December 21, 2020 • 28 mins
Jake delves into one piece of the puzzle that he didn’t quite get into in season one but has continued to intrigue him: the source. In this episode, you’ll meet Tommy Powell, a former smuggler who guides us through the import side of the marijuana industry. Starting out as a small time dealer in Michigan, Tommy winds up in Colombia inspecting marijuana crops and working as a liaison between farmers and other smugglers. Eventually, Tommy claims, he became one of the first smugglers to bring in really big loads of Colombian weed to the United States.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey guys, this is Jake Halbern, host of Deep Cover.
We're currently working on season two and we'll be sure
to let you know when it will be coming out.
But in the meantime, we have our first bonus episode
for you. The supply side today's bonus episode. It's actually
(00:41):
a story that I really wanted to include in season one.
In fact, to tell you the truth, I had this
big debate with my producer Karen Shakerjee. I kept saying, look,
we got to include this story. She was like, it's awesome,
but it's kind of a tangent, like a crazy side trip,
and it just doesn't fit. Karen, she was right, kind
of annoyingly, she's almost always right. But fortunately this story
(01:05):
it's perfect for bonus episode because one thing that we
really didn't get into during season one was the suppliers,
the Colombians, the guys who actually harvested all those crops
of marijuana. If you recall, that's where Ned ultimately wanted
to go down to Columbia. He had a source named
Simone who had all kinds of connections down there. These
(01:28):
are the people that would have supplied the drugs to
likely rich. There are the people that controlled everything on
an Earth coast to Columbia. But in the end, and
spoiler your guys, So if you haven't heard episode nine yet,
hit pause, because Ned ends up leaving the FBI and
the suppliers, well, they just kind of slipped away naturally.
(01:56):
This was one piece of the puzzle that still really
intrigued me. So in this episode, we're going to do
a deep dive into the marijuana industry down in Columbia,
and our guide, interestingly enough, is a guy who once
helped supply Mike Vogel back in the day. Remember Mike,
I had it in such a way that I really
control the marijuana industry in Michigan, Anna Iver and all
(02:18):
the rest. He was the grocery guy, the distributor with
the big warehouse. Anyway, I heard about the supplier from
a customs agent, and I was intrigued. I had this
one question in particular that I wanted to run by him.
If you remember from season one, our smugglers had all
his products stuck down in Columbia, one million pounds of marijuana,
(02:39):
and so I'm kind of wondering, what does the bullion
pounds of marijuana look like a fucking mountain that's Tommy Powell.
My name is either Tommy, tom or Thomas, depending on
who I'm talking to. Tommy is to my friends, Tomas
(03:00):
people that don't know me, and Thomas is for the government.
I'm seventy two, I'm a lifelong vegetarian. I'm in great health,
and I look forward to another thirty or four years.
Tommy was a self identified smuggler and salesman for about
(03:23):
a decade. He started in the early seventies. He was
this American ex pat used to live and work down
in Columbia inspecting marijuana crops. He's responsible for bringing in
over three hundred thousand pounds of marijuana himself. Not just that,
he estimates he helped supply a bunch of other smugglers
who brought in somewhere in the range of two to
(03:44):
three million pounds. But Tommy was the guy. He would
be on the ground in Colombia and would often find
himself in some pretty dicey situations. He's lived a crazy life,
even by the standards of the character. As you got
to know in season one, Jake, I can't describe the
(04:05):
walk into the mountains. I mean, so treacherous, so treacherous.
There was this one section. It's probably a hundred yards
where there's a walk it's probably about three feet wide,
and it's over this cliff and the drop is probably
(04:26):
a thousand feet or five hundred feet or something. Some
seriously scary if you look over the edge when you're walking,
you really don't want to do that. So how does Tommy,
a dude from Michigan end up living down in Columbia
inspecting marijuana crops? Turns out it's kind of a wild story. Initially,
(04:47):
he was a dealer in ann Arbor around the same
time Mike Vogel was getting started. Mike Vogel I'm familiar with.
He used to sell my reefer in Detroit before he
got involved with those other criminals. At the time, Tommy
says he was smuggling his reefer, as he calls it
in from Mexico, but the product wasn't so great, nothing
(05:08):
to rag about. Eventually, Tommy gets in trouble with the
law when a drug sniffing dog named Bomber finds a
foot locker of weed at the airport. Police played at
sly and followed the foot locker as it was picked
up and then taken to a house. The cops eventually
barged in and made arrests Tommy. He was at the
house he got arrested. We found news articles documenting all this.
(05:31):
By the way, bottom line, this is bad news for Tommy.
But Tommy says that his case was thrown out because
the judge ruled it was an illegal search and seizure.
Bomber apparently was not authorized to sniff that foot locker. Still,
it was a close call, and so Tommy decides to
go clean for a while. Anyhow, so I said, ah,
(05:52):
I'm retiring. So I decided to go to Gainesville and
visit my brother Billy. And at that time, water beds
were real popular, and so I filled up my van
with like about fifty water beds and that drove down
to Gainesville and start selling them out of the back
of my van. And so I was so successful at it.
(06:14):
I mean I was doing good. I was selling thousands
of them. But as you've probably gathered, he gets drawn
back into the marijuana business. He meets a guy who
offers some some new product imported from Jamaica. This, by
the way, is the early nineteen seventies, and the export
market for Jamaican weed is expanding. In the US, the branding,
(06:37):
for lack of a better word, was good. Bob Marley
was becoming a household name. Tommy says the Jamaican buds
were a real upgrade from the Mexican stuff that he'd
been peddling. So I started taking his Jamaicans up to
ann Arbor and I probably sold Jesus Coming Guy alone
twenty thousand and thirty thousand pounds maybe of his reefer.
(07:00):
So while I'm selling it, I'm getting this Oh shit,
this stuff is not good. It's good. It's better than
that Mexican ship, but it's good. So I put it
in my mind. I says, man, I'm going to go
to Columbian and see if I can get from better
reefer out of there. And the reason that he says
this is because at some point he gets a chance
to smoke some of that Columbian weed. I think I
(07:25):
was at a Partian and Arbor and there were some
hipsters there and they had some Columbian Maryluana and we
smoked it, and I smoked, and I go home, Shit, man,
we've got to get this stuff. You know. It was
that much better. It was two times three times better.
It looked better you know, and it was definitely had
a higher THC content for sure. Then one day two
(07:49):
of Tommy's friends, Ronnie and Dave, propose a kind of
spur of the moment trip. They said, hey, let's go
to Columbia. I says, yeah, man, let's go to Columbia,
go up the north coast and see if we can
find something out up there. You know. I Jamaican ships
getting boring. So we got on a plane Abianca flight
out of Miami, and Ronnie comes up like ten minutes
(08:15):
after the flight's going and says, hey, man, you want
to take a hit of ascid? Oh my lord. So
I says, yeah, man, I'll take a hit of Assis.
Landed in Bogata and proceeded to go directly to the
closest house of ill repute and got an aunt of
cocaine and like five bottles of old par Scotch and
(08:39):
sat in there and drank in there and did other
nfarious things, and I crawled out the front door. Tommy
says that by this point, Ronnie and Dave, there's two
buddies that he'd flown down with. They were in rough shape.
They were so freaked out they didn't want to stay.
So I don't want to stay either, because I'd be
(09:01):
all alone then and I didn't know anybody, you know.
So we hopped back on a cane and flew back
to my Ammy. When you went to Columbia that first time,
did you actually make contact with any marijuana fellers, No,
just with the ladies of the night. A few months later,
(09:21):
Tommy gives it another go, and he has a bold plan.
He wants to set up a twenty thousand pounds shipment
of weed. He heads back down to Columbia this time,
skips the whole acid trip brothel visit, and actually manages
to get an introduction to a reputable supplier, a very cool,
nice Columbian guy, the nicest value want to run into
(09:43):
in the world. And his nickname but we nicknamed him uncle,
and his name was gamo Avola. He's going up in
the mountains talk to the farmers, getting whatever you can
from and he's bringing a spank, samples and stuff like that.
So it's the stuff's awesome. So yeah, yeah, we'll take
(10:04):
twenty thousand, he says. Here, okay, I could do twenty thousand,
I says, well, when it comes down the loaden night,
he only had sixteen thousands, but that's how the Colombian
market started. Tommy says he was the guy, like the pioneer,
who first smuggled really big loads of Colombian weed to
(10:26):
the United States. It's a bold claim and one that
I couldn't totally verify, but the timing of it is right.
Starting in the mid nineteen seventies, weed from Mexico kind
of lost its popularity, in part because Mexican authorities began
using a herbicide known as paraquat to poison marijuana crops
(10:46):
down there. According to declassified CIA documents, American consumers began
to quote prefer the better manicured and reputedly more potent
Colombian marijuana end quote. Tommy says he was the guy
who first brought in large quantities of this more potent
stuff starting in nineteen seventy two. It's a really big success.
(11:09):
He buys the weed for six dollars a pound and
sells it for two hundred and forty pound back in Michigan,
and it's really good stuff. He keeps making trips down
there each year. I tried to always get my loads
together and make sure they're ready by December or I
had a trip together by December, because that's when they
did the harvest, and that's when they had the best marijuana.
(11:31):
Anybody that else goes to Columbian, you know, they all
went down there and they would take anything they'd stashed
that reefer in warehouses, you know, and it'd be like
eight ten months old, you know, and just be trash weed,
you know. And then they also packed it in bricks,
these big fifty pound bricks where they use they use
a press pressing machine and pressed it all up down tight,
(11:53):
you know, and screwed up all the buds, you know.
So I started, I demanded that none of mine to
be pressed like that. I wanted mind to be in pillows.
We call them, nice fluffy pillows of high quality weed.
That was the key. Tommy ended up making a lot
(12:13):
of money, so much money in fact, that he decides
to hide some of it in the ground. He puts
three hundred and eighty three eight hundred and forty dollars
in a suitcase and buried it on some lamb that
he owned in Michigan. Sometime later, this hunter comes along,
finds it, and being a good Samaritan, the hunter hands
it over to the state police. Tommy then tried to
(12:35):
get the suitcase and the money back. He actually shows
up with a receipt for the suitcase, proving that hey,
I purchased this particular handback. He even gave a sworn
statement saying the money was hit, but he took the
fifth when it came to explaining how he got it
no dice. The police wouldn't hand it over the suitcase.
(12:55):
Though it made big news, newspapers and Detroit wrote about it.
It was even mentioned on an episode of Sixty Minutes.
None of his notoriety was especially good for tom in
the long run. He says it really put him on
the authority's radar. Not long after this, he was indicted
by the FEDS, So naturally, Tummy sends to run for it,
(13:20):
become a fugitive. He flies to Europe, spend some time
and some money there, and then he bounces around a
bit to Morocco, the Canary Islands, down to the Bahamas
before deciding where he'll land next. That so hell, and
might as well get it over worth. I'm just going
to Columbia. They're not going to extradite me out of there.
There are never going to get me out of there,
you know, I get the world's baddest ass bodyguards. Yeah,
(13:44):
so that's kind of how I ended up in Columbia.
I wanted to be safe, well, relatively safe. There was
always the danger that he'd fall off one of those
cliffs or worse. More on this when we come back
after the break. So Tommy was under indictment in the
(14:20):
United States, spend some time on the lamb, and then
moves down to Columbia. He deepens his connections there, makes
more trips out to the countryside to inspect the weed
that he wants to buy. Now, typically he didn't do
this in the fields, but at these makeshift marijuana warehouses
that were set up right at the base of the mountains.
(14:40):
And all the while, Tommy says that he maintained his
distribution network back in Michigan. I controlled the boats from
the onloading spots, the trucks, and the market and ann arbor.
You know, already at that point you're telling me that
you weren't just working supply side. You were actually like
(15:03):
complete system. Like you were there at the College of
Vertically Integrated vertically Integrated Marijuana Business. I always did it
all myself. It's interesting because like with Lee Rich and
his group, they basically always just subcontracted out to supply.
They had dance supply partners. If I'm understanding you correctly,
(15:25):
you're saying that like you manage the supply side yourself personally. Yep.
I would go on like three days a week and
go inspect marijuana. And I would inspect marijuana for other
people too, you know, because some of these smugglers quote
non quote, they they didn't know how to get it,
(15:49):
where to get it, who to get it from, and
how it was going to be safe, and how much
they were going to pay and all that shit. I
would take care of all that, especially for my friends. Wait,
so were you like, were you like a consultant? When
you say you're doing this for other people? Are you
are you charging them? Oh? Yeah, I would charge him.
Might get hard of the load. You're like the guy,
like you're the equivalent of like the Costco guy who
(16:10):
like comes in to check out the coffee beans or
like the grapes or something to make sure that they're
up to Costco standard. Yeah, it's on one of these
quality inspection trips. The tummy visits what he calls a
quote mountain of marijuana out in the Guahira Desert. And
(16:30):
that's how he knew how to answer my question, what
does a million pounds of marijuana look like? It was
it was up in the water here and I was
looking for a load of sixty thousand I think in
uh and say, oh, well, we're going to take you
to this low here and you can pick out whatever
you want. Well, it was get late in the day
and we decided to we didn't want to drive in
(16:52):
the water here and at night. Just something you really
don't want to do. And because you got M nineteen
and H and h F a dose F two, you know,
it's just the FBI and Colombian and the dogs, is
uh the CI A wait wait, can you just go
back and explain this again? Do you help me visualize
(17:15):
a million pounds of marijuana? Like, what does it look like? Well,
when you're driving up to it, it's like a like
a big mound or you know, And it was all
piled up into like a peak. And that's where we
went and built our little fort spend the night in. Yeah,
(17:37):
thirty feet thirty five somewhere in there. Wow, that's like
a three story tall building that was totally amazing. Wait,
so so you're telling me you climbed up on top
of this mountain marijuana. You built a fourth out of
the marijuana. Yeah, we'll put up little you know, put
up little walls and stuff, you know, and you know
(18:00):
they're like bricks or like building blox. Hell, it's like
a you know, a rector set or something, you know,
I mean, what are those what's that where they have
all the plastic blocks and they build castles and shipped
out of them here in Florida the Danish company Legos. Yeah, Legos. Yeah,
it was like a lego. It was a meritorial lego.
(18:25):
It's while he's building his lego for it that he
gets a sense for exactly what kind of weed this is. So,
but we went up to the top of the mountain
and started digging out all the bales. You know, these
are all like these were hard pressed bales. You know.
We I never did the hard pressed bales because well
I did them in the beginning because I didn't know
(18:46):
any better. I was spent the whole next day going
through the whole damned lot of the ship and there
was nothing in there. There was any good. You know,
it was dry and dusty. It's out in the middle
of the Wahara Desert. Man, it's probably one hundred degrees
and it was dry and just dusty, and some of
(19:06):
it was moldy. And you know, it's just the stuff
that anam smuggler would go ahead and entertain putting on
her boats. So, yeah, the mountain of marijuana was made
of really shitty weed. And Tommy, he didn't do shitty weed.
He did pillows of the nice fluffy stuff. Tommy has
(19:28):
a whole process worked out. Once he'd okay a batch,
he had to move it down from the mountains where
it was grown and get it loaded up on ships
bound for America. And this there's no easy task. Even
the CIA recognize this. In one declassified report from nineteen
eighty two, it says, quote, the complicated logistics of smuggling
(19:50):
Colombian marijuana, which calls for massive quantities to be hauled
over long distances for large amounts of capital, attracted a
new class of smuggling organizations structured along corporate lines. Yep,
that's Tommy. And to tackle those logistics, at least at
the start of the process, he used mules and or donkeys. Yeah,
(20:14):
a lot it takes a lot. I mean, okay, look
at like take a donkey's or more sure footed, and
they can't carry as much as a mule. So donkey
could probably carry two hundred pounds maybe two fifty, you know,
and then a mule another matter, the mule could probably
carry four hundred. Wow. So it was the mule preparable
(20:37):
for the donkey. The donkeys were more sure footed. Mules, well,
sometimes they slipped. And Tommy saw this for himself on
one very harrowing part of the trail they were traversing
it at night. He had all his heinekens, all our heinekens.
He had like six cases of heinekens on that mule.
And what happened. There's a washout area where the water
(20:59):
runs down the mountain and it carved a little bee,
and I was watching it, and the mule stepped in
that bee and went over the mountain with the heineken.
So you did you actually see your mule with all
the hind hims go over the edge. Yea. At the
end of this ledge, there's there's a little waterfall, you know,
(21:19):
like a shower built into the side of the cliff
at the end, and then there's a pool of water
where there's like a it's like a big jakuzi, I
mean probably ten fifteen feet across and three or four
feet deep. And I was sitting in there and drinking
some toniac and watching the mule, and then he stepped off.
(21:41):
And I'm telling you what, you never heard anything like
that in your life. I could never. I mean it
was the cross between a horse, K mean and a
donkey bay. I mean, it was terrible sound. And he
hit the rocks and that was the end of him.
Once it was down from the mountains, Tommy and his
associates had to move the stuff to the coast in trucks.
(22:01):
There were always some military checkpoints, but they knew the
right guys to pay off. Tommy's an entire business model,
by the way, matches up almost exactly with the intel
that the CIA gathered at the time. It's almost as
if the CIA's report was describing Tommy's operations. The report
mentioned convoys of up to two hundred mules and the
(22:22):
fact that smugglers typically placed bribes for each shipment. The
last stage of the process, according to the CIA report,
was loading the weed into canoes bringing it out to
supply boats. Tommy did this in Ta Ganga, a little
fishing village located on the Caribbean coast of Columbia. Tommy
says that the harbor was run by the native tribes
(22:43):
and that the chief was a good friend of his.
These locals helped him load the weed onto smuggling ships
that pulled into the harbor, and they would use these dugouts. So,
you know, they pick up tree and the biggest tree
they can find, they chop it down and they carve
out a nice boat, make it into a boat. And
(23:04):
they had one dug out there. I swear to god,
it was the biggest thing I ever saw. I was like,
I don't know, but it was from a big tree
from Stowe. Gotta be one piece. And that's thing. How
five thousand pounds. That's basically a canoe that can hold
five thousand pounds of marijuana. Yeah, it was a one
(23:24):
of a kind. And that was Tommy's business model, finding
the fluffy pillows of weed, moving it by donkey, then
by truck, and then a giant dugout canoe floating into
shrimp boags, smuggling it back to the US and selling
it in Michigan. It all worked really well, but Eventually,
Tommy says, the business warmed down. He got ripped off
(23:48):
on one load. He decided, know what time to retire
and really retire. This time he met a Swedish woman
on the beach into Ganga and she got pregnant. He
decided he wanted to follow her home to Sweden, but
first he needed to make sure that he couldn't be
extradited from there. I remember, he said, the days before
(24:08):
the internet. So you sides, he needs to go to
well a law library, a really good law library, the
International Law Library at Harvard University. You went up to Cambridge,
mass for this, Yeah, I went there specifically for that.
(24:29):
I had a good time too. I love sitting on
that bridge watching all them guys rolling their boats and
shit like that. But what I did is I had
some ideas. I had a forger at that time, and
he's a really good forger, ande he forged some paperwork
for me. You know that I was a visiting professor
from the University of Florida, so I could have access
(24:52):
to the library, and every day I'd go into the
university and study the Extradition Treaty, a case law with
Sweden and the United States and I figured out that
according to the law of reciprocity, that there's no way
they could get me for a conspira or for the
one I was really worried about. The one that had
(25:13):
me with life with no parole plus seventy years was
continuous criminal enterprise. While continuous criminal enterprise is based on
predicate defenses. This didn't match any Swedish laws whatsoever. It
was non extraditable, it was non extraditable crime, and sol
was conspiracy. Oh, I figured I'm cool in Sweden. So
he moved to Sweden, married the woman he met on
(25:35):
the beach, and became a dad. It all worked out
pretty well for about three years until the US entered
into a new extradition treaty with Sweden. So much for
all of his sleothing at the Harvard Law Library, Tommy
was indicted for conspiracy to import marijuana and extradited back
(25:56):
to the United States. He ended up spending six years
in prison before he was finally released in nineteen ninety.
He says he's very proud that he never cooperated with
the government. He now lives down in Saint Petersburg. He's
reinvented himself as a computer expert and he actually got
a degree in digital forensics at the age of seventy one.
(26:17):
He's working on a memoir called Reefer, recounting all of
his life stories, and let me tell you, there are
a lot of them. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob
Smith and edited by Karen Shakerjee. Original music and our
(26:41):
theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Miao Bell is Pushkin's executive producer. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Heather Fame, Carly Mcleori Lee, Tom Mallad, Maya Kanig, Eric Sandler,
Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.
Additional thanks to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. You can
(27:05):
learn more about Tommy Powell on his website Tommy Powell
dot net, and stay tuned to this feed from more
bonus episodes and announcements about season two. I'm Jake Holder.
(27:26):
All right, Tommy, I gotta run, but um, all right, brother,
it's been real. We'll be able to just together and
drink some agua dante. That would be great. I look
overd to it. Thanks that you ever at it. No
I had it So the last time I drank Agua dente,
(27:48):
I drank it with the remains of my partner, Victor
in the Agua dente. For this, two brothers, all three
of us, they put some of the ashes in the
Agua dante and did shots of Aguadiente with his bones
in it. You drank your friend, Yeah, how was that?
Drinking the remains of your friend and fucking horrible
Pushkin. Hey guys, this is Jake Halbern, host of Deep Cover.
We're currently working on season two and we'll be sure
to let you know when it will be coming out.
But in the meantime, we have our first bonus episode
for you. The supply side today's bonus episode. It's actually
(00:41):
a story that I really wanted to include in season one.
In fact, to tell you the truth, I had this
big debate with my producer Karen Shakerjee. I kept saying, look,
we got to include this story. She was like, it's awesome,
but it's kind of a tangent, like a crazy side trip,
and it just doesn't fit. Karen, she was right, kind
of annoyingly, she's almost always right. But fortunately this story
(01:05):
it's perfect for bonus episode because one thing that we
really didn't get into during season one was the suppliers,
the Colombians, the guys who actually harvested all those crops
of marijuana. If you recall, that's where Ned ultimately wanted
to go down to Columbia. He had a source named
Simone who had all kinds of connections down there. These
(01:28):
are the people that would have supplied the drugs to
likely rich. There are the people that controlled everything on
an Earth coast to Columbia. But in the end, and
spoiler your guys, So if you haven't heard episode nine yet,
hit pause, because Ned ends up leaving the FBI and
the suppliers, well, they just kind of slipped away naturally.
(01:56):
This was one piece of the puzzle that still really
intrigued me. So in this episode, we're going to do
a deep dive into the marijuana industry down in Columbia,
and our guide, interestingly enough, is a guy who once
helped supply Mike Vogel back in the day. Remember Mike,
I had it in such a way that I really
control the marijuana industry in Michigan, Anna Iver and all
(02:18):
the rest. He was the grocery guy, the distributor with
the big warehouse. Anyway, I heard about the supplier from
a customs agent, and I was intrigued. I had this
one question in particular that I wanted to run by him.
If you remember from season one, our smugglers had all
his products stuck down in Columbia, one million pounds of marijuana,
(02:39):
and so I'm kind of wondering, what does the bullion
pounds of marijuana look like a fucking mountain that's Tommy Powell.
My name is either Tommy, tom or Thomas, depending on
who I'm talking to. Tommy is to my friends, Tomas
(03:00):
people that don't know me, and Thomas is for the government.
I'm seventy two, I'm a lifelong vegetarian. I'm in great health,
and I look forward to another thirty or four years.
Tommy was a self identified smuggler and salesman for about
(03:23):
a decade. He started in the early seventies. He was
this American ex pat used to live and work down
in Columbia inspecting marijuana crops. He's responsible for bringing in
over three hundred thousand pounds of marijuana himself. Not just that,
he estimates he helped supply a bunch of other smugglers
who brought in somewhere in the range of two to
(03:44):
three million pounds. But Tommy was the guy. He would
be on the ground in Colombia and would often find
himself in some pretty dicey situations. He's lived a crazy life,
even by the standards of the character. As you got
to know in season one, Jake, I can't describe the
(04:05):
walk into the mountains. I mean, so treacherous, so treacherous.
There was this one section. It's probably a hundred yards
where there's a walk it's probably about three feet wide,
and it's over this cliff and the drop is probably
(04:26):
a thousand feet or five hundred feet or something. Some
seriously scary if you look over the edge when you're walking,
you really don't want to do that. So how does Tommy,
a dude from Michigan end up living down in Columbia
inspecting marijuana crops? Turns out it's kind of a wild story. Initially,
(04:47):
he was a dealer in ann Arbor around the same
time Mike Vogel was getting started. Mike Vogel I'm familiar with.
He used to sell my reefer in Detroit before he
got involved with those other criminals. At the time, Tommy
says he was smuggling his reefer, as he calls it
in from Mexico, but the product wasn't so great, nothing
(05:08):
to rag about. Eventually, Tommy gets in trouble with the
law when a drug sniffing dog named Bomber finds a
foot locker of weed at the airport. Police played at
sly and followed the foot locker as it was picked
up and then taken to a house. The cops eventually
barged in and made arrests Tommy. He was at the
house he got arrested. We found news articles documenting all this.
(05:31):
By the way, bottom line, this is bad news for Tommy.
But Tommy says that his case was thrown out because
the judge ruled it was an illegal search and seizure.
Bomber apparently was not authorized to sniff that foot locker. Still,
it was a close call, and so Tommy decides to
go clean for a while. Anyhow, so I said, ah,
(05:52):
I'm retiring. So I decided to go to Gainesville and
visit my brother Billy. And at that time, water beds
were real popular, and so I filled up my van
with like about fifty water beds and that drove down
to Gainesville and start selling them out of the back
of my van. And so I was so successful at it.
(06:14):
I mean I was doing good. I was selling thousands
of them. But as you've probably gathered, he gets drawn
back into the marijuana business. He meets a guy who
offers some some new product imported from Jamaica. This, by
the way, is the early nineteen seventies, and the export
market for Jamaican weed is expanding. In the US, the branding,
(06:37):
for lack of a better word, was good. Bob Marley
was becoming a household name. Tommy says the Jamaican buds
were a real upgrade from the Mexican stuff that he'd
been peddling. So I started taking his Jamaicans up to
ann Arbor and I probably sold Jesus Coming Guy alone
twenty thousand and thirty thousand pounds maybe of his reefer.
(07:00):
So while I'm selling it, I'm getting this Oh shit,
this stuff is not good. It's good. It's better than
that Mexican ship, but it's good. So I put it
in my mind. I says, man, I'm going to go
to Columbian and see if I can get from better
reefer out of there. And the reason that he says
this is because at some point he gets a chance
to smoke some of that Columbian weed. I think I
(07:25):
was at a Partian and Arbor and there were some
hipsters there and they had some Columbian Maryluana and we
smoked it, and I smoked, and I go home, Shit, man,
we've got to get this stuff. You know. It was
that much better. It was two times three times better.
It looked better you know, and it was definitely had
a higher THC content for sure. Then one day two
(07:49):
of Tommy's friends, Ronnie and Dave, propose a kind of
spur of the moment trip. They said, hey, let's go
to Columbia. I says, yeah, man, let's go to Columbia,
go up the north coast and see if we can
find something out up there. You know. I Jamaican ships
getting boring. So we got on a plane Abianca flight
out of Miami, and Ronnie comes up like ten minutes
(08:15):
after the flight's going and says, hey, man, you want
to take a hit of ascid? Oh my lord. So
I says, yeah, man, I'll take a hit of Assis.
Landed in Bogata and proceeded to go directly to the
closest house of ill repute and got an aunt of
cocaine and like five bottles of old par Scotch and
(08:39):
sat in there and drank in there and did other
nfarious things, and I crawled out the front door. Tommy
says that by this point, Ronnie and Dave, there's two
buddies that he'd flown down with. They were in rough shape.
They were so freaked out they didn't want to stay.
So I don't want to stay either, because I'd be
(09:01):
all alone then and I didn't know anybody, you know.
So we hopped back on a cane and flew back
to my Ammy. When you went to Columbia that first time,
did you actually make contact with any marijuana fellers, No,
just with the ladies of the night. A few months later,
(09:21):
Tommy gives it another go, and he has a bold plan.
He wants to set up a twenty thousand pounds shipment
of weed. He heads back down to Columbia this time,
skips the whole acid trip brothel visit, and actually manages
to get an introduction to a reputable supplier, a very cool,
nice Columbian guy, the nicest value want to run into
(09:43):
in the world. And his nickname but we nicknamed him uncle,
and his name was gamo Avola. He's going up in
the mountains talk to the farmers, getting whatever you can
from and he's bringing a spank, samples and stuff like that.
So it's the stuff's awesome. So yeah, yeah, we'll take
(10:04):
twenty thousand, he says. Here, okay, I could do twenty thousand,
I says, well, when it comes down the loaden night,
he only had sixteen thousands, but that's how the Colombian
market started. Tommy says he was the guy, like the pioneer,
who first smuggled really big loads of Colombian weed to
(10:26):
the United States. It's a bold claim and one that
I couldn't totally verify, but the timing of it is right.
Starting in the mid nineteen seventies, weed from Mexico kind
of lost its popularity, in part because Mexican authorities began
using a herbicide known as paraquat to poison marijuana crops
(10:46):
down there. According to declassified CIA documents, American consumers began
to quote prefer the better manicured and reputedly more potent
Colombian marijuana end quote. Tommy says he was the guy
who first brought in large quantities of this more potent
stuff starting in nineteen seventy two. It's a really big success.
(11:09):
He buys the weed for six dollars a pound and
sells it for two hundred and forty pound back in Michigan,
and it's really good stuff. He keeps making trips down
there each year. I tried to always get my loads
together and make sure they're ready by December or I
had a trip together by December, because that's when they
did the harvest, and that's when they had the best marijuana.
(11:31):
Anybody that else goes to Columbian, you know, they all
went down there and they would take anything they'd stashed
that reefer in warehouses, you know, and it'd be like
eight ten months old, you know, and just be trash weed,
you know. And then they also packed it in bricks,
these big fifty pound bricks where they use they use
a press pressing machine and pressed it all up down tight,
(11:53):
you know, and screwed up all the buds, you know.
So I started, I demanded that none of mine to
be pressed like that. I wanted mind to be in pillows.
We call them, nice fluffy pillows of high quality weed.
That was the key. Tommy ended up making a lot
(12:13):
of money, so much money in fact, that he decides
to hide some of it in the ground. He puts
three hundred and eighty three eight hundred and forty dollars
in a suitcase and buried it on some lamb that
he owned in Michigan. Sometime later, this hunter comes along,
finds it, and being a good Samaritan, the hunter hands
it over to the state police. Tommy then tried to
(12:35):
get the suitcase and the money back. He actually shows
up with a receipt for the suitcase, proving that hey,
I purchased this particular handback. He even gave a sworn
statement saying the money was hit, but he took the
fifth when it came to explaining how he got it
no dice. The police wouldn't hand it over the suitcase.
(12:55):
Though it made big news, newspapers and Detroit wrote about it.
It was even mentioned on an episode of Sixty Minutes.
None of his notoriety was especially good for tom in
the long run. He says it really put him on
the authority's radar. Not long after this, he was indicted
by the FEDS, So naturally, Tummy sends to run for it,
(13:20):
become a fugitive. He flies to Europe, spend some time
and some money there, and then he bounces around a
bit to Morocco, the Canary Islands, down to the Bahamas
before deciding where he'll land next. That so hell, and
might as well get it over worth. I'm just going
to Columbia. They're not going to extradite me out of there.
There are never going to get me out of there,
you know, I get the world's baddest ass bodyguards. Yeah,
(13:44):
so that's kind of how I ended up in Columbia.
I wanted to be safe, well, relatively safe. There was
always the danger that he'd fall off one of those
cliffs or worse. More on this when we come back
after the break. So Tommy was under indictment in the
(14:20):
United States, spend some time on the lamb, and then
moves down to Columbia. He deepens his connections there, makes
more trips out to the countryside to inspect the weed
that he wants to buy. Now, typically he didn't do
this in the fields, but at these makeshift marijuana warehouses
that were set up right at the base of the mountains.
(14:40):
And all the while, Tommy says that he maintained his
distribution network back in Michigan. I controlled the boats from
the onloading spots, the trucks, and the market and ann arbor.
You know, already at that point you're telling me that
you weren't just working supply side. You were actually like
(15:03):
complete system. Like you were there at the College of
Vertically Integrated vertically Integrated Marijuana Business. I always did it
all myself. It's interesting because like with Lee Rich and
his group, they basically always just subcontracted out to supply.
They had dance supply partners. If I'm understanding you correctly,
(15:25):
you're saying that like you manage the supply side yourself personally. Yep.
I would go on like three days a week and
go inspect marijuana. And I would inspect marijuana for other
people too, you know, because some of these smugglers quote
non quote, they they didn't know how to get it,
(15:49):
where to get it, who to get it from, and
how it was going to be safe, and how much
they were going to pay and all that shit. I
would take care of all that, especially for my friends. Wait,
so were you like, were you like a consultant? When
you say you're doing this for other people? Are you
are you charging them? Oh? Yeah, I would charge him.
Might get hard of the load. You're like the guy,
like you're the equivalent of like the Costco guy who
(16:10):
like comes in to check out the coffee beans or
like the grapes or something to make sure that they're
up to Costco standard. Yeah, it's on one of these
quality inspection trips. The tummy visits what he calls a
quote mountain of marijuana out in the Guahira Desert. And
(16:30):
that's how he knew how to answer my question, what
does a million pounds of marijuana look like? It was
it was up in the water here and I was
looking for a load of sixty thousand I think in
uh and say, oh, well, we're going to take you
to this low here and you can pick out whatever
you want. Well, it was get late in the day
and we decided to we didn't want to drive in
(16:52):
the water here and at night. Just something you really
don't want to do. And because you got M nineteen
and H and h F a dose F two, you know,
it's just the FBI and Colombian and the dogs, is
uh the CI A wait wait, can you just go
back and explain this again? Do you help me visualize
(17:15):
a million pounds of marijuana? Like, what does it look like? Well,
when you're driving up to it, it's like a like
a big mound or you know, And it was all
piled up into like a peak. And that's where we
went and built our little fort spend the night in. Yeah,
(17:37):
thirty feet thirty five somewhere in there. Wow, that's like
a three story tall building that was totally amazing. Wait,
so so you're telling me you climbed up on top
of this mountain marijuana. You built a fourth out of
the marijuana. Yeah, we'll put up little you know, put
up little walls and stuff, you know, and you know
(18:00):
they're like bricks or like building blox. Hell, it's like
a you know, a rector set or something, you know,
I mean, what are those what's that where they have
all the plastic blocks and they build castles and shipped
out of them here in Florida the Danish company Legos. Yeah, Legos. Yeah,
it was like a lego. It was a meritorial lego.
(18:25):
It's while he's building his lego for it that he
gets a sense for exactly what kind of weed this is. So,
but we went up to the top of the mountain
and started digging out all the bales. You know, these
are all like these were hard pressed bales. You know.
We I never did the hard pressed bales because well
I did them in the beginning because I didn't know
(18:46):
any better. I was spent the whole next day going
through the whole damned lot of the ship and there
was nothing in there. There was any good. You know,
it was dry and dusty. It's out in the middle
of the Wahara Desert. Man, it's probably one hundred degrees
and it was dry and just dusty, and some of
(19:06):
it was moldy. And you know, it's just the stuff
that anam smuggler would go ahead and entertain putting on
her boats. So, yeah, the mountain of marijuana was made
of really shitty weed. And Tommy, he didn't do shitty weed.
He did pillows of the nice fluffy stuff. Tommy has
(19:28):
a whole process worked out. Once he'd okay a batch,
he had to move it down from the mountains where
it was grown and get it loaded up on ships
bound for America. And this there's no easy task. Even
the CIA recognize this. In one declassified report from nineteen
eighty two, it says, quote, the complicated logistics of smuggling
(19:50):
Colombian marijuana, which calls for massive quantities to be hauled
over long distances for large amounts of capital, attracted a
new class of smuggling organizations structured along corporate lines. Yep,
that's Tommy. And to tackle those logistics, at least at
the start of the process, he used mules and or donkeys. Yeah,
(20:14):
a lot it takes a lot. I mean, okay, look
at like take a donkey's or more sure footed, and
they can't carry as much as a mule. So donkey
could probably carry two hundred pounds maybe two fifty, you know,
and then a mule another matter, the mule could probably
carry four hundred. Wow. So it was the mule preparable
(20:37):
for the donkey. The donkeys were more sure footed. Mules, well,
sometimes they slipped. And Tommy saw this for himself on
one very harrowing part of the trail they were traversing
it at night. He had all his heinekens, all our heinekens.
He had like six cases of heinekens on that mule.
And what happened. There's a washout area where the water
(20:59):
runs down the mountain and it carved a little bee,
and I was watching it, and the mule stepped in
that bee and went over the mountain with the heineken.
So you did you actually see your mule with all
the hind hims go over the edge. Yea. At the
end of this ledge, there's there's a little waterfall, you know,
(21:19):
like a shower built into the side of the cliff
at the end, and then there's a pool of water
where there's like a it's like a big jakuzi, I
mean probably ten fifteen feet across and three or four
feet deep. And I was sitting in there and drinking
some toniac and watching the mule, and then he stepped off.
(21:41):
And I'm telling you what, you never heard anything like
that in your life. I could never. I mean it
was the cross between a horse, K mean and a
donkey bay. I mean, it was terrible sound. And he
hit the rocks and that was the end of him.
Once it was down from the mountains, Tommy and his
associates had to move the stuff to the coast in trucks.
(22:01):
There were always some military checkpoints, but they knew the
right guys to pay off. Tommy's an entire business model,
by the way, matches up almost exactly with the intel
that the CIA gathered at the time. It's almost as
if the CIA's report was describing Tommy's operations. The report
mentioned convoys of up to two hundred mules and the
(22:22):
fact that smugglers typically placed bribes for each shipment. The
last stage of the process, according to the CIA report,
was loading the weed into canoes bringing it out to
supply boats. Tommy did this in Ta Ganga, a little
fishing village located on the Caribbean coast of Columbia. Tommy
says that the harbor was run by the native tribes
(22:43):
and that the chief was a good friend of his.
These locals helped him load the weed onto smuggling ships
that pulled into the harbor, and they would use these dugouts. So,
you know, they pick up tree and the biggest tree
they can find, they chop it down and they carve
out a nice boat, make it into a boat. And
(23:04):
they had one dug out there. I swear to god,
it was the biggest thing I ever saw. I was like,
I don't know, but it was from a big tree
from Stowe. Gotta be one piece. And that's thing. How
five thousand pounds. That's basically a canoe that can hold
five thousand pounds of marijuana. Yeah, it was a one
(23:24):
of a kind. And that was Tommy's business model, finding
the fluffy pillows of weed, moving it by donkey, then
by truck, and then a giant dugout canoe floating into
shrimp boags, smuggling it back to the US and selling
it in Michigan. It all worked really well, but Eventually,
Tommy says, the business warmed down. He got ripped off
(23:48):
on one load. He decided, know what time to retire
and really retire. This time he met a Swedish woman
on the beach into Ganga and she got pregnant. He
decided he wanted to follow her home to Sweden, but
first he needed to make sure that he couldn't be
extradited from there. I remember, he said, the days before
(24:08):
the internet. So you sides, he needs to go to
well a law library, a really good law library, the
International Law Library at Harvard University. You went up to Cambridge,
mass for this, Yeah, I went there specifically for that.
(24:29):
I had a good time too. I love sitting on
that bridge watching all them guys rolling their boats and
shit like that. But what I did is I had
some ideas. I had a forger at that time, and
he's a really good forger, ande he forged some paperwork
for me. You know that I was a visiting professor
from the University of Florida, so I could have access
(24:52):
to the library, and every day I'd go into the
university and study the Extradition Treaty, a case law with
Sweden and the United States and I figured out that
according to the law of reciprocity, that there's no way
they could get me for a conspira or for the
one I was really worried about. The one that had
(25:13):
me with life with no parole plus seventy years was
continuous criminal enterprise. While continuous criminal enterprise is based on
predicate defenses. This didn't match any Swedish laws whatsoever. It
was non extraditable, it was non extraditable crime, and sol
was conspiracy. Oh, I figured I'm cool in Sweden. So
he moved to Sweden, married the woman he met on
(25:35):
the beach, and became a dad. It all worked out
pretty well for about three years until the US entered
into a new extradition treaty with Sweden. So much for
all of his sleothing at the Harvard Law Library, Tommy
was indicted for conspiracy to import marijuana and extradited back
(25:56):
to the United States. He ended up spending six years
in prison before he was finally released in nineteen ninety.
He says he's very proud that he never cooperated with
the government. He now lives down in Saint Petersburg. He's
reinvented himself as a computer expert and he actually got
a degree in digital forensics at the age of seventy one.
(26:17):
He's working on a memoir called Reefer, recounting all of
his life stories, and let me tell you, there are
a lot of them. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob
Smith and edited by Karen Shakerjee. Original music and our
(26:41):
theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Miao Bell is Pushkin's executive producer. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Heather Fame, Carly Mcleori Lee, Tom Mallad, Maya Kanig, Eric Sandler,
Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.
Additional thanks to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. You can
(27:05):
learn more about Tommy Powell on his website Tommy Powell
dot net, and stay tuned to this feed from more
bonus episodes and announcements about season two. I'm Jake Holder.
(27:26):
All right, Tommy, I gotta run, but um, all right, brother,
it's been real. We'll be able to just together and
drink some agua dante. That would be great. I look
overd to it. Thanks that you ever at it. No
I had it So the last time I drank Agua dente,
(27:48):
I drank it with the remains of my partner, Victor
in the Agua dente. For this, two brothers, all three
of us, they put some of the ashes in the
Agua dante and did shots of Aguadiente with his bones
in it. You drank your friend, Yeah, how was that?
Drinking the remains of your friend and fucking horrible
Host
Jake Halpern
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