August 16, 2025 • 34 mins
Join Todd Denkin and his cousin Bruce Perlowin as they delve into the fascinating and tumultuous journey of becoming the King of Pot. In this episode, Bruce shares his transformation from a peace-loving hippie to orchestrating one of the largest marijuana smuggling operations in history. Discover how his spiritual mission intertwined with a billion-dollar empire, all while navigating the colorful and chaotic world of the 60s and 70s. Tune in for a captivating tale of ambition, love, and the quest to change the world with cannabis.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is true life stuff. This really happened to all
the stories ins and outs.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hi, everybody, I'm Todd Dankin and I want to welcome
you to Becoming the King of Pot, where we explore
the true life story of Bruce Perlowin, a hippie, a
family man, and a mastermind whose life mission was to
change the world with marijuana. He turned his spiritual mission
into one of the biggest marijuana smuggling operations that the
(00:31):
US has ever seen. He smuggled in over a billion
dollars worth of cannabis right under the Golden gate Bridge.
And guess what he happens to be my cousin, Bruce.
Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Thank you, Todd. It's a pleasure to be here and
I can't wait to tell the stories growing up on
how I became the King of Pot.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, that's what we're going to talk about. You know,
you did a lot of nefarious things back in the
seventies and eighties, right and you know, we're going to
talk about all of the stuff that you did from
you know, smuggling and moving around the world and all
your relationships and you know, really what you were thinking,
you know, as you were this criminal right if you will.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, I don't think we saw ourselves as criminals as
much as outlaws and pirates.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, I suppose you know, you don't see yourself like that,
but the world sees you like that, don't they.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Sometimes sometimes other people have big groups, yes, as freedom
fighters delivering the product that my entire generation pretty much wanted.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Tell me what was happening in the world while you
were in high school and how you were drawn towards pot.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well, I was in high school right at the dawn
of the Summer of Love. The Summer of Love is
nineteen sixty seven. Nineteen sixty five is when it really started.
The Certical Youth movement started that year, and they've got
Timothy Leary promoting LSD. We got a date Grateful Dead
forming out in San Francisco. So that entire wave of
(02:05):
the sixties hippie generation was just beginning as I was
entering high school. So by the time it got to
North Miami, where I was in high school, we were
in the middle of this explosive, amazing, incredible generation called
the post war Baby Boom hippie generation. We were buying pot,
we were selling LSD, we were going to Fairchild Gardens
(02:28):
on the week or actually we were skipping school going
to Fairchild Gardens. Was nobody was there and we'd all
take lsd there's smoke pot and that was an amazing
experience because we're all the hippies. Imagine all the hippies
in the largest subtropical botanical gardens in the world where
they filmed gentle Band, the TV series, and everyone you
everywhere you looked, there's Arthur and his girlfriend. There's your
(02:49):
best friend, there's your brother, there's your you know, your
ex girlfriend, there's your current girlfriend. It was you just
loved everybody in that park as we were the only
ones there, about a dozen to twenty of us, and
you had different you know, friendship love, girlfriend love, brother love,
best friend love. It was like being in the guard
to Veden. That influenced me to want to help change
(03:11):
the world and make the entire world look like that
kind of environment. And like anything else, you start small.
We would buy a pound, we'd make ounces in high
school and we put in if you bought an ounce,
you got a free pack of rolling papers. You bought
a nickel or dime, you got a little saying make
love that war. You know, different dessert piece, you know,
(03:31):
love different sayings of that era, and we just sold
them mostly not so much to make money, but to
make enough pot to smoke ourselves. Then a little by
little it became a very lucrative entrepreneurial venture.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And then one of your friends asked you to hold
a bail or something. Right, let's let's talk about, you know,
how that bail showed up, and then it really shows
you how the real money was made.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, but I had quit doing all drugs. I was
doing yoga, meditation. I had a spiritual underground newspaper called
Rainbow Bridge that I was making. I sold organic Shackley products,
go organic vegetables in my backyard, so I was straight
and not. There was no heat on me because I
wasn't dealing anymore for years, three or four years. So
(04:19):
a friend from Gainesville went away from high school to
Gainesville and back then the pot would come in on
boats into Tampa on the west coast of Florida, all
over Florida, but in this particular loads west coast, the
university kids there were taking the university kids in Gainesville.
The university kids Gainesville would bring it bound to Florida
North Miami. So I was in North Miami straight as
(04:43):
an arrow at that point, living this spiritual health, organic lifestyle.
And Jeff tuck band and friend said, can I store
this pot here? And I'll give you five hundred bucks
if you let me store it here, So he comes
down for Gainesville stores at the house. There's no heat
on us, and if you sell any you can make
ten dollars a pound. Great, David Tobias and I teamed up.
We said we're you know, we had a tree trimming business.
(05:04):
We were partners and the tree people, which advertised in
the underground newspaper we had, so we we started selling.
I think we sold maybe seventeen pounds out of the fifty,
made one hundred and seventy dollars plus five hundred. Now
we're making decent money. The next time Jeff brought a
bail down to store, we sold the whole thing. It
was even close. Three days later it was gone. The
(05:26):
demand for marijuana in those days and probably just today,
is insatiable, all right. So fifty pounds came and went
like that, and that started me off, you know, us
doing deals with other people, moving from bales to hundreds
of pounds and then I decided to move back to
the land and left that small I guess one hundred pounds,
(05:50):
you know, set up, you know, that's what we're doing.
It wasn't pounds or bails, aymortgs, was hundreds of pounds.
And I just said, I'm gonna talk.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
About that jump. Le let's let's talk about that jump
where you know you go from holding onto a ball
from your buddy, right and then ending up selling it
out right, and then you got to make the connections
to now you want to go unload boats, right, isn't
that the next step? Right? And then you know, as
you see other guys to tell us how that all
(06:22):
worked out, and the timeline on that.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
All right, that's that's a bigger jump. Okay. First it
was the bales, then the hundreds of pounds, all right,
and you know, I mean one hundred pounds, two hundred pounds,
five hundred pounds at a time. Then I'm going to
move back to the land. I moved to Arkansas on
forty acres. I am not doing any marijuana out there.
It's Arkansas. I'm tree trimming and for a living. Back
(06:45):
to land. Didn't make it, couldn't last lasted ninety days.
Then I came back and moved to from North Miami.
I moved to a house of Fort Lauderdale. David Tobias
is now partners, which you have tuck band, So we
weren't partners, so I was on my own. And that's
when we started going from the one hundred pounds before
I moved to Arkansas to now that literally thousands of
(07:05):
pounds of marijuana. I mean it was just the amount
of marijuana coming into South Florida and enter north to
Miami Fort Loyal area was literally in the millions of pounds.
So I ended up dealing, you know, three thousand pound load,
eight thousand pound load, five thousand pound load.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And that's what's going on in your What's going on
in your head at this point? You know where you know,
you're not just have one fifty pounds bail right, and
you're not doing three four hundred pounds right anymore. You're
literally in thousands and tens of thousands of pounds. What's
happening in your head? Are you scared? Are you worried?
Are you just excited? Are you just you know, throwing
(07:45):
the money up in the air and rolling around the money.
I mean what's happening, and you know, inside.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It was extremely exciting. Okay, first of all, it was
like catcher. If you can't getting away with it. That
was a massive and major rush.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Wow. All right.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And then and part of that whole thing was I
was always reinvesting my money into trucks, into vans, into boats,
into renting more houses, into warehouses, to scales, into all
these stuff. You need starlight scope, you know, just having
a lot of fun scanners to watch the police. And
it really wasn't that much heat in South Florida at
(08:20):
that particular time, so getting away with it was an
absolute thrill. And it came to the point where I said,
wait a minute, I'm selling all this pot I don't
want to just be a salesman. I want to be
a smuggler.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
During that period, you're doing offloads for people. So a
typical offload was the other's freighter's like crazy coming in.
So freighter comes in, somebody's going to offload it and
their boat breaks down or and so they need you
because you got other people with boats, so you have
your own boats and a combination. So you'd wake up
in the middle of the night three o'clock in the morning,
they'd get a call, and I needed two pieces of information.
(08:54):
How far off is the freighter and how much you have.
If it was too far off, you'd need fishing boats.
It was you know, three miles or four miles off shore,
you use the speedboats. So I would contract with a
group of speedboats or use my own, and I would
They would pay me twenty five percent, and I would
pay the other offloaders ten or fifteen percent, and I
would get the load to sell. So that's the offload portion.
(09:17):
But now you talk about tens of thousands of pounds,
you know, up to fifteen thousands.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
So let's talk about the whole offload thing. So talk
about what it's like, you know, to jump into a boat,
you know, a haul ause out into the middle of
the ocean and unload a freighter full of marijuana.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Okay, well I never did that part. I just coordinated
it at all.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Interesting, nice, Yeah, So I was like the brains behind
the operations.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
So what that's like is you contract for you know,
let's say Tom, Dick and Harry, we have twenty thousand
pounds we have to offload, and you would rent what
we called water houses they're are big fancy houses in
Fort Laurel up the inner coastal down these can and
you'd unload into a dock, and there is a very
(10:03):
specific formula if you do what you were doing. A
lot of people didn't know what they were doing and
got busted because they were stupid. I don't know super
is the word, but they're inexperience. So it's the technique
is you pull your boat, you're either your yacht or
your speedboat behind your house on the dock. You have
a bunch of guys over to have a barbecue. So
(10:24):
there's a reason for a bunch of people to be
at the house. You know you're having a barbecue, so
all the neighbors say you're a barcue. You wait until
after the eleven o'clock news when everybody goes to sleep.
Now you got to be really careful because I forget,
we knew the statistics something like twenty percent of people
have insomnia and maybe two or three percent are going
to walk outside their backyard along the canal, So you
(10:46):
got to watch for that, make sure everything's safe. Everyone's
most people went to sleep, and then you're there. You
have a reason to be there. The barbecue and you
offload into the garage. All right, very quickly, you have
your vans in the garage. You don't have your vans
outside in the front of the yard because people have
been busted because the DA learned about that, and they
busted people because they would watch the vans and they'd
(11:09):
see them offload after eleven o'clock news. We all knew
that trick, all the smugglers, we all tell each other,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
And so it was it was not really competition. It
was just sort of everyone did it together.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Oh absolutely. You were either selling someone's load, offloading someone's load,
or bringing your own load in and you're bringing your
own load in a boat, bringing you a load in
a plane. So we all worked together. There was no
conspiracy laws that changed where people they had to catch
red handed. So it changed that you could just say
I did this and this date at this place and
(11:44):
get somebody convicted. That didn't exist back then when we started,
and it was only a five year charge by the way,
that was the maximum sentence. You know. We all worked
together as a group. We shared information. Some guys would
get the hot sheet, which was the list of the
coast Guard of hot boats that they were watching other
guys who get the frequencies that the DEA and the
(12:05):
FBI broadcast on. So there was those lists that would
share among each you'd buy them your trade. We'd all
work together, and you had to because you have a
freighter off shore and it's broken down, you better have
the resources to know if your boat brakes, you know,
getting out there, and that happened often maybe ten fift
(12:27):
maybe twenty percent of time. You had to have backup boats.
And because if you didn't do it by sunlight, the
coast guards going to find that freight or a bust it.
So we all worked together as much as possible. Some
people did keep totally by themselves. Other people worked with everybody.
I tended to work with pretty much everybody.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
I think the perception, especially for drug dealers or drug
smugglers right these days, is that it's about ego and
power and money, right, But it wasn't like that back then.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
No. You know, that ego power money thing came in
with the cocaine, all right. There's a very very big
distinct difference between the dealer that is attracted to cocaine.
They wear gold, they have flashy cars, they're into guns,
were hippie back to the land farms. Okay, we had trucks.
(13:19):
We didn't have fancy you know, Lamborghinis. Some of us did,
but most of us didn't. And but that was the
coke dealers, and that was the big ego. That was
the other guys that have low self esteem. All of
a sudden, they made you a million bucks and they
think they're hot. Shit. Anyone can make a million bucks
back then, and they buy a fancy house. Anybody could
(13:40):
buy a fancy house. It doesn't make you anything special.
And we all knew that. So we were more down
to the earth people.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, so what's happening in your personal life as you
start delving into, you know, this life of crime.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
In the beginning, before I went talking, so I got
married to Diane, and we had a child, and I
actually tried to go to day junior college and couldn't
afford it because I had a new child and a
new wife. So I had to go back to selling
pot to make a living, which was very lutative. And
then she really didn't like it that much. I mean,
(14:15):
she got used to it. But then we moved out
to the land, to Arkansas, and that didn't cut it.
So we came back, and you know, it was interesting time.
It was the time of free love. So although I
was married, I I was allowed to have other No,
when you're married, you're married. I didn't. I was I
(14:36):
didn't participate in the free love version back then. Maybe
earlier when it first came, but not after I got married.
And but then we got divorced when we split up,
and then you have lots of girlfriends, and you have
a lot of girlfriends.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, and is it Are they attracted to Bruce? Are
they attracted to the lifestyle, or or are they attracted
to the.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
It's very interesting that that's a great question. And I
didn't know that. You know, you're growing up, you're learning
stuff about life. You're not sure yourself and you're not
sure of anything, and you make a plan and hopefully
it comes together. And I remember Daryl Boyd. He was
my marijuana mentor. You know, you don't just become the
king of pot. You learn and you learn from the pros.
(15:21):
Daryl was about three years older than me. He gave
me my first big load. I was living in North Miami.
I made my first one hundred thousand dollars Okay, that
year I made a million bucks total, but he really
launched my career. And so now I've made a hundred
thousand dollars and I saw that the girls were like
flies on rice, right, they just came out of the woodwork, zoom,
(15:44):
They're all over the place. I go, wow, this is interesting.
You know, I'm buying vans and I'm buying you know,
stash house and you know, the tools of the trade.
And then I spent all the money. It was gone.
It didn't matter because if you didn't make ten thousand,
two hundred thousand a month, you were doing stuff thing wrong.
Or a week, actually not a month, a week. So
(16:04):
I spent all the money and I'm totally broke, and
the girls were still there, the flies on rice, And
I realized it wasn't the money that the attracted to him.
It was a self confidence that you exude when you
have all that money and all that ability and you're
doing something and it's working and you're being successful at it.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Sure, so it's power. So it's the power that they're
attracted to.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I don't know if it's so much power or self
just self confidence. Now, if self confidence means that you
exude power then the universe.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so, don't you.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, yeah, because I did command, you know, I mean,
that was the boss even back then. But you know,
as far as rocket rolling out in California, I was
the kingpin and had my own organization. People work for me.
So it was power and self assured confidence that you
knew what you were doing was actually going to work
because of the experience, and you know, you make mistakes.
(17:01):
Of course, everyone makes mistakes. I had boats that sank,
I had planes that crashed, and that's how you learn. Yeah,
and we learned by other people making mistakes.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
You know.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
We always said, yeah, this guy he was living in
Fort lord of the idiot he had. He's living in
this big, fancy, expensive neighborhood and they don't mow the grass.
Everyone's crass is manicured. And this guy's got grass, you know,
up to your knees. And so they brought on heat.
Sure enough, they busted them. It was a stash house,
you know, right. You learned by those other your mistakes
(17:32):
and other people's mistakes, and so the self confidence you
exude is what attracts all the women.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Okay, so you're learning from everybody's mistakes. Everybody's learning from you,
and you guys are sharing all of this knowledge because
there's no cell phones, right, there's no you know, you
can't really communicate that way. But what were some of
the mistakes that you made right that that you had
to do better the next time?
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Well, other than you know, just typical planes crashing. Oh,
you didn't put it up fuel. You miscalculated the fuel
that your plane needed. You to use old Rickley boats.
But I think that if I would focus in on
a mistake I made, it was an interesting situation. I
had a stash house and George, my worker, was at
the stash house and Brian was at the other stash house.
(18:16):
There was like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a
pot in each one, and in one of them, the
dea and other stitches from the police were all corrupt.
Back then pulls up and instead of arresting him, they
actually beat him to a pulp and stole the pot.
The reason they were beating him because they wanted him
(18:36):
to tell him where the next stash house was. That
he wasn't going to do that, they actually put a
pillowcase over his head, cocked the shotgun and pulled the trigger,
but there was no bullets in the chamber, so he
had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
We got to back up a little bit, all right.
So you have a stash house, right, and you got
some guy watching it, and then what happens.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Okay, a van pulls up and they knocked the door.
They go, we're and they say Dea police, you know,
and they go and they raid the house. George is
the only one there. They put him into bathtub, tie
him up, They put him a pillowcase over his head,
and they put a shotgun to his sais where's the
other stashouse? I went the address and George was saying
(19:18):
and they had hit him in the head a bunch
of times as a gun he had. We had to
take him to the hospital get stitches. And he wasn't
going to say because he didn't want Brian to get
the same treatment he was getting, and so he wouldn't.
So they you know, cocked the shotgun, pulled the trigger,
but there was no bullets in the chamber. They were
just doing that to scare him. And they stole the pot.
Right now, the DEA guys stole all the the DEA.
(19:41):
They were corrupt as hell back then. I mean, if
you look at the history of North Miami, one time,
I think they fired eighty percent of the police force,
all right, But that was in a couple of years
later we tracked down who did it. You know, it
was this guy, he told these other people. So I
go and get a gun. And this is my i'm
mistake that I learned from. And I go to the
(20:02):
guy's house with a gun in my front you know,
down my front pants. I knock on his door and
he's not answering the door. And next thing I know,
there's a I see a police car slowly coming down
the road. So I go and hide in the bushes
in the front yard, and the police goes by, and
they obviously saw me because he sped up and went
(20:24):
drove real real quick. At that time, I knew he
saw me. I started running through the backyards and back there,
you like, I was here, and I'd run through this yard,
this yard, on this street, this yard. So I'm just
running through the yards and jumping over bushes, dogs barking,
And I got this gun and I finally get I
believe about eight or nine blocks away, and I'd start
(20:46):
walking the down that block and I take the gun.
I put it under a trash pile because people would
put their trash in there. And when I was at
the front of his house, I was thinking, what the
hell am I doing. I'm gonna do shoot the guy,
I you know, And so we decided to back off,
just go back to work and make another quarter million dollars,
(21:07):
which I did. I paid, but that whole load off
and the stolen pot off and they fronted me more weight.
And that's when they all wanted me to become partners
with them as smugglers because not always it because salesman
I was honorable and honest. So the mistake was trying
to resolve things with guns, right.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Right, so you live so during your career, right, what
was your stance on guns after that moment?
Speaker 1 (21:36):
It was what are you gonna do? Shoot it out
with the police? Number one, if you're doing an offload,
you're not gonna do that. You're never gonna win because
if you start to shootout, they're gonna bring more police
and then they're gonna bring you know, the army than
the Navy, that the air force. You're not gonna win
against the authorities. So there's no sense having guns. We
are non violent hippies. We believe in make love, not war,
and peace, and I didn't like There's two groups I
(21:59):
never liked to work with. That was mafia and CIA,
and they were all over the place back then, maybe
the Cuban violent Cuban people and cocaine dealers. If they
were run around with guns, I didn't want anything to
do with them because it just it brought too much heat.
I could never imagine taking somebody's life. I did absolutely.
(22:23):
I'm not God. I don't have the right to make
that decision. And I inculcated that thought and that behavior
throughout everybody I work with. If you want to hang
out with guns, you're not hanging out with me. Now,
we did have guns, a couple of guns, a shotgun
because Craig, my brother, Craigie, pulled a shot at one
time on the one of the Bobs, Bob Senior, Bob Junior.
(22:44):
That was a big smuggling operation. We can talk about later,
but you know, that was sort of a comical moment,
but we just that was it. Learning the mistake was
not to do not to confront people with guns.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Sure, sure, so let's talk about Craig and how how
you guys work together to really build this business. And
you know, even though he's your younger brother, right, he
ended up kind of being your protector, right, that was
the role.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
He fell into. Yeah, so we did to start off with.
I was rocking and rolling and my mom found out
that I was selling marijuana when I just lost when
I left a bail at my house and growing up
in her apartment. And one of our cousins would come
down every year, cousin Harry, and he found the bail,
(23:37):
freaked out, got on the plane, went back to Philadelphia
the next day. And so yeah, yeah, so I don't
know if you knew cousin Harry.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I did. I did.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, Yeah, he was the teacher right up in Philadelphia. Okay,
so he that's cool being cousins, you know all these people,
right right. So uh And my dad yelled at me
when he came home, and I said, I said, and
I yelled back and my dad, I said, George was
supposed to come and take the bail out of here.
(24:09):
What's supposed to be here when he came and George
fucked up. He forgot. Okay, there's a mistake. We left
the baill of this shower because of how we found it.
So I yelled at my dad. So later my mom said,
why you got to go apologize for your father. You
yelled at him. You're not supposed to yell at your father,
which is true. So I said, Dad, I apologize, I
lost thirty thousand dollars, and he goes, what. I go, Yeah,
(24:34):
I hit it somewhere in the house here, and I
don't know where it is, and it's a whole week's hurting.
It's my whole week now. A week back then was
like today, like six months, right, a week with years,
oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Week rand it was was you're doing very well in
nineteen sixty eight, right.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
So he goes, a week's income, you made thirty thousand, Yeah,
and I don't know where it is. So about that's
when I so I apologize for yelling because I was upset.
About two hours later, I go, mom, Dad, I remember
where I hit it. I go where where? And I
go right there at the credenza. So I open the credenza,
I take out a brown paper bag. I pour thirty
(25:12):
thousand dollars cash on the dining room table. Their eyes
are bugged out and they go, whoa, you made that
much selling Marijue. I go, yeah, I go you want it?
I go for your jewelry store because they had a
jewelises go say yeah, I go, okay, no problem, get
again next week. So they from then on it was
okay for me to be in the business.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Ah, so good old Ann Helen and Uncle Lee Roy
were okay, right, as long as you paid theig. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
But they did say, promise me you won't get your
little brother involved, Craig. Okay, so I promised them I
would not let Craig be part of my smuggling. So
when George got ripped off and I was rocking and rolling,
Craig wasn't a part of the organization then at that time. However,
one day Craig calculated, he figured it all out. He goes, Mom,
(26:04):
I lost one hundred thousand dollars last year because you
wouldn't let me be part of Bruce's smuggling operation. He goes,
I really want to do it. She goes, one hundred
thousand dollars. Okay, So Ann Hella, they wanted to lose
out on the income.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
That is so funny that, oh you're making a nice living, right,
it's okay.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
So then Craig became an integral part of my organization,
and mostly just as a salesman. You know, he would
take pop, he'd come down to the sixth Avenue stash
house and he would take marijuana back to Lakeland and
sell it.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
And later on big quantities. Was he doing ounces or
pounds or you know.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
I jumped back to the pound. I was doing thousands
of pounds. He was doing ten pounds right right, And
then then so he was like your street dealer, one
of them.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
But then when we moved to the Fort Lauderdale waterhouses,
he actually got busted with five hundred pounds and that
was a mistake, all.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Right, Yeah, so tell that story what happened.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So I said, whatever you do, never ever let anybody
follow you back to the house. The stash house.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It's a stash house, even.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Though it was a waterhouse. Typically the waterhouses would be
offload and then you take it from there out to
the farms out in the country, and that was a
stash house. But this we weren't using to offload at
the moment. No, we weren't at all, because we lived there.
So it was a stash house. I said, don't ever
let anyone follow you back to the stash house. Well,
he was doing a five hundred pound deal, and they
(27:48):
followed him back to the stash house, and he led
them back to the stash house, walked in the house.
Bob Margolis another high school friend. Everyone from high school
that you grew up selling one and we all sort
of moved up into smuggler to big dealer, to street dealer,
to giant dealer, to offloaders. We all did it all.
(28:09):
So he was from high school. He was at the
house and Craig gets in there and gets busted with
five hundred pounds, So consequently he couldn't when we moved
out to California.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
What happened? What happened to Greig ultimately got probation.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
You know, we had lots of money back then that
by the time it went to court, we wereut in California,
rock and roll and make him millions, and we hired
the top attorneys and they got him one year probation
and he couldn't be out in California and during that
period until he ended his probation and then he came
back out.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Yeah, we'll get to California in a couple of episodes.
But yeah, that's interesting that here it is he's trying
to work with his big brother, right, and he's the
one who gets busted.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, and so anyway, but there's some interesting big stories
which we'll tell the next episode about, you know, offloading
big loads in the Caribbean and cat Island, specifically in
the Bahamas. Those great offload stories. You know, freighters lined
up with millions of pounds in them. But jumping back
(29:17):
to the Free Love episode. The free Love story, when
we were in uh my mom's house, when we had
just gotten right before we went to Arkansas. I was
there and at this point I'm going back and forth
to Gainesville, you know, I'm picking up pot in Gainesville
driving it back. That was interesting. Diane and I we
(29:39):
had a plan. We made a bed in the back
of a van and underneath the bed we could fit
five hundred pounds and so we'd sleep on the bed
if a cop pulled us over. Her job was a
pinch Aubry her Son, make him start screaming and cry.
He so the cop and let me get away from
this van. It never happened, but that was our plan anyway.
(30:00):
So there's this time where David would come over to
Bias and we'd have you know, like five hundred pounds
or about two hundred pounds in the bathtub, and he
would take a pound of it and proxy a pound
handed to me. I would put in a plastic bag,
put it on the scale, take out a couple of
buzzs or put a couple buds into make it exactly
four hundred fifty for grams, which is one pound or
(30:23):
four hun and forty eight whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Four fifty four.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Yeah, oh you knew that. Huh.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
You grew over that eerr too a little bit later.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
But same. I'm actually in the pot business now also,
but the legal side of things. So, yes, it's four
hundred and fifty four grams to a pound.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Isn't an amazing That's been part of our lives over
fifty years now, yeah, way fifty.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
So Bruce, you're in Florida, you are off floating or
organizing offloading. You're selling we to everybody in the state,
driving it up and down, and you're a mentoror, right,
Darryl Boyd, How what did he teach you? And how
does someone become a smuggling mentor? Oh? Tell us a
(31:09):
Darryl Boyd's story and how you got hooked with him.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Okay, so earlier I mentioned I made my first one
hundred thousand dollars with Daryl Boyd. That load was very
funny the way it happened. He had offloaded it offload
and he had an RV parked in front of his
house and a couple RVs, and so I went there
to pick up my RV and there was eight thousand
pounds in that particular RV, and I don't know what,
(31:34):
you know, I had trucks, he had a bunch of
stuff he has, like a farming area, And so I
go and drive away. About three days later, he calls
me up. He goes, Bruce, you brought maybe it was
actually two days later or the next day, because you
picked up the wrong RV, you know, bring it back.
I go, sorry, it's all sold. He goes, oh, that's okay.
(31:58):
And you know, he was one of these guys I
said I looked up to I'm a young, up and
coming marijuana smuggler, and I just he was an idol.
He was a hero. He's the guy who started off
smuggling fifty thousand pounds at a time. You know, I
started off with pounds. He started off with fifty thousand,
and he was just, you know, Bruce, you don't do this.
You don't do this, you don't do this. You do this,
(32:20):
you do this. There's dues and there's don'ts, and he
just taught me a lot of them all the time.
I Mean, his nickname is he calls himself the Gorilla
because he's a he's an alpha male prime right, he
bosses around alpha male, similar to what I became. But meanwhile,
he's a.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Big dude too. He's a big stature, like he's a
very tall.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Oh yeah, in a big beard and him and he
was the military, his brother Tracy, they were partners. He
was in the Special Forces. They called her the Smith
Brothers because of the Smith's brother's cough drop that's what
they look like. And he's just somebody that had a
million pieces of very useful information that with al that
(33:00):
I would have taken me years to learn on my own.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, all right, Well, more stories about Darryl Boyd and
his brother and their exploits with Bruce perlowin the King
of Pot Right here on becoming the King of Pot.
As we learn more about Bruce Perlowin and how he
really became this massive kingpin. Bruce, any last words on
(33:28):
episode number one, my friend, I.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Think that covers it, although I just want people to
understand the error in which this all took place. That
was the incredible, amazing, colorful sixties and seventies, in the
years of the hippies, and then ultimately what our impact
was on society today with marijuana and with the culture
of the time.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Awesome. And next week we'll talk about the time that
you guys took that money and donated it to the
Jerry Lewis Telethon, and uh, we'll tell that story, all right.
That was thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
That that was Daryl Boyd that did that. Yeah, that's
a great story. I know.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
I can't wait to hear it. I know, I know.
We'll talk about that next week. Bruce. Thanks for the
incredible stories and I look forward to chatting more next week.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Thank you, Todd, I do too,
This is true life stuff. This really happened to all
the stories ins and outs.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hi, everybody, I'm Todd Dankin and I want to welcome
you to Becoming the King of Pot, where we explore
the true life story of Bruce Perlowin, a hippie, a
family man, and a mastermind whose life mission was to
change the world with marijuana. He turned his spiritual mission
into one of the biggest marijuana smuggling operations that the
(00:31):
US has ever seen. He smuggled in over a billion
dollars worth of cannabis right under the Golden gate Bridge.
And guess what he happens to be my cousin, Bruce.
Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Thank you, Todd. It's a pleasure to be here and
I can't wait to tell the stories growing up on
how I became the King of Pot.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, that's what we're going to talk about. You know,
you did a lot of nefarious things back in the
seventies and eighties, right and you know, we're going to
talk about all of the stuff that you did from
you know, smuggling and moving around the world and all
your relationships and you know, really what you were thinking,
you know, as you were this criminal right if you will.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, I don't think we saw ourselves as criminals as
much as outlaws and pirates.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, I suppose you know, you don't see yourself like that,
but the world sees you like that, don't they.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Sometimes sometimes other people have big groups, yes, as freedom
fighters delivering the product that my entire generation pretty much wanted.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Tell me what was happening in the world while you
were in high school and how you were drawn towards pot.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well, I was in high school right at the dawn
of the Summer of Love. The Summer of Love is
nineteen sixty seven. Nineteen sixty five is when it really started.
The Certical Youth movement started that year, and they've got
Timothy Leary promoting LSD. We got a date Grateful Dead
forming out in San Francisco. So that entire wave of
(02:05):
the sixties hippie generation was just beginning as I was
entering high school. So by the time it got to
North Miami, where I was in high school, we were
in the middle of this explosive, amazing, incredible generation called
the post war Baby Boom hippie generation. We were buying pot,
we were selling LSD, we were going to Fairchild Gardens
(02:28):
on the week or actually we were skipping school going
to Fairchild Gardens. Was nobody was there and we'd all
take lsd there's smoke pot and that was an amazing
experience because we're all the hippies. Imagine all the hippies
in the largest subtropical botanical gardens in the world where
they filmed gentle Band, the TV series, and everyone you
everywhere you looked, there's Arthur and his girlfriend. There's your
(02:49):
best friend, there's your brother, there's your you know, your
ex girlfriend, there's your current girlfriend. It was you just
loved everybody in that park as we were the only
ones there, about a dozen to twenty of us, and
you had different you know, friendship love, girlfriend love, brother love,
best friend love. It was like being in the guard
to Veden. That influenced me to want to help change
(03:11):
the world and make the entire world look like that
kind of environment. And like anything else, you start small.
We would buy a pound, we'd make ounces in high
school and we put in if you bought an ounce,
you got a free pack of rolling papers. You bought
a nickel or dime, you got a little saying make
love that war. You know, different dessert piece, you know,
(03:31):
love different sayings of that era, and we just sold
them mostly not so much to make money, but to
make enough pot to smoke ourselves. Then a little by
little it became a very lucrative entrepreneurial venture.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And then one of your friends asked you to hold
a bail or something. Right, let's let's talk about, you know,
how that bail showed up, and then it really shows
you how the real money was made.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, but I had quit doing all drugs. I was
doing yoga, meditation. I had a spiritual underground newspaper called
Rainbow Bridge that I was making. I sold organic Shackley products,
go organic vegetables in my backyard, so I was straight
and not. There was no heat on me because I
wasn't dealing anymore for years, three or four years. So
(04:19):
a friend from Gainesville went away from high school to
Gainesville and back then the pot would come in on
boats into Tampa on the west coast of Florida, all
over Florida, but in this particular loads west coast, the
university kids there were taking the university kids in Gainesville.
The university kids Gainesville would bring it bound to Florida
North Miami. So I was in North Miami straight as
(04:43):
an arrow at that point, living this spiritual health, organic lifestyle.
And Jeff tuck band and friend said, can I store
this pot here? And I'll give you five hundred bucks
if you let me store it here, So he comes
down for Gainesville stores at the house. There's no heat
on us, and if you sell any you can make
ten dollars a pound. Great, David Tobias and I teamed up.
We said we're you know, we had a tree trimming business.
(05:04):
We were partners and the tree people, which advertised in
the underground newspaper we had, so we we started selling.
I think we sold maybe seventeen pounds out of the fifty,
made one hundred and seventy dollars plus five hundred. Now
we're making decent money. The next time Jeff brought a
bail down to store, we sold the whole thing. It
was even close. Three days later it was gone. The
(05:26):
demand for marijuana in those days and probably just today,
is insatiable, all right. So fifty pounds came and went
like that, and that started me off, you know, us
doing deals with other people, moving from bales to hundreds
of pounds and then I decided to move back to
the land and left that small I guess one hundred pounds,
(05:50):
you know, set up, you know, that's what we're doing.
It wasn't pounds or bails, aymortgs, was hundreds of pounds.
And I just said, I'm gonna talk.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
About that jump. Le let's let's talk about that jump
where you know you go from holding onto a ball
from your buddy, right and then ending up selling it
out right, and then you got to make the connections
to now you want to go unload boats, right, isn't
that the next step? Right? And then you know, as
you see other guys to tell us how that all
(06:22):
worked out, and the timeline on that.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
All right, that's that's a bigger jump. Okay. First it
was the bales, then the hundreds of pounds, all right,
and you know, I mean one hundred pounds, two hundred pounds,
five hundred pounds at a time. Then I'm going to
move back to the land. I moved to Arkansas on
forty acres. I am not doing any marijuana out there.
It's Arkansas. I'm tree trimming and for a living. Back
(06:45):
to land. Didn't make it, couldn't last lasted ninety days.
Then I came back and moved to from North Miami.
I moved to a house of Fort Lauderdale. David Tobias
is now partners, which you have tuck band, So we
weren't partners, so I was on my own. And that's
when we started going from the one hundred pounds before
I moved to Arkansas to now that literally thousands of
(07:05):
pounds of marijuana. I mean it was just the amount
of marijuana coming into South Florida and enter north to
Miami Fort Loyal area was literally in the millions of pounds.
So I ended up dealing, you know, three thousand pound load,
eight thousand pound load, five thousand pound load.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And that's what's going on in your What's going on
in your head at this point? You know where you know,
you're not just have one fifty pounds bail right, and
you're not doing three four hundred pounds right anymore. You're
literally in thousands and tens of thousands of pounds. What's
happening in your head? Are you scared? Are you worried?
Are you just excited? Are you just you know, throwing
(07:45):
the money up in the air and rolling around the money.
I mean what's happening, and you know, inside.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It was extremely exciting. Okay, first of all, it was
like catcher. If you can't getting away with it. That
was a massive and major rush.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Wow. All right.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And then and part of that whole thing was I
was always reinvesting my money into trucks, into vans, into boats,
into renting more houses, into warehouses, to scales, into all
these stuff. You need starlight scope, you know, just having
a lot of fun scanners to watch the police. And
it really wasn't that much heat in South Florida at
(08:20):
that particular time, so getting away with it was an
absolute thrill. And it came to the point where I said,
wait a minute, I'm selling all this pot I don't
want to just be a salesman. I want to be
a smuggler.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
During that period, you're doing offloads for people. So a
typical offload was the other's freighter's like crazy coming in.
So freighter comes in, somebody's going to offload it and
their boat breaks down or and so they need you
because you got other people with boats, so you have
your own boats and a combination. So you'd wake up
in the middle of the night three o'clock in the morning,
they'd get a call, and I needed two pieces of information.
(08:54):
How far off is the freighter and how much you have.
If it was too far off, you'd need fishing boats.
It was you know, three miles or four miles off shore,
you use the speedboats. So I would contract with a
group of speedboats or use my own, and I would
They would pay me twenty five percent, and I would
pay the other offloaders ten or fifteen percent, and I
would get the load to sell. So that's the offload portion.
(09:17):
But now you talk about tens of thousands of pounds,
you know, up to fifteen thousands.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
So let's talk about the whole offload thing. So talk
about what it's like, you know, to jump into a boat,
you know, a haul ause out into the middle of
the ocean and unload a freighter full of marijuana.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Okay, well I never did that part. I just coordinated
it at all.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Interesting, nice, Yeah, So I was like the brains behind
the operations.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
So what that's like is you contract for you know,
let's say Tom, Dick and Harry, we have twenty thousand
pounds we have to offload, and you would rent what
we called water houses they're are big fancy houses in
Fort Laurel up the inner coastal down these can and
you'd unload into a dock, and there is a very
(10:03):
specific formula if you do what you were doing. A
lot of people didn't know what they were doing and
got busted because they were stupid. I don't know super
is the word, but they're inexperience. So it's the technique
is you pull your boat, you're either your yacht or
your speedboat behind your house on the dock. You have
a bunch of guys over to have a barbecue. So
(10:24):
there's a reason for a bunch of people to be
at the house. You know you're having a barbecue, so
all the neighbors say you're a barcue. You wait until
after the eleven o'clock news when everybody goes to sleep.
Now you got to be really careful because I forget,
we knew the statistics something like twenty percent of people
have insomnia and maybe two or three percent are going
to walk outside their backyard along the canal, So you
(10:46):
got to watch for that, make sure everything's safe. Everyone's
most people went to sleep, and then you're there. You
have a reason to be there. The barbecue and you
offload into the garage. All right, very quickly, you have
your vans in the garage. You don't have your vans
outside in the front of the yard because people have
been busted because the DA learned about that, and they
busted people because they would watch the vans and they'd
(11:09):
see them offload after eleven o'clock news. We all knew
that trick, all the smugglers, we all tell each other,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
And so it was it was not really competition. It
was just sort of everyone did it together.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Oh absolutely. You were either selling someone's load, offloading someone's load,
or bringing your own load in and you're bringing your
own load in a boat, bringing you a load in
a plane. So we all worked together. There was no
conspiracy laws that changed where people they had to catch
red handed. So it changed that you could just say
I did this and this date at this place and
(11:44):
get somebody convicted. That didn't exist back then when we started,
and it was only a five year charge by the way,
that was the maximum sentence. You know. We all worked
together as a group. We shared information. Some guys would
get the hot sheet, which was the list of the
coast Guard of hot boats that they were watching other
guys who get the frequencies that the DEA and the
(12:05):
FBI broadcast on. So there was those lists that would
share among each you'd buy them your trade. We'd all
work together, and you had to because you have a
freighter off shore and it's broken down, you better have
the resources to know if your boat brakes, you know,
getting out there, and that happened often maybe ten fift
(12:27):
maybe twenty percent of time. You had to have backup boats.
And because if you didn't do it by sunlight, the
coast guards going to find that freight or a bust it.
So we all worked together as much as possible. Some
people did keep totally by themselves. Other people worked with everybody.
I tended to work with pretty much everybody.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
I think the perception, especially for drug dealers or drug
smugglers right these days, is that it's about ego and
power and money, right, But it wasn't like that back then.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
No. You know, that ego power money thing came in
with the cocaine, all right. There's a very very big
distinct difference between the dealer that is attracted to cocaine.
They wear gold, they have flashy cars, they're into guns,
were hippie back to the land farms. Okay, we had trucks.
(13:19):
We didn't have fancy you know, Lamborghinis. Some of us did,
but most of us didn't. And but that was the
coke dealers, and that was the big ego. That was
the other guys that have low self esteem. All of
a sudden, they made you a million bucks and they
think they're hot. Shit. Anyone can make a million bucks
back then, and they buy a fancy house. Anybody could
(13:40):
buy a fancy house. It doesn't make you anything special.
And we all knew that. So we were more down
to the earth people.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, so what's happening in your personal life as you
start delving into, you know, this life of crime.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
In the beginning, before I went talking, so I got
married to Diane, and we had a child, and I
actually tried to go to day junior college and couldn't
afford it because I had a new child and a
new wife. So I had to go back to selling
pot to make a living, which was very lutative. And
then she really didn't like it that much. I mean,
(14:15):
she got used to it. But then we moved out
to the land, to Arkansas, and that didn't cut it.
So we came back, and you know, it was interesting time.
It was the time of free love. So although I
was married, I I was allowed to have other No,
when you're married, you're married. I didn't. I was I
(14:36):
didn't participate in the free love version back then. Maybe
earlier when it first came, but not after I got married.
And but then we got divorced when we split up,
and then you have lots of girlfriends, and you have
a lot of girlfriends.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, and is it Are they attracted to Bruce? Are
they attracted to the lifestyle, or or are they attracted
to the.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
It's very interesting that that's a great question. And I
didn't know that. You know, you're growing up, you're learning
stuff about life. You're not sure yourself and you're not
sure of anything, and you make a plan and hopefully
it comes together. And I remember Daryl Boyd. He was
my marijuana mentor. You know, you don't just become the
king of pot. You learn and you learn from the pros.
(15:21):
Daryl was about three years older than me. He gave
me my first big load. I was living in North Miami.
I made my first one hundred thousand dollars Okay, that
year I made a million bucks total, but he really
launched my career. And so now I've made a hundred
thousand dollars and I saw that the girls were like
flies on rice, right, they just came out of the woodwork, zoom,
(15:44):
They're all over the place. I go, wow, this is interesting.
You know, I'm buying vans and I'm buying you know,
stash house and you know, the tools of the trade.
And then I spent all the money. It was gone.
It didn't matter because if you didn't make ten thousand,
two hundred thousand a month, you were doing stuff thing wrong.
Or a week, actually not a month, a week. So
(16:04):
I spent all the money and I'm totally broke, and
the girls were still there, the flies on rice, And
I realized it wasn't the money that the attracted to him.
It was a self confidence that you exude when you
have all that money and all that ability and you're
doing something and it's working and you're being successful at it.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Sure, so it's power. So it's the power that they're
attracted to.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I don't know if it's so much power or self
just self confidence. Now, if self confidence means that you
exude power then the universe.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so, don't you.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, yeah, because I did command, you know, I mean,
that was the boss even back then. But you know,
as far as rocket rolling out in California, I was
the kingpin and had my own organization. People work for me.
So it was power and self assured confidence that you
knew what you were doing was actually going to work
because of the experience, and you know, you make mistakes.
(17:01):
Of course, everyone makes mistakes. I had boats that sank,
I had planes that crashed, and that's how you learn. Yeah,
and we learned by other people making mistakes.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
You know.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
We always said, yeah, this guy he was living in
Fort lord of the idiot he had. He's living in
this big, fancy, expensive neighborhood and they don't mow the grass.
Everyone's crass is manicured. And this guy's got grass, you know,
up to your knees. And so they brought on heat.
Sure enough, they busted them. It was a stash house,
you know, right. You learned by those other your mistakes
(17:32):
and other people's mistakes, and so the self confidence you
exude is what attracts all the women.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Okay, so you're learning from everybody's mistakes. Everybody's learning from you,
and you guys are sharing all of this knowledge because
there's no cell phones, right, there's no you know, you
can't really communicate that way. But what were some of
the mistakes that you made right that that you had
to do better the next time?
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Well, other than you know, just typical planes crashing. Oh,
you didn't put it up fuel. You miscalculated the fuel
that your plane needed. You to use old Rickley boats.
But I think that if I would focus in on
a mistake I made, it was an interesting situation. I
had a stash house and George, my worker, was at
the stash house and Brian was at the other stash house.
(18:16):
There was like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a
pot in each one, and in one of them, the
dea and other stitches from the police were all corrupt.
Back then pulls up and instead of arresting him, they
actually beat him to a pulp and stole the pot.
The reason they were beating him because they wanted him
(18:36):
to tell him where the next stash house was. That
he wasn't going to do that, they actually put a
pillowcase over his head, cocked the shotgun and pulled the trigger,
but there was no bullets in the chamber, so he
had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
We got to back up a little bit, all right.
So you have a stash house, right, and you got
some guy watching it, and then what happens.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Okay, a van pulls up and they knocked the door.
They go, we're and they say Dea police, you know,
and they go and they raid the house. George is
the only one there. They put him into bathtub, tie
him up, They put him a pillowcase over his head,
and they put a shotgun to his sais where's the
other stashouse? I went the address and George was saying
(19:18):
and they had hit him in the head a bunch
of times as a gun he had. We had to
take him to the hospital get stitches. And he wasn't
going to say because he didn't want Brian to get
the same treatment he was getting, and so he wouldn't.
So they you know, cocked the shotgun, pulled the trigger,
but there was no bullets in the chamber. They were
just doing that to scare him. And they stole the pot.
Right now, the DEA guys stole all the the DEA.
(19:41):
They were corrupt as hell back then. I mean, if
you look at the history of North Miami, one time,
I think they fired eighty percent of the police force,
all right, But that was in a couple of years
later we tracked down who did it. You know, it
was this guy, he told these other people. So I
go and get a gun. And this is my i'm
mistake that I learned from. And I go to the
(20:02):
guy's house with a gun in my front you know,
down my front pants. I knock on his door and
he's not answering the door. And next thing I know,
there's a I see a police car slowly coming down
the road. So I go and hide in the bushes
in the front yard, and the police goes by, and
they obviously saw me because he sped up and went
(20:24):
drove real real quick. At that time, I knew he
saw me. I started running through the backyards and back there,
you like, I was here, and I'd run through this yard,
this yard, on this street, this yard. So I'm just
running through the yards and jumping over bushes, dogs barking,
And I got this gun and I finally get I
believe about eight or nine blocks away, and I'd start
(20:46):
walking the down that block and I take the gun.
I put it under a trash pile because people would
put their trash in there. And when I was at
the front of his house, I was thinking, what the
hell am I doing. I'm gonna do shoot the guy,
I you know, And so we decided to back off,
just go back to work and make another quarter million dollars,
(21:07):
which I did. I paid, but that whole load off
and the stolen pot off and they fronted me more weight.
And that's when they all wanted me to become partners
with them as smugglers because not always it because salesman
I was honorable and honest. So the mistake was trying
to resolve things with guns, right.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Right, so you live so during your career, right, what
was your stance on guns after that moment?
Speaker 1 (21:36):
It was what are you gonna do? Shoot it out
with the police? Number one, if you're doing an offload,
you're not gonna do that. You're never gonna win because
if you start to shootout, they're gonna bring more police
and then they're gonna bring you know, the army than
the Navy, that the air force. You're not gonna win
against the authorities. So there's no sense having guns. We
are non violent hippies. We believe in make love, not war,
and peace, and I didn't like There's two groups I
(21:59):
never liked to work with. That was mafia and CIA,
and they were all over the place back then, maybe
the Cuban violent Cuban people and cocaine dealers. If they
were run around with guns, I didn't want anything to
do with them because it just it brought too much heat.
I could never imagine taking somebody's life. I did absolutely.
(22:23):
I'm not God. I don't have the right to make
that decision. And I inculcated that thought and that behavior
throughout everybody I work with. If you want to hang
out with guns, you're not hanging out with me. Now,
we did have guns, a couple of guns, a shotgun
because Craig, my brother, Craigie, pulled a shot at one
time on the one of the Bobs, Bob Senior, Bob Junior.
(22:44):
That was a big smuggling operation. We can talk about later,
but you know, that was sort of a comical moment,
but we just that was it. Learning the mistake was
not to do not to confront people with guns.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Sure, sure, so let's talk about Craig and how how
you guys work together to really build this business. And
you know, even though he's your younger brother, right, he
ended up kind of being your protector, right, that was
the role.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
He fell into. Yeah, so we did to start off with.
I was rocking and rolling and my mom found out
that I was selling marijuana when I just lost when
I left a bail at my house and growing up
in her apartment. And one of our cousins would come
down every year, cousin Harry, and he found the bail,
(23:37):
freaked out, got on the plane, went back to Philadelphia
the next day. And so yeah, yeah, so I don't
know if you knew cousin Harry.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I did. I did.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, Yeah, he was the teacher right up in Philadelphia. Okay,
so he that's cool being cousins, you know all these people,
right right. So uh And my dad yelled at me
when he came home, and I said, I said, and
I yelled back and my dad, I said, George was
supposed to come and take the bail out of here.
(24:09):
What's supposed to be here when he came and George
fucked up. He forgot. Okay, there's a mistake. We left
the baill of this shower because of how we found it.
So I yelled at my dad. So later my mom said,
why you got to go apologize for your father. You
yelled at him. You're not supposed to yell at your father,
which is true. So I said, Dad, I apologize, I
lost thirty thousand dollars, and he goes, what. I go, Yeah,
(24:34):
I hit it somewhere in the house here, and I
don't know where it is, and it's a whole week's hurting.
It's my whole week now. A week back then was
like today, like six months, right, a week with years,
oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Week rand it was was you're doing very well in
nineteen sixty eight, right.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
So he goes, a week's income, you made thirty thousand, Yeah,
and I don't know where it is. So about that's
when I so I apologize for yelling because I was upset.
About two hours later, I go, mom, Dad, I remember
where I hit it. I go where where? And I
go right there at the credenza. So I open the credenza,
I take out a brown paper bag. I pour thirty
(25:12):
thousand dollars cash on the dining room table. Their eyes
are bugged out and they go, whoa, you made that
much selling Marijue. I go, yeah, I go you want it?
I go for your jewelry store because they had a
jewelises go say yeah, I go, okay, no problem, get
again next week. So they from then on it was
okay for me to be in the business.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Ah, so good old Ann Helen and Uncle Lee Roy
were okay, right, as long as you paid theig. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
But they did say, promise me you won't get your
little brother involved, Craig. Okay, so I promised them I
would not let Craig be part of my smuggling. So
when George got ripped off and I was rocking and rolling,
Craig wasn't a part of the organization then at that time. However,
one day Craig calculated, he figured it all out. He goes, Mom,
(26:04):
I lost one hundred thousand dollars last year because you
wouldn't let me be part of Bruce's smuggling operation. He goes,
I really want to do it. She goes, one hundred
thousand dollars. Okay, So Ann Hella, they wanted to lose
out on the income.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
That is so funny that, oh you're making a nice living, right,
it's okay.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
So then Craig became an integral part of my organization,
and mostly just as a salesman. You know, he would
take pop, he'd come down to the sixth Avenue stash
house and he would take marijuana back to Lakeland and
sell it.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
And later on big quantities. Was he doing ounces or
pounds or you know.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
I jumped back to the pound. I was doing thousands
of pounds. He was doing ten pounds right right, And
then then so he was like your street dealer, one
of them.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
But then when we moved to the Fort Lauderdale waterhouses,
he actually got busted with five hundred pounds and that
was a mistake, all.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Right, Yeah, so tell that story what happened.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So I said, whatever you do, never ever let anybody
follow you back to the house. The stash house.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It's a stash house, even.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Though it was a waterhouse. Typically the waterhouses would be
offload and then you take it from there out to
the farms out in the country, and that was a
stash house. But this we weren't using to offload at
the moment. No, we weren't at all, because we lived there.
So it was a stash house. I said, don't ever
let anyone follow you back to the stash house. Well,
he was doing a five hundred pound deal, and they
(27:48):
followed him back to the stash house, and he led
them back to the stash house, walked in the house.
Bob Margolis another high school friend. Everyone from high school
that you grew up selling one and we all sort
of moved up into smuggler to big dealer, to street dealer,
to giant dealer, to offloaders. We all did it all.
(28:09):
So he was from high school. He was at the
house and Craig gets in there and gets busted with
five hundred pounds, So consequently he couldn't when we moved
out to California.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
What happened? What happened to Greig ultimately got probation.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
You know, we had lots of money back then that
by the time it went to court, we wereut in California,
rock and roll and make him millions, and we hired
the top attorneys and they got him one year probation
and he couldn't be out in California and during that
period until he ended his probation and then he came
back out.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Yeah, we'll get to California in a couple of episodes.
But yeah, that's interesting that here it is he's trying
to work with his big brother, right, and he's the
one who gets busted.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, and so anyway, but there's some interesting big stories
which we'll tell the next episode about, you know, offloading
big loads in the Caribbean and cat Island, specifically in
the Bahamas. Those great offload stories. You know, freighters lined
up with millions of pounds in them. But jumping back
(29:17):
to the Free Love episode. The free Love story, when
we were in uh my mom's house, when we had
just gotten right before we went to Arkansas. I was
there and at this point I'm going back and forth
to Gainesville, you know, I'm picking up pot in Gainesville
driving it back. That was interesting. Diane and I we
(29:39):
had a plan. We made a bed in the back
of a van and underneath the bed we could fit
five hundred pounds and so we'd sleep on the bed
if a cop pulled us over. Her job was a
pinch Aubry her Son, make him start screaming and cry.
He so the cop and let me get away from
this van. It never happened, but that was our plan anyway.
(30:00):
So there's this time where David would come over to
Bias and we'd have you know, like five hundred pounds
or about two hundred pounds in the bathtub, and he
would take a pound of it and proxy a pound
handed to me. I would put in a plastic bag,
put it on the scale, take out a couple of
buzzs or put a couple buds into make it exactly
four hundred fifty for grams, which is one pound or
(30:23):
four hun and forty eight whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Four fifty four.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Yeah, oh you knew that. Huh.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
You grew over that eerr too a little bit later.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
But same. I'm actually in the pot business now also,
but the legal side of things. So, yes, it's four
hundred and fifty four grams to a pound.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Isn't an amazing That's been part of our lives over
fifty years now, yeah, way fifty.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
So Bruce, you're in Florida, you are off floating or
organizing offloading. You're selling we to everybody in the state,
driving it up and down, and you're a mentoror, right,
Darryl Boyd, How what did he teach you? And how
does someone become a smuggling mentor? Oh? Tell us a
(31:09):
Darryl Boyd's story and how you got hooked with him.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Okay, so earlier I mentioned I made my first one
hundred thousand dollars with Daryl Boyd. That load was very
funny the way it happened. He had offloaded it offload
and he had an RV parked in front of his
house and a couple RVs, and so I went there
to pick up my RV and there was eight thousand
pounds in that particular RV, and I don't know what,
(31:34):
you know, I had trucks, he had a bunch of
stuff he has, like a farming area, And so I
go and drive away. About three days later, he calls
me up. He goes, Bruce, you brought maybe it was
actually two days later or the next day, because you
picked up the wrong RV, you know, bring it back.
I go, sorry, it's all sold. He goes, oh, that's okay.
(31:58):
And you know, he was one of these guys I
said I looked up to I'm a young, up and
coming marijuana smuggler, and I just he was an idol.
He was a hero. He's the guy who started off
smuggling fifty thousand pounds at a time. You know, I
started off with pounds. He started off with fifty thousand,
and he was just, you know, Bruce, you don't do this.
You don't do this, you don't do this. You do this,
(32:20):
you do this. There's dues and there's don'ts, and he
just taught me a lot of them all the time.
I Mean, his nickname is he calls himself the Gorilla
because he's a he's an alpha male prime right, he
bosses around alpha male, similar to what I became. But meanwhile,
he's a.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Big dude too. He's a big stature, like he's a
very tall.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Oh yeah, in a big beard and him and he
was the military, his brother Tracy, they were partners. He
was in the Special Forces. They called her the Smith
Brothers because of the Smith's brother's cough drop that's what
they look like. And he's just somebody that had a
million pieces of very useful information that with al that
(33:00):
I would have taken me years to learn on my own.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, all right, Well, more stories about Darryl Boyd and
his brother and their exploits with Bruce perlowin the King
of Pot Right here on becoming the King of Pot.
As we learn more about Bruce Perlowin and how he
really became this massive kingpin. Bruce, any last words on
(33:28):
episode number one, my friend, I.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Think that covers it, although I just want people to
understand the error in which this all took place. That
was the incredible, amazing, colorful sixties and seventies, in the
years of the hippies, and then ultimately what our impact
was on society today with marijuana and with the culture
of the time.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Awesome. And next week we'll talk about the time that
you guys took that money and donated it to the
Jerry Lewis Telethon, and uh, we'll tell that story, all right.
That was thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
That that was Daryl Boyd that did that. Yeah, that's
a great story. I know.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
I can't wait to hear it. I know, I know.
We'll talk about that next week. Bruce. Thanks for the
incredible stories and I look forward to chatting more next week.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Thank you, Todd, I do too,
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