November 9, 2022 • 25 mins
Motorsports journalist Bones Bourcier shares the story of Gary Balough, the legendary short track racer who was arrested in 1982 for his role in a Caribbean pot smuggling ring.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Campsite Media. Can you just tell me what you had
for breakfast? Yeah, so I can set my bone. I
thought my breath was bad or something. Um, oatmeal. You
need more than that. Bacon, eggs, ham and cheese, omelet,
some caviare French toasts? Are we are? We get to go?
(00:23):
Are we rolling? Hey? Everyone? This week we're taking a
break from the series to bring you a bonus episode.
We'll be back to regular programming next week, but right now,
I want you to meet this guy. He's one of
the first people I ever spoke to when I started
working on running Smoke Bones force here Uh freelance writer
(00:44):
of books, Uh, monthly columnists for magazines? What are you
write about? All? Racing? Bones is one of my favorite
motorsports writers out there. A couple of years ago, he
helped a legendary race car drive to write his autobiography.
That driver's name was Gary hot Chew Blue. I had
(01:05):
to wait a year and Alf and my boss up saying, Gary,
come on, man, there's other people could write this. The
voice you're hearing, well, that's the man himself, Gary Blue.
I said, no, there's there's anyone can do it for me.
Those around me and go up from me and watched
me race and new my story and new the players,
and new the people and the bugs, and nobody shouldn't.
(01:29):
Nobody should have done that. Books look like he did it.
It's in my words, so he cleaned it up a
little bit here and there, but it's actually me talking,
you know. Gary won over a thousand races, several championships,
and earned himself a reputation as one of the toughest
competitors in the field, but all of that was overshadowed
when FBI agents arrested Blue and sixty others for running
(01:51):
a marijuana smuggling operation. To be clear, Gary's story is
quite different from Derek's story, but it does show how
a racers and visions and his skill set can lead
to success just as easily as it can lead to tragedy.
I'll let bones take it away. Gary Blue was a
kid from UH just outside of Miami Hilia, Florida, who
(02:13):
kind of grew up in the shadow down there of
guys like Bobby and Donnie Allison and Red Farmer drivers
who gained spectacular UH fame and NASCAR UH. Gary was
about a half a generation behind them, so he not
only saw those guys compete at the local level. They're
all from South Florida. Um, but they recognized him as
(02:34):
kind of a hungry young kid who was always sneaking
into the pits, uh, you know, going to every race possible.
He would hitchhick with those guys, bum rides to different tracks.
He just had an enormous hunger and he brought that
hunger to his own racing once he got to be
old enough. You know, built cars, uh, you know, using
the old, tried and true junk yard method back then,
(02:58):
and UH had a desire that that he kind of
burned with it. He saw these guys as being the best,
and he wanted to be at that level, and UH
worked his way from the South Florida tracks to dirt
tracks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. That paid very well. He had.
He had won all the major short track races that
(03:21):
he ran. He was definitely one of those guys that
everybody acknowledged as being super talented, very aggressive personality, fiery,
you know, had a fight here and there, made an
obscene gesture to an official here and there. He could
be a polarizing figure, but as a guy who writes,
you want to write about interesting people, and Gary was
(03:44):
always always interesting. There was always something happening around him.
So you saw Gary race back in the day. I
saw him race um in the mid seventies for the
first time at Syracuse, New York. There was a mild
dirt track at the time. Once a year they'd get
together and October for this big race on the mile track.
Gary number one corner. Let's see what happens park, he
(04:09):
drops back up it. Cozy gets up to the barn.
Now break Cozy moving into it on a three spot
and look at Cozy monor Cozy motoring down the back.
You garry below each till year later he draws a
lot of four pint car line played between the corner,
checkered back and ready now they come out a turn
of a par Yeah, what I come. Gary wanted three
(04:35):
years in a row, seventy six, seven and eight. And
then every year we'd go to Florida for Daytona speed
Weeks and he would compete nearby at New Smyrna Speedway, UH,
and he was dominant over there quite a bit. So Yeah,
I saw him in a lot of different UH kinds
of cars and saw him excel in every one. Of them,
(04:57):
so again it was it just reinforced what I had
always heard, which was he was just special. There's four
quarters are too straight away. It's pretty easy bath. But
you know what if you get the four quarters better
and everybody else and didn't have it runs on the
Stralia away, then it handles down the strailway didn't really
becomes fast. I never want to reach myself, but I've
always had a lot of really really really good people.
(05:19):
Please them me that worked your ass off and works
hard as they could and had the hard into it
to win, so we could all win together, and we
went together. What did you see in Gary's racing style
that set him apart? The first thing anybody notices about
him is that he's super aggressive. You know that that
You know, if the hall opens up, you go for
right now. Uh. If you can't go inside a guy
(05:43):
to pass, which is probably the easiest way, just go
around him, you know. Just don't don't mess around too
long when you catch a guy do something. Uh. And
yet a lot of guys who do that, they might
win one night and then crash the next three nights. Gary,
even though he had that raw aggressiveness, UH, had a
(06:03):
way of winning long races, and those things don't always
go together, so you started to think that there was
a a real brain there in addition to you know,
whatever he had naturally, whatever gifts he had, you know,
balance reflects his eyesight, all the things that go into UM,
probably any driver. He also had that that ability to
(06:27):
plot out race. You know. The other thing was the
fact that he had won, you know in bulky, clumsy
dirt track modifies and sleek, fast, well handling as false cars.
You know, it's like, no matter what he got into UM,
he excelled and then ended up moving back to Florida,
(06:49):
UH in the late seventies to sort of pursue his
dream of NASCAR racing. By the late seventies, Gary had
managed to win just about every major race east of
the Mississippi and just about anything with four wheels and
a motor. For a driver of his caliber, there was
only one thing on his mind, the NASCAR Cup Series,
the pinnacle of American motorsports. To pursue that dream, Gary
(07:11):
decided to move back down to South Florida, where he
knew some race team owners that can help him get
behind the wheel of a Cup car. I mean everybody
remembers the show Miami Vice. I think that came out
maybe in eighty five, but it was based on what
all those people in Hollywood had seen for the last
however many years. Gary got back down there in seventy
eight or seventy nine, UH in Miami, and you know,
(07:33):
kind of the way he puts everywhere you looked. There
were people that were driving cars that if you looked
at him really quickly, wouldn't think they would own. You know,
a guy that you knew was maybe a Saturday night
race or shouldn't be driving around in a Mercedes or
a Ferrari. And then some of these guys were living
in houses that you knew, based on whatever profession they
(07:56):
were in, they probably shouldn't have been able to afford.
And I think he got curious about that and some
of the people he started driving for. We're most definitely
wrapped up in that end of life. I mean, I
remember going to New Smyrna every February and seeing three
or four guys, uh every year, and they were all
(08:19):
South Florida guys were you knew there. It wasn't a
rumor that they'd been involved in something like that. It
was a well known fact. You know, these guys have
beautiful race cars and beautiful tow vehicles and gorgeous trailers,
and you knew the money was coming from somewhere. There
were no big sponsors on the side of the car,
and it was kind of just like an open wink wink,
(08:40):
kind of a secret that that's what they were into.
It made perfect sense that racers would feature prominently in
the drug smuggling scene back in the day. The skill
set that made you successful in the drug business would
serve you well in racing, and vice versa. I think
what racers also have is that, you know, that willingness
to risk things. You know, the best brain all have
(09:00):
a high degree of being comfortable with risk. They're all
decisive thinkers. As we said, a lot of them are
good plan A, plan B, plan C type people. Because
in a race, you know, it's the old boxing thing.
Everybody has a plan to get hitting the nose well
and racing, everybody has a plan till they throw the
green flag. So if plan A doesn't work, you go
(09:23):
to plan B. You go to you know, you're gonna
pass this guy on the outside, and then he moves over,
so you gotta pass him. On the bottom. You know,
you're very reactive. And the way Gary says that somebody
told him, you know, you'd be perfect for this. You know,
if you want to kind of just get a feel
for what it's like, you can come on one of
these trips and you can be what's called a counter.
(09:44):
And the counter was if you you and your friends
from South Florida, we're going to the Bahamas somewhere in
a little cove or someplace, and you were meeting another
group that was, in this case Colombians, and they had
a counter on their boat, and you had a counter
on your boat. And what the counter was was the
(10:05):
guy who as they unloaded thirty seven bales or whatever
it was, how whatever the amount was from their boat
onto your boat, their counter agreed that they had unloaded
thirty seven, and you were the guy that counted and
saw that, okay, we've got thirty seven. And then so
you know he did it the first time. Uh, it
(10:26):
went off without a hitch. You know, got home, made
the kind of money that you wouldn't have made if
you won every race for two or three months at
the short track level. And I think once you do
it and get away with it, no matter what it
is in life, if you get away with something wants,
it's gonna be easier the second time, I think, and
it obviously was for him, and you know, you go
again and then you go again, and I think he
(10:49):
just sort of found himself deeper and deeper and deeper
into it until there might come a point where you
don't even think of yourself as being in it and and
in it anymore. You you are just in it. Yeahsh
was winn into you know what I mean? Like, Wowey
was laid better than Rachel. I can tell you that more.
(11:11):
After the break you're listening to running Smoked by the
early the team owners Gary was working with in South
Florida had managed to get him into a Cup car.
(11:33):
The equipment wasn't top notch, so Gary wasn't leading laps
or competing for the win, but he was making a mark. Nonetheless,
did drug money contribute to him getting all the way
to the Cup Scares? Yeah? I think on on some
level it did because it financed his short track stuff.
He was already unbelievably talented, but he was able to
do not just him, but I mean he drove for
some people who were involved in too so you were
(11:53):
in better equipment than you've ever been in UM. I
think it made more people look at him for Gary
Blue entered the Daytona five hundred, the highest profile event
in the whole NASCAR season. The Daytona five hundred, the
great American race from every corner of the country. For
the twenty fourth consecutive year, stock car racing's faithful returned
(12:17):
last week to Daytona Beach. They partied, They soaked up
the sun, had beer and barbecue last Sunday the five hundred,
traditionally a ten car battle all day long and a
race that tells us a lot about who's gonna run
strong for the rest of the season. That left Kale
Yarborough and Darryl Waltrip as the only real contenders, but
Yarborough couldn't avoid us spinning Gary Blue. Kale made it
(12:41):
to the pitch, changed tires and held on to finish second.
Waltrip fell out with a blown engine, avoiding the destruction
to win it easily. Bobby Allison, though he ran out
of gas on the cool off laugh and had to
be pushed to victory lane. Despite some mechanical troubles that day,
Gary finished in the eleventh place. It would be last
time he would ever race at Daytona. After that Daytona
(13:04):
five hundred four days later, UH, seventy different people were
sort of rounded up in the wee hours of the morning,
all across Florida, and a couple of more up in
North Carolina. So there were seventy people in that ring.
UH indicted. Two drivers will not see action at Richmond.
They have some explaining to do to the FBI. In
(13:26):
the pre dawned darkness Thursday morning, federal agents arrested NASCAR
driver Gary Blue, who finished eleventh and last week's Daytona. Five.
The drivers and sixty eight other people were indicted on
drug smuggling charges. Organization would offload marijuana from mother ships,
bring it into this country, and then have it unloaded
again and stored. Would be eventually turned over to owners
(13:48):
or buyers of this marijuana, and the group handling the
off floating and importation would receive a percentage of the
marijuana as payment for their services. During its two and
a half year investigation, the FBI received total cooperation from
NASCAR in tracing the drug rings efforts to use stock
car racing as a front for its activities Also arrested
(14:11):
were a number of mechanics associated with those drivers, and
six million dollars in property was seized as well. Gary
was the most visible name on the bunch. I was
living in Connecticut at the time, and I don't remember
it was in the Hartford paper or one of the
one of the New York daily papers, but his picture
was in their Biggest Life, you know, getting lead out
(14:33):
and he was wearing a jacket. It was winter, even
in Florida was winter and having a you know, an
FBI guy has scored him along, you know, head down
in the home. It looked like a typical purp walk
type photo and it was. It was kind of jarring
at the time, even though it was kind of an
open an open secret what a lot of those guys
were doing. It was just like, oh my god, you
(14:56):
know this. You hate to say, poor Gary because it
was a mistake that he made, you know, he made
his own decisions and paid for it. But it was
there was something I think that resonated in people that
you know that maybe he was more of a shame
uh to have that happened to than than some guys were,
because you kind of thought, and I still think it's
(15:16):
a what what might have been in the next couple
of weekends. Guys that sort of knew him before and
had enough respect for him that without saying this, they
were kind of saying, you know, you really did screw
up here. But you know, you're our our friend, you're
our fellow competitor. Maybe let's not talk about it. You know,
you don't you don't have to say that. You just
(15:36):
kind of know, let's not talk about it. But yeah,
you are ostracized on some level because you're not going
to get a medicine avenue, you know, advertising executive making
a sponsorship decision that goes in your favor if you've
been indicted for drug smuggling. So on that level, yeah,
he was oscracized. This The sport kind of let him
stay around, you know, Nascar. I'm sure it was a
(15:59):
hell of a thing for them to decide, what do
you do with this guy? He was found guilty. You know,
it had to be a heck of a a line
for them to walk and a heck of a fairly
fast decision for them to make. They have rated winning,
they got all the money, got all the time. They
make your rules, they say, what I want to say,
(16:20):
do what they want to do. That's what the system is.
You're not going to beat him. Like I said before,
for your first thing is when they said the United
States America versus carry blue. That's your first thing right there.
You think you're gonna go against the United States government
and vet him here an idiot, here an idiot. But
(16:42):
you know, he fought it for a long time. They appealed,
and he continued to race until uh So for four
years he was out and about, although you know you're
here in trial a lot of the time. Uh he
did manage to run and win some fairly big short
track races in that time. He won the championship of
(17:02):
a late model series called the All Pro UH Series,
which was really big in the South. It was kind
of a maybe like the racing version of single A
baseball or something, you know, a respected minor league. He
won the championship for that, went to the awards banquet
in the beginning of eight seven, celebrated the championship, got up,
(17:26):
got the trophy, got the pictures, got the prize money,
the whole deal, and Monday morning he had to turn
himself in. So the cliche he always uses is that's
what it felt like to be champion for a day.
You know, he had Sunday. He did admit that they
celebrated pretty hard. You know, you've got nothing to lose
at that point, and UH, Monday morning he had to
(17:48):
report to UH federal facility and I think the first
one was Texas, UH and that was it. You know,
You're flew there on Sunday, reported on Monday, and began
a series of a few years behind bars. And I'm
sure that had to be a an amazing UH come
(18:11):
down for a guy who had been, you know, for
a lot of his life, had been kind of the
the toast of the party. And I mean not necessarily
party parties, but you know, you're the guy in victory lane.
You're the guy that people want autographs from. You're the
guy that people want to meet UH. You're the guy
that car owners want to drive their equipment. You're the
guy that rivals looked to for inspiration as a driver
(18:34):
and maybe for UH chassis set up technology, wisdom as
a competitor. You know, he was. He was always on
top of his game that way too. So you go
from being, you know, a guy who has been celebrated
for most of your life to be in just a
number uh, in a very very you know, bad place around.
(18:58):
He reached a point where you realized. I think when
he first came out, he thought, Okay, I've paid my
debt to society. I'll make it back. You know, I'll
win all these major short track races. I'll show everybody
that I was, that I am what I was before,
and I'll get back to the cup level. But life
had moved on, you don't. You're no longer, um, the
(19:19):
hot young guy that he was at one time, and
racing had changed to now where you know, a young
guy was no longer thirty or thirty two. Now the
young guys were so you know, if you're in your forties,
you were almost an old man at that point. It
was gonna be really exceptional if you got there. And yeah,
he was exceptional talent wise, but you've also got that
(19:41):
giant albatross around your neck is having been a convicted
drug smuggler. So there was no upside really for any
major team hiring a guy like Gary. He was still
incredibly talented, but there's a lot of incredibly talented race
drivers out there, and and um, he reached the point
where he realized he wasn't gonna make it anymore. He
(20:04):
was living in Charlotte at this time when he was
trying to rebuild his career and went to Florida, and
as he puts it, kind of got talked into, well,
why don't you just go on this one one more run?
You know, just you know, just you need a little money.
You know this will be good. And as he said,
you do it once you're sort of right back into it.
He jokes about this, but he's also deadly serious when
(20:26):
he says it. He said, I I approached my smuggling
like I approached my racing. He was prepared. He had
contingency plans for everything. Well, he had backup fuel pumps
and backup you know, backups for backups. He was very
well prepared if something went wrong in the middle of
the night on the ocean, where otherwise you just sort
(20:47):
of float around out there with a broken down boat
waiting for the somebody to discover you. And if somebody
is the coast guard or the d e A, you
know you're going back to jail. I mean, all myself
is nice as I couldn't life, as I couldn't claim
as I could and hard at tested, buying different stuff
and different butters, different he said, I smuggled the same
(21:11):
way with my boats, because when you break down, you're
in trouble. You can't show that stuff over. So I
think that probably the people that were involved in that
like to having him around because he was good from
that standpoint. He knew what he was doing. But all
the preparations and concealed compartments in the world won't help
if the d a already has eyes on you before
(21:32):
you even leave the dock. As soon as he picked
up his load and started back towards land, he was
surrounded by police. Gary Blue spent the next six years
in prison and was let out in The shame that
time is that he didn't learn from his mistake. You
know your now your family is back into it again.
Now you're back in prison. Uh, you know, so there's
two levels of it. It was a shame for so
(21:55):
many people who knew him to see him go through
that the first time, because you thought, you know what
a waste of talent, enormous talent. And I should say
that the the landscape had changed from a pop culture
point of view, you know, Miami Vice wasn't cool in
the nineties, you know what I mean, Nobody looked at
it like a fun outlaw thing anymore. You know, by then,
(22:16):
the whole drug thing, you know there, everybody knew by
then what what told drugs took on families and kids
and and uh crime in cities. You know, it was
no longer something you could wink your way through. Nowadays,
Gary isn't driving anymore, but he's still in the racing world.
He does work with teams, uh, at different levels of
(22:37):
the sport, including even like in the NASCAR Truck Series,
you know, helping teams and mentoring drivers. He's got so
much to offer. There's definitely a lot still in him.
But you know, you're now, you're a guy that's seventy
years old or whatever. In a in a young man's game,
you can be a mentor. But you know, the the
ugly truth of it is probably, you know, just simple math,
(23:00):
most of the young drivers that come up today don't
remember who he was or what he was, you know,
when he was winning races in the seventies and eighties.
It's just a lot of those kids weren't born, you know,
until until the late eighties or the nineties. You know,
it's uh, you know how he takes work as and
when he can find it, and he's he's still really
(23:20):
respected by certain guys in the sport, By almost everybody
in the sport that's been around. There are people who
um held it against him for a long time, didn't
want anything to do with him, and finally it bothered
him for a long time. You know, guys he raced
with people he knew who worked on his cars back
in the Northeast or back in Florida. You know that
(23:41):
didn't really want anything to do with him anymore. But
he finally accepted in his own mind that look, you know,
I'm not gonna say I'm sorry, I did what I did.
I got caught, ultimately lost a total of ten years
of his life, you know, behind bars. So as he
puts it, I've paid my dues. I'm not going to
say that I what I did wasn't wrong, But I'm
not going to apologize to you and you and you uh,
(24:04):
you know this is this is what I did and
it and it happened, and you know, again, it goes
right back to who Gary was anyway. He was always
always the most one of the most interesting guys at
the racetrack. He's led an incredible life, both good and bad.
Um and it's you know, I'm sure he has regrets,
but like he like he put it and still puts it.
(24:26):
He's he's past the point where he's going to keep
apologizing for it. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next
week with more Running Smoke. Running Smoke is a production
of Campsite Media, Dan Patrick Productions and Workhouse Media, Written
(24:48):
and reported by me roder Gola. Our producers are Leah Papes,
Laine Gerbig, and Julie Dennischet. Our editors are Michelle Lands
and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark
mc adam. Additional sound and mixing by Ewen Lye from Ewen.
Additional reporting by Susie McCarthy. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick,
Josh Dean of camp Said Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Pinella,
(25:11):
and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary
Mathis and Angela Mercado, artwork by Polly Adams, and additional
thanks to Greg Horne, Johnny Kaufman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van
Brocklyn and Sean Flynn
Campsite Media. Can you just tell me what you had
for breakfast? Yeah, so I can set my bone. I
thought my breath was bad or something. Um, oatmeal. You
need more than that. Bacon, eggs, ham and cheese, omelet,
some caviare French toasts? Are we are? We get to go?
(00:23):
Are we rolling? Hey? Everyone? This week we're taking a
break from the series to bring you a bonus episode.
We'll be back to regular programming next week, but right now,
I want you to meet this guy. He's one of
the first people I ever spoke to when I started
working on running Smoke Bones force here Uh freelance writer
(00:44):
of books, Uh, monthly columnists for magazines? What are you
write about? All? Racing? Bones is one of my favorite
motorsports writers out there. A couple of years ago, he
helped a legendary race car drive to write his autobiography.
That driver's name was Gary hot Chew Blue. I had
(01:05):
to wait a year and Alf and my boss up saying, Gary,
come on, man, there's other people could write this. The
voice you're hearing, well, that's the man himself, Gary Blue.
I said, no, there's there's anyone can do it for me.
Those around me and go up from me and watched
me race and new my story and new the players,
and new the people and the bugs, and nobody shouldn't.
(01:29):
Nobody should have done that. Books look like he did it.
It's in my words, so he cleaned it up a
little bit here and there, but it's actually me talking,
you know. Gary won over a thousand races, several championships,
and earned himself a reputation as one of the toughest
competitors in the field, but all of that was overshadowed
when FBI agents arrested Blue and sixty others for running
(01:51):
a marijuana smuggling operation. To be clear, Gary's story is
quite different from Derek's story, but it does show how
a racers and visions and his skill set can lead
to success just as easily as it can lead to tragedy.
I'll let bones take it away. Gary Blue was a
kid from UH just outside of Miami Hilia, Florida, who
(02:13):
kind of grew up in the shadow down there of
guys like Bobby and Donnie Allison and Red Farmer drivers
who gained spectacular UH fame and NASCAR UH. Gary was
about a half a generation behind them, so he not
only saw those guys compete at the local level. They're
all from South Florida. Um, but they recognized him as
(02:34):
kind of a hungry young kid who was always sneaking
into the pits, uh, you know, going to every race possible.
He would hitchhick with those guys, bum rides to different tracks.
He just had an enormous hunger and he brought that
hunger to his own racing once he got to be
old enough. You know, built cars, uh, you know, using
the old, tried and true junk yard method back then,
(02:58):
and UH had a desire that that he kind of
burned with it. He saw these guys as being the best,
and he wanted to be at that level, and UH
worked his way from the South Florida tracks to dirt
tracks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. That paid very well. He had.
He had won all the major short track races that
(03:21):
he ran. He was definitely one of those guys that
everybody acknowledged as being super talented, very aggressive personality, fiery,
you know, had a fight here and there, made an
obscene gesture to an official here and there. He could
be a polarizing figure, but as a guy who writes,
you want to write about interesting people, and Gary was
(03:44):
always always interesting. There was always something happening around him.
So you saw Gary race back in the day. I
saw him race um in the mid seventies for the
first time at Syracuse, New York. There was a mild
dirt track at the time. Once a year they'd get
together and October for this big race on the mile track.
Gary number one corner. Let's see what happens park, he
(04:09):
drops back up it. Cozy gets up to the barn.
Now break Cozy moving into it on a three spot
and look at Cozy monor Cozy motoring down the back.
You garry below each till year later he draws a
lot of four pint car line played between the corner,
checkered back and ready now they come out a turn
of a par Yeah, what I come. Gary wanted three
(04:35):
years in a row, seventy six, seven and eight. And
then every year we'd go to Florida for Daytona speed
Weeks and he would compete nearby at New Smyrna Speedway, UH,
and he was dominant over there quite a bit. So Yeah,
I saw him in a lot of different UH kinds
of cars and saw him excel in every one. Of them,
(04:57):
so again it was it just reinforced what I had
always heard, which was he was just special. There's four
quarters are too straight away. It's pretty easy bath. But
you know what if you get the four quarters better
and everybody else and didn't have it runs on the
Stralia away, then it handles down the strailway didn't really
becomes fast. I never want to reach myself, but I've
always had a lot of really really really good people.
(05:19):
Please them me that worked your ass off and works
hard as they could and had the hard into it
to win, so we could all win together, and we
went together. What did you see in Gary's racing style
that set him apart? The first thing anybody notices about
him is that he's super aggressive. You know that that
You know, if the hall opens up, you go for
right now. Uh. If you can't go inside a guy
(05:43):
to pass, which is probably the easiest way, just go
around him, you know. Just don't don't mess around too
long when you catch a guy do something. Uh. And
yet a lot of guys who do that, they might
win one night and then crash the next three nights. Gary,
even though he had that raw aggressiveness, UH, had a
(06:03):
way of winning long races, and those things don't always
go together, so you started to think that there was
a a real brain there in addition to you know,
whatever he had naturally, whatever gifts he had, you know,
balance reflects his eyesight, all the things that go into UM,
probably any driver. He also had that that ability to
(06:27):
plot out race. You know. The other thing was the
fact that he had won, you know in bulky, clumsy
dirt track modifies and sleek, fast, well handling as false cars.
You know, it's like, no matter what he got into UM,
he excelled and then ended up moving back to Florida,
(06:49):
UH in the late seventies to sort of pursue his
dream of NASCAR racing. By the late seventies, Gary had
managed to win just about every major race east of
the Mississippi and just about anything with four wheels and
a motor. For a driver of his caliber, there was
only one thing on his mind, the NASCAR Cup Series,
the pinnacle of American motorsports. To pursue that dream, Gary
(07:11):
decided to move back down to South Florida, where he
knew some race team owners that can help him get
behind the wheel of a Cup car. I mean everybody
remembers the show Miami Vice. I think that came out
maybe in eighty five, but it was based on what
all those people in Hollywood had seen for the last
however many years. Gary got back down there in seventy
eight or seventy nine, UH in Miami, and you know,
(07:33):
kind of the way he puts everywhere you looked. There
were people that were driving cars that if you looked
at him really quickly, wouldn't think they would own. You know,
a guy that you knew was maybe a Saturday night
race or shouldn't be driving around in a Mercedes or
a Ferrari. And then some of these guys were living
in houses that you knew, based on whatever profession they
(07:56):
were in, they probably shouldn't have been able to afford.
And I think he got curious about that and some
of the people he started driving for. We're most definitely
wrapped up in that end of life. I mean, I
remember going to New Smyrna every February and seeing three
or four guys, uh every year, and they were all
(08:19):
South Florida guys were you knew there. It wasn't a
rumor that they'd been involved in something like that. It
was a well known fact. You know, these guys have
beautiful race cars and beautiful tow vehicles and gorgeous trailers,
and you knew the money was coming from somewhere. There
were no big sponsors on the side of the car,
and it was kind of just like an open wink wink,
(08:40):
kind of a secret that that's what they were into.
It made perfect sense that racers would feature prominently in
the drug smuggling scene back in the day. The skill
set that made you successful in the drug business would
serve you well in racing, and vice versa. I think
what racers also have is that, you know, that willingness
to risk things. You know, the best brain all have
(09:00):
a high degree of being comfortable with risk. They're all
decisive thinkers. As we said, a lot of them are
good plan A, plan B, plan C type people. Because
in a race, you know, it's the old boxing thing.
Everybody has a plan to get hitting the nose well
and racing, everybody has a plan till they throw the
green flag. So if plan A doesn't work, you go
(09:23):
to plan B. You go to you know, you're gonna
pass this guy on the outside, and then he moves over,
so you gotta pass him. On the bottom. You know,
you're very reactive. And the way Gary says that somebody
told him, you know, you'd be perfect for this. You know,
if you want to kind of just get a feel
for what it's like, you can come on one of
these trips and you can be what's called a counter.
(09:44):
And the counter was if you you and your friends
from South Florida, we're going to the Bahamas somewhere in
a little cove or someplace, and you were meeting another
group that was, in this case Colombians, and they had
a counter on their boat, and you had a counter
on your boat. And what the counter was was the
(10:05):
guy who as they unloaded thirty seven bales or whatever
it was, how whatever the amount was from their boat
onto your boat, their counter agreed that they had unloaded
thirty seven, and you were the guy that counted and
saw that, okay, we've got thirty seven. And then so
you know he did it the first time. Uh, it
(10:26):
went off without a hitch. You know, got home, made
the kind of money that you wouldn't have made if
you won every race for two or three months at
the short track level. And I think once you do
it and get away with it, no matter what it
is in life, if you get away with something wants,
it's gonna be easier the second time, I think, and
it obviously was for him, and you know, you go
again and then you go again, and I think he
(10:49):
just sort of found himself deeper and deeper and deeper
into it until there might come a point where you
don't even think of yourself as being in it and and
in it anymore. You you are just in it. Yeahsh
was winn into you know what I mean? Like, Wowey
was laid better than Rachel. I can tell you that more.
(11:11):
After the break you're listening to running Smoked by the
early the team owners Gary was working with in South
Florida had managed to get him into a Cup car.
(11:33):
The equipment wasn't top notch, so Gary wasn't leading laps
or competing for the win, but he was making a mark. Nonetheless,
did drug money contribute to him getting all the way
to the Cup Scares? Yeah? I think on on some
level it did because it financed his short track stuff.
He was already unbelievably talented, but he was able to
do not just him, but I mean he drove for
some people who were involved in too so you were
(11:53):
in better equipment than you've ever been in UM. I
think it made more people look at him for Gary
Blue entered the Daytona five hundred, the highest profile event
in the whole NASCAR season. The Daytona five hundred, the
great American race from every corner of the country. For
the twenty fourth consecutive year, stock car racing's faithful returned
(12:17):
last week to Daytona Beach. They partied, They soaked up
the sun, had beer and barbecue last Sunday the five hundred,
traditionally a ten car battle all day long and a
race that tells us a lot about who's gonna run
strong for the rest of the season. That left Kale
Yarborough and Darryl Waltrip as the only real contenders, but
Yarborough couldn't avoid us spinning Gary Blue. Kale made it
(12:41):
to the pitch, changed tires and held on to finish second.
Waltrip fell out with a blown engine, avoiding the destruction
to win it easily. Bobby Allison, though he ran out
of gas on the cool off laugh and had to
be pushed to victory lane. Despite some mechanical troubles that day,
Gary finished in the eleventh place. It would be last
time he would ever race at Daytona. After that Daytona
(13:04):
five hundred four days later, UH, seventy different people were
sort of rounded up in the wee hours of the morning,
all across Florida, and a couple of more up in
North Carolina. So there were seventy people in that ring.
UH indicted. Two drivers will not see action at Richmond.
They have some explaining to do to the FBI. In
(13:26):
the pre dawned darkness Thursday morning, federal agents arrested NASCAR
driver Gary Blue, who finished eleventh and last week's Daytona. Five.
The drivers and sixty eight other people were indicted on
drug smuggling charges. Organization would offload marijuana from mother ships,
bring it into this country, and then have it unloaded
again and stored. Would be eventually turned over to owners
(13:48):
or buyers of this marijuana, and the group handling the
off floating and importation would receive a percentage of the
marijuana as payment for their services. During its two and
a half year investigation, the FBI received total cooperation from
NASCAR in tracing the drug rings efforts to use stock
car racing as a front for its activities Also arrested
(14:11):
were a number of mechanics associated with those drivers, and
six million dollars in property was seized as well. Gary
was the most visible name on the bunch. I was
living in Connecticut at the time, and I don't remember
it was in the Hartford paper or one of the
one of the New York daily papers, but his picture
was in their Biggest Life, you know, getting lead out
(14:33):
and he was wearing a jacket. It was winter, even
in Florida was winter and having a you know, an
FBI guy has scored him along, you know, head down
in the home. It looked like a typical purp walk
type photo and it was. It was kind of jarring
at the time, even though it was kind of an
open an open secret what a lot of those guys
were doing. It was just like, oh my god, you
(14:56):
know this. You hate to say, poor Gary because it
was a mistake that he made, you know, he made
his own decisions and paid for it. But it was
there was something I think that resonated in people that
you know that maybe he was more of a shame
uh to have that happened to than than some guys were,
because you kind of thought, and I still think it's
(15:16):
a what what might have been in the next couple
of weekends. Guys that sort of knew him before and
had enough respect for him that without saying this, they
were kind of saying, you know, you really did screw
up here. But you know, you're our our friend, you're
our fellow competitor. Maybe let's not talk about it. You know,
you don't you don't have to say that. You just
(15:36):
kind of know, let's not talk about it. But yeah,
you are ostracized on some level because you're not going
to get a medicine avenue, you know, advertising executive making
a sponsorship decision that goes in your favor if you've
been indicted for drug smuggling. So on that level, yeah,
he was oscracized. This The sport kind of let him
stay around, you know, Nascar. I'm sure it was a
(15:59):
hell of a thing for them to decide, what do
you do with this guy? He was found guilty. You know,
it had to be a heck of a a line
for them to walk and a heck of a fairly
fast decision for them to make. They have rated winning,
they got all the money, got all the time. They
make your rules, they say, what I want to say,
(16:20):
do what they want to do. That's what the system is.
You're not going to beat him. Like I said before,
for your first thing is when they said the United
States America versus carry blue. That's your first thing right there.
You think you're gonna go against the United States government
and vet him here an idiot, here an idiot. But
(16:42):
you know, he fought it for a long time. They appealed,
and he continued to race until uh So for four
years he was out and about, although you know you're
here in trial a lot of the time. Uh he
did manage to run and win some fairly big short
track races in that time. He won the championship of
(17:02):
a late model series called the All Pro UH Series,
which was really big in the South. It was kind
of a maybe like the racing version of single A
baseball or something, you know, a respected minor league. He
won the championship for that, went to the awards banquet
in the beginning of eight seven, celebrated the championship, got up,
(17:26):
got the trophy, got the pictures, got the prize money,
the whole deal, and Monday morning he had to turn
himself in. So the cliche he always uses is that's
what it felt like to be champion for a day.
You know, he had Sunday. He did admit that they
celebrated pretty hard. You know, you've got nothing to lose
at that point, and UH, Monday morning he had to
(17:48):
report to UH federal facility and I think the first
one was Texas, UH and that was it. You know,
You're flew there on Sunday, reported on Monday, and began
a series of a few years behind bars. And I'm
sure that had to be a an amazing UH come
(18:11):
down for a guy who had been, you know, for
a lot of his life, had been kind of the
the toast of the party. And I mean not necessarily
party parties, but you know, you're the guy in victory lane.
You're the guy that people want autographs from. You're the
guy that people want to meet UH. You're the guy
that car owners want to drive their equipment. You're the
guy that rivals looked to for inspiration as a driver
(18:34):
and maybe for UH chassis set up technology, wisdom as
a competitor. You know, he was. He was always on
top of his game that way too. So you go
from being, you know, a guy who has been celebrated
for most of your life to be in just a
number uh, in a very very you know, bad place around.
(18:58):
He reached a point where you realized. I think when
he first came out, he thought, Okay, I've paid my
debt to society. I'll make it back. You know, I'll
win all these major short track races. I'll show everybody
that I was, that I am what I was before,
and I'll get back to the cup level. But life
had moved on, you don't. You're no longer, um, the
(19:19):
hot young guy that he was at one time, and
racing had changed to now where you know, a young
guy was no longer thirty or thirty two. Now the
young guys were so you know, if you're in your forties,
you were almost an old man at that point. It
was gonna be really exceptional if you got there. And yeah,
he was exceptional talent wise, but you've also got that
(19:41):
giant albatross around your neck is having been a convicted
drug smuggler. So there was no upside really for any
major team hiring a guy like Gary. He was still
incredibly talented, but there's a lot of incredibly talented race
drivers out there, and and um, he reached the point
where he realized he wasn't gonna make it anymore. He
(20:04):
was living in Charlotte at this time when he was
trying to rebuild his career and went to Florida, and
as he puts it, kind of got talked into, well,
why don't you just go on this one one more run?
You know, just you know, just you need a little money.
You know this will be good. And as he said,
you do it once you're sort of right back into it.
He jokes about this, but he's also deadly serious when
(20:26):
he says it. He said, I I approached my smuggling
like I approached my racing. He was prepared. He had
contingency plans for everything. Well, he had backup fuel pumps
and backup you know, backups for backups. He was very
well prepared if something went wrong in the middle of
the night on the ocean, where otherwise you just sort
(20:47):
of float around out there with a broken down boat
waiting for the somebody to discover you. And if somebody
is the coast guard or the d e A, you
know you're going back to jail. I mean, all myself
is nice as I couldn't life, as I couldn't claim
as I could and hard at tested, buying different stuff
and different butters, different he said, I smuggled the same
(21:11):
way with my boats, because when you break down, you're
in trouble. You can't show that stuff over. So I
think that probably the people that were involved in that
like to having him around because he was good from
that standpoint. He knew what he was doing. But all
the preparations and concealed compartments in the world won't help
if the d a already has eyes on you before
(21:32):
you even leave the dock. As soon as he picked
up his load and started back towards land, he was
surrounded by police. Gary Blue spent the next six years
in prison and was let out in The shame that
time is that he didn't learn from his mistake. You
know your now your family is back into it again.
Now you're back in prison. Uh, you know, so there's
two levels of it. It was a shame for so
(21:55):
many people who knew him to see him go through
that the first time, because you thought, you know what
a waste of talent, enormous talent. And I should say
that the the landscape had changed from a pop culture
point of view, you know, Miami Vice wasn't cool in
the nineties, you know what I mean, Nobody looked at
it like a fun outlaw thing anymore. You know, by then,
(22:16):
the whole drug thing, you know there, everybody knew by
then what what told drugs took on families and kids
and and uh crime in cities. You know, it was
no longer something you could wink your way through. Nowadays,
Gary isn't driving anymore, but he's still in the racing world.
He does work with teams, uh, at different levels of
(22:37):
the sport, including even like in the NASCAR Truck Series,
you know, helping teams and mentoring drivers. He's got so
much to offer. There's definitely a lot still in him.
But you know, you're now, you're a guy that's seventy
years old or whatever. In a in a young man's game,
you can be a mentor. But you know, the the
ugly truth of it is probably, you know, just simple math,
(23:00):
most of the young drivers that come up today don't
remember who he was or what he was, you know,
when he was winning races in the seventies and eighties.
It's just a lot of those kids weren't born, you know,
until until the late eighties or the nineties. You know,
it's uh, you know how he takes work as and
when he can find it, and he's he's still really
(23:20):
respected by certain guys in the sport, By almost everybody
in the sport that's been around. There are people who
um held it against him for a long time, didn't
want anything to do with him, and finally it bothered
him for a long time. You know, guys he raced
with people he knew who worked on his cars back
in the Northeast or back in Florida. You know that
(23:41):
didn't really want anything to do with him anymore. But
he finally accepted in his own mind that look, you know,
I'm not gonna say I'm sorry, I did what I did.
I got caught, ultimately lost a total of ten years
of his life, you know, behind bars. So as he
puts it, I've paid my dues. I'm not going to
say that I what I did wasn't wrong, But I'm
not going to apologize to you and you and you uh,
(24:04):
you know this is this is what I did and
it and it happened, and you know, again, it goes
right back to who Gary was anyway. He was always
always the most one of the most interesting guys at
the racetrack. He's led an incredible life, both good and bad.
Um and it's you know, I'm sure he has regrets,
but like he like he put it and still puts it.
(24:26):
He's he's past the point where he's going to keep
apologizing for it. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next
week with more Running Smoke. Running Smoke is a production
of Campsite Media, Dan Patrick Productions and Workhouse Media, Written
(24:48):
and reported by me roder Gola. Our producers are Leah Papes,
Laine Gerbig, and Julie Dennischet. Our editors are Michelle Lands
and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark
mc adam. Additional sound and mixing by Ewen Lye from Ewen.
Additional reporting by Susie McCarthy. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick,
Josh Dean of camp Said Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Pinella,
(25:11):
and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary
Mathis and Angela Mercado, artwork by Polly Adams, and additional
thanks to Greg Horne, Johnny Kaufman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van
Brocklyn and Sean Flynn
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