of airplanes he couldn't pay for, so I
bought him.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
And that's how I met Lamar.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
He was flying for Eastern Airlines, but he had overextended himself.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
And you guys ended up becoming pretty good friends, right.
Speaker 5 (18:50):
Yeah. I was the only outsider at his wedding because
it was only family relatives. I was the only non
family member there. It was an Indian theme.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And by Indian mister miles means Native American.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
I got a picture of it Artists and Lamar, okay,
let me get up so I can describe it. Artists
was a she was tall by pianner or something like that.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
She west eighty and others.
Speaker 5 (19:25):
Lamar's kind of been a eisenhowerd tight jacket, but a
Western like and he stands about three quarters of a head,
two thirds of the head taller than Artist.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Why was there a theme to the wedding just for fun?
Speaker 5 (19:43):
No, it was both of their second marriages, and they
were like that.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
The photo was faded to a soft pastel blow. Lamar
and Artists are looking at the camera, likely held by
happy Chester's right arm resting on his bride's lower back.
Both are wearing wide grins, and Artists is indeed wearing
what appears to be Native American garb and a band
across her forehead.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
Chester smile is topped by.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
A thin mustache that gives off an earl Flynn sort
of vibe. He's wearing his dark hair meticulously slipped back
and a yellow rose on his left lapel.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
They look like a very happy couple.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
Well, I think they were very much in love with
each other. I know she was going with some mafia.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Also when Lamar met her.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
Lamar used to buy roses and fly over there a
yacht and dump the roses out from his nose at
the mafia.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
He wasn't afraid.
Speaker 5 (20:41):
Lamar wasn't afraid of anything. He stood about two or
three inches taller than I, long, lanky, kind of a
farm boy type, and he wasn't afraid of anybody or anything.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
That fearlessness would be on full display during a double date.
Happy remembers as memorable on multiple levels.
Speaker 5 (21:05):
One time we went for Paiea in Cuban Town in
my Cadillac and Lamar and artists were in the back seat,
and I'd pull up to a stop sign and a
guy would pull up alongside of us and then want
a drag racist to the next light. And I didn't
know Lamar.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Was giving him the finger of the whole time.
Speaker 5 (21:30):
And when we came to stop, he had a three
point fifty seven pointed at me.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
And I was in the right lane, so I made
the right.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Turn and tried to lose them. And here we were,
at one hundred miles an hour, going through Cubantown, all
the residential.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Roads, and I was open for.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
A cop to see us. We finally locked him and
we got back to his apartment on Brickell Avenue on
the water there, and I went up to his apartment
and he opened a foot locker and got a couple
machine guns out of it uzzis and said, let's go
(22:10):
find the bastard. I said, Lamar, you're crazy. We're not
going looking for any trouble. And he was flying guns
then to Nicaragua.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
You heard that, right, machine guns that were being flown
from Miami to Nicaragua in the late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
They were military foot lockers in the living room, stacked
one on top of the other, standard military foot lockers,
the issue you in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
A foot locker is about.
Speaker 5 (22:44):
Two feet high and two feet deep and four feet
long or something like that.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
And they were just filled with guns.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
Yeah, there were probably at least twenty thirty guns of
each one.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
And what kind of guns.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
Sixteen's I guess and M one and stuff.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Like that, so military grade stuff.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Yeah, all military grade.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
And did he tell you who he was running the
guns for?
Speaker 5 (23:17):
This IA? I would imagine the CIA was running that.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Show those guns and Chester's claim of running them for
the government will play a major role as history in Foles,
and that remains one of the pieces Bill Stamford is
still trying to place and one that will eventually play
out in a court of law.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, that was one of the stories that struck me
as very important because it was evidence that Chester was
running guns. I mean, there were crates of guns, and
is Happy says, no one has that many guns for
personal use. I mean they were in these crates for shipping.
And apparently he told Happy that he was flying them
(24:02):
to Nicaragua.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Remember that story because it'll come up again. But in
terms of our timeline, Happy's hold on Miami social scene
was coming to an end by the time Phil relocated there,
which is why their paths wouldn't cross until years later.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
When I finally tracked him down. It turned out he
was living about ninety miles from me in Albany, Oregon,
in an abandoned aircraft hangar building a plane.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
Very happy asque.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
He has remarkable abilities. I mean he's completely unschooled, but
there's a little bit of certainly mechanical genius about him.
He was able to put together huge deals. He was
able to master several crafts. I think he started out
as a sail maker, and then that got him into
the boat rental business, and then he got into the
aircraft business, and he was modifying planes and god knows,
(24:54):
flying them too, without a commercial pilot's license.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Now, no, he's dyslexi, so he can't get his instrumental
flight certificate.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
He gets mixed up. That's why he said that it
was scary.
Speaker 5 (25:08):
I didn't like it. Oh, I mean, you're coming back
at night time. Sometimes it was just scary as shit
being dyslexic. I'd almost killed myself a couple times. The
airplay lost it in the clouds and it went out
of control, and just a good Lord to save my ass,
(25:29):
I guess I don't know.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, good, that's happy.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Did I ever tell you that he ended up going
into the movie business as well, both as a producer
and in Caddyshack, there is that scene where Ted Knight
is on the boat and Rodney Dangerfield is trying to
rev up his boat and come see him, and all
of this chaos ensues and somebody throws a fishing rod
(25:59):
and he gets hot to the boat and he goes
flying through the air, and at that moment a plane
comes and swoops down, almost brushing Ted Knight on the
top of the head.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
And guess who's flying that plane.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
That's happy? Yeah, sure, that's happy.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Miles and flirting with risky flying seems to be a
running theme with the Coconut Grove guys. Here's happy.
Speaker 5 (26:20):
In fact, Lamar at one time let me land a
seventy seven at National Airport.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
No way, not with people on the flight. Oh yeah,
how did that come about?
Speaker 5 (26:34):
That?
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Lamar? Let you fly a passenger plane.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
I was on a trip with Lamar.
Speaker 5 (26:40):
Back in those days, they could take somebody up into
the cockpit, even take him on the airplane without.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Paying for him.
Speaker 5 (26:49):
And when the chief plot Freester said what do you doing?
He said, I didn't think he could fly? Do you
think I'd let him fly my airplanes? And I have
had eleven thousand hours probably at that point in my life.
And we took off from Miami and the co pilot
got out of the seat and I got in and
(27:11):
then flew the airplane. I flew the approach and then
what we got, I don't know, down five hundred feet
or something.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
He said, my airplane and he landed it.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Oh so he landed it.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yeah, but I could have landed.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
It back to Phil.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Did he also tell you a story about an air
drop in the Everglades where Lamar talked his way out
of an arrest.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yes, it's a great story. One morning they're doing another
drop and Happy's up doing the lookout, and here come
two planes headed from Jamaica or wherever they were coming from.
They flew together because they'd create one radar signature, and
the idea was that the plane carrying the dope would
drop down and the other one would take off, so
(28:00):
that people watching radar would think that just one plane
had passed over the Everglades and would be landing at
the whatever airport sometime later. So here comes the plane
landing on the road and Lamar is driving a.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Truck, but there's a police presence nearby, and so the
gang had to get a message to Chester in code,
I'll let happ you pick it up from here.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
They didn't use aircraft radios to talk to back and forth.
They used marine boat radios, and they would talk about fishing.
You know, I hope you got your license with you today,
because the game warden's checking licenses. It looks to be
about five minutes away or something like that anyway. So
(28:51):
Lamar landing was offloading the load. He had a truck.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
And not just any truck, this one was cussed demized.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
It was painted green, and it had a Florida state
seal on the door that said Florida hyacin Control. Nothing
suspicious about that, except there's no Florida hyacin control.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
They had the logo and everything just made up.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
Yeah, yeah, And they had this truck jacked up way
off the ground so you couldn't see in the bed
of it. So they landed, unloaded the load, threw a
tarp over it, and Lamar said, you fly the airplane
to his son and I'll drive the truck because a
(29:43):
sheriff was coming. So five minutes later they meet going
the opposite direction and Lamar waves him down.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
That's when Chester informs the sheriff about suspicious activity he'd
passed a while back, and graciously offers to phone it
into the state and.
Speaker 5 (30:04):
The sheriff said, would you be so kind? He said, yeah,
I'll do that for you.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Back to phil and Lamar drives off, and of course,
Happy learns about it later when they all stop for drinks,
probably outside Opa Loca air Airport and They all have
a good laugh about that one.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
So there was no hyacinthe patrol.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
No, no, I mean, these guys have a lot of
time to sit around scheming. And Lamar was and Happy.
They were both schemers.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
That's kind of brilliant because they weren't impersonating an actual
arm of law enforcement.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
They created their own.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, yeah, no, it was a good dope smuggler story.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Lamar Chester would also introduce Happy Miles to a legendary
marijuana smuggler, Ron Elliott.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Well On and Lamar both slew through Eastern Airlines, were
both captains and they both joined my club. Ron is
one of these guys that overthinks everything and makes it
too complicated. He was an astronaut, you know, wow, But
(31:18):
when they shut down the Skylab program, we went to
work flying for Eastern and he and his wife had
had a baby that had some weird disease where the
baby never got out of diapers. He wasn't supposed to
live for a year or two, and he lived to
(31:39):
be seven, and she was a nurse and both of
them were just frazzled by the time the kid died.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
And Ron Elliott said, fuck, I was so teed up.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
I'd have robbed a bank, but he decided he'd find
a buy in Jamay and he did so.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
That pretty much explains how Lamar, Chester, Happy Miles, and
Ron Elliott knew each other and why they were eventually
known by their swagger sounding nicknames.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Back to Phil there was Captain America of course, as
Lamar the commodore, Happy because he had this boat rental business,
and Ron Elliott his nickname was the Astronaut because at
one time he'd actually been part of the US government
astronaut program. He's a very vivid character. I hadn't met
(32:33):
him yet either. He was like Happy. I didn't meet
him till later. He had grown up in northern Florida,
like Lamar and Daredevil. Like Lamar, he'd been flying crop
dusting jobs while he was still in high school, and
about the time he graduated from high school went into
the Service and ended up flying special operations missions in
(32:55):
Vietnam and laws and besides that, he was flying in
the Mid East for intelligence off the book stuff, but
he was a pilot for Eastern just like Lamar, And
that's actually how they met.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Elliott told Stamford about the meeting, which he remembers occurring
in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
He had a layover in Boston for about four hours,
and I was in the pilot's lounge and who should
come in but Lamar. Lamar wasn't flying that day, so
he'd come up just to see Ron. And they started
talking and at a certain point, Laura said, how'd you
like to do some hanky panky flying? And Ron says
he played dumb at first, didn't know what he was
(33:35):
talking about. And Lamar smiled at him and put his
government records folder with its government records on the table
in front of them, and Ron looked at it, and
so he knew that Lamar was already familiar with all
the off the books flying he was already doing. He
agreed to hook up with Lamar and for the next
several days, he said they were down in the Bahamas,
(33:56):
and Lamar showed him where the safe houses were where
he could get gas and that sort of thing, and
they turned out to be best friends. He was Lamar's
best buddy.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
How did Lamar get Elliott's records?
Speaker 2 (34:11):
He would have had some sort of connection. It's pretty clear.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Did Elliott's name come up? If I'm not mistaken, in
the Black Tuna trial too.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Oh yeah, he was actually among the indictees in the
Black Tuna trial, but eventually dropped. And I don't know
whether it's because he had the government connections or because
he wasn't really part of the Black Tuna organization. He wasn't.
He was brought in at the very end by Bobby Plattshorn,
who'd filled a duty to rescue a couple of pilots
(34:50):
who'd gone down in Central America. And so he got
Ron Elliott and another guy who turned out to be
ad informant to fly down and get the two down pilots.
And when they landed, they were arrested, and Ron Elliott
was charged and initially on the Blacktooning indictment, but.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Then the charges were dropped.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, And as I say, it's not clear whether it
was because he had the government connections, which is quite possible,
or because he wasn't really part of the Blacktoona gang.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
So Elliot the charges or drops and platt Shorn gets
sixty years under the kingpin. Yeah yeah, Captain America, the
Commodore and the Astronaut, along with another smuggler named Jack Devo,
would very much rule the Miami Skies of nineteen seventies
drug smuggling.
Speaker 5 (35:44):
Here's happy Jack was Captain Jack from Dick Tracy. He
came in to join the club and very impressionable guy.
He came and talked to me about joining the club.
I told him it was one hundred and fifty six
dollars up front for his first year dues and I
(36:07):
would waive the initiation fee and of four hundred and
he went and he got a check for one hundred
and fifty six dollars signed by his mother. He was
a great pilot, good IFR pilot.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
What is an IFR pilot?
Speaker 5 (36:24):
Instrument flight rules? Where you go into the clouds and
you can't see anything and you have to drive the
airplane on instruments only.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (36:36):
So what happened was Jack joined my club and then
he borrowed my Lake Amphibian and wrecked it.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
Did so much damage to it that I don't know
how he got it home.
Speaker 5 (36:51):
And then the government came and said, do you know
that he's using your airplanes?
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Because he was using the planes from the Adventurers Club
to run trips where.
Speaker 5 (37:04):
Well I think he he originally was, I'm not sure,
probably flying out at Jamaica, but Denny went to Columbia.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Then the DA comes to you, right and starts asking
questions about Jack's travel.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
Yeah, yeah, the task Force. He got on the task
forces radar.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
And that's when Happy says, the task Force leaned on
him to keep tabs on devo. But when Happy realized
they were taping his office at the Adventurers Club, mister
Miles returned to the favor.
Speaker 5 (37:42):
I recorded the guys at Johnson Aviation, which was the
DEA in their office next to my office.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
They were trying to get evidence on mate.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
So while they're recording you, you're recording them.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (37:57):
Except I did a better job than they did, and
I never talked.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
In my office again.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
Instead, I taped everything that went on in their office.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
And what were they up to?
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Anything but the right thing?
Speaker 5 (38:13):
I mean I had cakes of them marketing product over
the telephone and stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yeah, and by marketing products, mister Miles means making drug deals.
So again, they're actually committing the crimes they're trying to enforce. Right,
Oh yeah, yeah, Happy he kept those tapes as insurance,
which could explain the unique immunity deal he wound up getting.
(38:43):
We'll dive more deeply into Jack Develle in future episodes,
and how he eventually ended up testifying against Manuel Noriega,
the former CIA spy turned drug running dictator.
Speaker 5 (38:56):
Yep testified before Congress with all his face wow, with
the black hood over his head.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
We'll circle back to all of that a bit later,
but back to our story. Armed with an innate sense
of both engineering and ingenuity, mister Happy Miles would take
credit for a hack that was an absolute game changer
for this high flying drug smuggling set.
Speaker 5 (39:22):
You know, everybody credits Later with stop in the Islands
and figuring out how to get cocaine from Colombia to
the US, But it was me far ahead of them.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Carlos Later was a German Colombian drug trafficker and one
of the founding members of the.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
Made Aene cartel.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
He's considered to be one of the most important Colombian
drug kingpins to have ever been successfully prosecuted in the
United States.
Speaker 5 (39:52):
I'm the guy that built the airplanes with four thousand
mile range. It wasn't for me building to came Clippers,
so airplane that'll fly forever, reliable twin engine Hypercomanche.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Usually, although I built.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
Other ones Skymasters with two hundred gallons of fuel on them,
well over that two hundred and fifty gallons.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Of fuel on them.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Inspired by a book about a legendary long distance pilot
who'd broken records by retrofitting planes with additional fuel capacity,
Happy employed the innovation to smuggling by artfully disguising the
additional tanks to avoid detection.
Speaker 5 (40:39):
They carried so much fuel, but nobody knew it. I mean,
I just had a few more filler caps up the
airplane the average comanche, but instead of carrying ninety gallons
I carried three hundred plus.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
And more fuel.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Means less stops on the way back from Columbia or
Jamaica for planes filled with drugs, which meant less risk
of customs discovering those drugs and less money spent on
bribing those customs agents. Fewer stops, lowered risk, and increased profits.
So happ these huge, yet hidden tanks were a huge
hit with the Coconut Grove smuggling set and a time
(41:19):
when smuggling was a bit simpler and safer.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
We're just a bunch of good old boys, Jack devoed
Lamar and Ron Elliott myself. None of us were bang bangs,
sheet them up. The only one I had ever seen
with a gun was Ron Elliott. When he pulled it
on me, threatened to blow my brains out. Said I
(41:46):
owed him money, but I didn't, but I.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Paid him anyway.
Speaker 5 (41:50):
And I never made enemies or had vendettis against anybody
because life was too short and you never know when
you might need them.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
But that happened a bit later, back to more innocent times.
Speaker 5 (42:06):
It was three cocaine cowboy Era and Grisel de Blanca.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Grisel de Blanco was a notorious Colombian cocaine trafficker known
as La Madrina, the Godmother of Cocaine, and the Black
Widow because she murdered all three of her husbands.
Speaker 5 (42:27):
There wasn't a lot of bang bangs, shoot them up,
if any. The head of the DEA, Jean Frankr, used
to call me the last of the oldie goldies. And
DEA was underfunded. They had no money, so they were
(42:48):
pretty hamstrong of what they could do, and surveillance wasn't
what it is now.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
So in a way, it was a simpler, more safe
time to get involved in that business.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yeah, I mean, the chances of you getting caught if
you knew what you were doing were pretty slim.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
And I'm sure that the rewards were pretty high.
Speaker 5 (43:16):
Well yeah, I mean you're getting basically ten percent.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Value of the load.
Speaker 5 (43:23):
Whoever your Columbian connection is, you're splitting six thousand dollars
of kilo basically, So I was getting three thousand and
five hundred.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
A kilo in the end.
Speaker 5 (43:39):
That's not what I got in the beginning, but that's
what I got after i'd worked for.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
In a while.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
How much at your peak would you say you were
bringing in a month.
Speaker 5 (43:51):
I was making it at least three hundred and fifty
thousand a month.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
I'd go one time, So.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
You were making three hundred fifty dollars a trip a trip.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Yeah, that's over four million a year in the nineteen seventies,
and that's what basically put the Coconut Grove guys on
the radar of law enforcement money.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Apparently, after Lamar made the hookup with the cartel people
and got into cocaine, which was really big money. It
was Ron Elliott who walked Duffel bags of money through
customs in Panama to launder it in the banks down there,
and he was the one who was chosen to do
(44:38):
that because he wore a suit better than any of
the others. He could look like a real businessman. That
was his job, besides regular smuggling flying duties is taking
the money into Panama to be laundered.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
According to Happy, fuel takes weren't the only influence he
wielded over Chester. He claims to have given the former
dope smuggler his cocaine connection.
Speaker 5 (45:01):
And when I fixed him up with that load of cocaine,
he made more money off of me that load than
the entire time he had been running marijuana.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
That's another story and a significant turning point in ours.
Back to Happy and his impact on the coconut grove
smuggling set.
Speaker 5 (45:21):
Believe it or not, I was the tremsetter. None of
them had airplanes as sophisticated as my cocaine clippers were
mich Coman cheese. I mean they followed me all the time.
I had the Adventures Club and then the Flying Club,
and then Jack started a flying operation out at Opalaca
(45:45):
after me.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Opa Laca is a city of Miami Dade with an
airport the coconut grove smugglers favored.
Speaker 5 (45:52):
I was living at the Miami Lakes Country Club and
I moved to Ocean Reef, and then Lamar moved to
Ocean Reef. Then Jack moved to Ocean Reef.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yes happy, he's referring to the exclusive Ocean Reef club
in North Key Largo.
Speaker 5 (46:13):
I had two hangars at Ocean Reef. Lamar had one
hanger at Ocean Reef. I guess after I left, Jack
took over one of my hangers.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
He's also implying the group smuggled drugs there via private hangars.
Speaker 5 (46:29):
You got to remember I started in what seventy four
or five. The first load I ever made, I carried
five kilos from Bolivia of cocaine. So off and on
one form or another. I had functioned in the industry
(46:50):
for over five years. That's a long time to get
away with doing what we were doing.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
But as this shifted into the eighties, the good old
boys dynamic was shifting too. Like Icarus, all these guys,
the Commodore, Captain America, the astronaut, and Captain Jack would
eventually fly a bit too close to the sun and
one would actually crash and burn, but only after all
had had some very real run ins with the law.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
They all got burned except Happy, Except Happy. Yeah. When
I was talking to Happy, it was pretty clear that
he was very clever. He was always a jump ahead
of the law. He was as much involved as any
of the others, maybe even more.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
So, and that level of involvement would ultimately let Happy
play both sides. What's the biggest misconception people have about
the war on drugs?
Speaker 5 (47:48):
Oh, that the government wants to do something about it.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
They don't.
Speaker 5 (47:54):
Everybody that works in the industry wants to keep it
going and make it bigger and bigger.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
The more money they pump at it.
Speaker 5 (48:03):
The niser choice that the guys have to play with.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
In the cars that they seize, they get the drive.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
So you think there was never any real intention to
win the war on drugs.
Speaker 4 (48:17):
Once they realized how lucratific could be to fight.
Speaker 5 (48:20):
It, well, it was all for show.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
On the next murder in Miami, the long standing history
of prohibition pushing illicit profits.
Speaker 5 (48:33):
When later moved into the Bahamas, he paid a lot
of money to be able to operate out in normal steal.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
While the War on drugs makes for some very bizarre
bed partners.
Speaker 5 (48:48):
He told me that the CIA had been attempted to
observe the government in the.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Bahamas and how the coconut grove smuggling set wound up
in such hot water.
Speaker 5 (48:59):
The color dry from their faces as there was a
photograph of Lamar on there and it said master criminal
or secret agent.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Murder of Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers
are Lauren Brett Pacheco, Taylor Chackoine, and Phil Stamford.
Speaker 4 (49:17):
Written by Phil Stamford and.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Lauren Brett Pacheco, Audio editing and sound design by Nicholas Harder,
Evan Tyer, and Taylor Chacoine, featuring music by Evan Tyre,
Phil Meyer, John Murchison and Taylor Chacoine. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get the stories that matter to you.
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