Snowbird E-Book

William Norris

• Herausgeber: CamCat Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 370

Beschreibung

The Rise and Fall of a Drug Smuggler

Leseprobe

Snowbird

William Norris

CamCat Publishing, LLC

Brentwood, Tennessee 37027

camcatpublishing.com

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher make no representations or warranties, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, usefulness or timeliness of the information contained in this book for any purpose. The author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

© 2020 by CamCat Publishing

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address 101 Creekside Crossing Suite 280 Brentwood, TN 37027.

Paperback ISBN 9780744300765

eBook ISBN 9780744300772

Large-Print Paperback ISBN 9780744300307

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935725

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Contents

Also by William Norris

1. When Pigs Fly

2. A Deal with the Devil

3. The Making of a Smuggler

4. Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend

5. The Suing of a Samaritan

6. An Island Called Norman

7. The Littlest Smuggler

8. Death of an Old Friend

9. Almost an Honest Living

10. Stepping Stones in the Ocean

11. The Gentlemen Pass By

12. Full Stop, Loaded

13. Invitation to Murder

14. Subsistence Money

15. Vengeance

16. Promises, Promises

17. Choosing Sides

18. Judgment

Epilogue

For Further Discussion

About the Author

More from William Norris

A Grave Too Many

A Talent to Deceive

Willful Misconduct

The Badger Game

The Man Who Fell From the Sky

CamCat Perspectives

Also by William Norris

Nonfiction

A Talent to Deceive

The Man Who Fell from the Sky

Willful Misconduct

Fiction

The Badger Game

Make Mad the Guilty

A Grave Too Many

1

When Pigs Fly

Even before the pig flew over the windshield, Andrew Barnes knew he had made a mistake. This was not the runway he was looking for. It wasn’t a runway at all. The brown strip rushing towards him in the landing lights of the twin-engine Rockwell Turbo Commander was nothing more than a rutted country lane. The flickering lights that he had taken as threshold markers were actually the headlamps of an ancient truck, jolting along and minding its own business.

“Oh, shit,” said Andrew Barnes.

There was no going back. Flaps extended, nose high, the Turbo Commander was committed to landing. The engines screamed in fine pitch as they swallowed the last few gallons of fuel in the tanks. The stall-warning horn blared in protest. On the ground, an astonished Colombian farmer stood on his brakes and lurched into a ditch as the monstrous shape skimmed the roof of his truck and struck the road only yards ahead.

“Hang on tight,” shouted Barnes. Paralyzed with fear, his two passengers hardly needed to be told. With a spine-jarring jolt, the main wheels touched and stayed down as the fully stalled aircraft fell out of the sky. The nose dropped, and they watched with horrified fascination through the windshield as the Turbo Commander began a wild charge down the track. Barnes fought for control, stabbing at brakes and rudder pedals, miraculously dodging the trees and bushes that flashed past the wingtips. And then the road turned. There was nowhere to go.

The aircraft left the path, crossed a ditch, smashed through a hedge, and hurled itself into a farmyard. Startled chicken scattered in all directions.

And a pig flew over the windshield.

With a final expensive crunch, the Turbo Commander plunged its nose into a wooden fence. And stopped.

Andrew Barnes told me that story on the first day we met. It was not a chance encounter. Some three weeks before I had had a telephone call from Michael Knipe, then foreign news editor of The Times. Michael, an old friend from my own days with that once-distinguished newspaper, was calling to do me a favor. At least, he hoped it was going to be a favor. He sounded a trifle nervous.

The Times man in New York, said Michael, had just been interviewing an odd character who was one of the witnesses in the cocaine-smuggling trial of Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, down in Miami. The witness was an Englishman, now living in Pennsylvania, who had an extraordinary tale to tell about the cocaine-smuggling business. Furthermore, he seemed to want it converted into a book and had asked the New York correspondent if he knew any good authors who might be interested. The message had been passed on to the Foreign Desk, and Michael had thought of me. Nice of him.

“What do you know about this guy?” I asked. Not a lot, it turned out. Just that his name was Barnes, that he had smuggled large quantities of cocaine for the Medellín Cartel, and he was probably heading for a lengthy spell in prison. From the sound of it, he deserved no less.

At this point I knew no more about the Medellín Cartel than the next man, merely what I had read in the press and seen on television. But it was enough to induce revulsion. By all accounts, these were unscrupulous crooks who had poisoned a continent and amassed a king’s ransom in the process. On the way, they had murdered scores of men who attempted to expose their conspiracy. And some of those men, I now remembered with an odd churning in the pit of my stomach, had been journalists. From the tone of Michael’s voice, clear across four thousand miles, I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“Just thought you might be interested,” he said rather lamely. “I’ve got his telephone number if you want it.”

Why not? There was no harm in having the option. I scribbled down the number and sat looking at it pensively long after our conversation ended. I wondered about the personality of the man who lay behind that number, and I wondered even more about his associates. I had never met a drug smuggler, at least, not knowingly. Curiosity did battle with prudence, and for the moment, prudence won. I pushed the slip of paper to one side and got on with the rest of my life.

It was not a good time for authoring in the Norris household. In spite of splendid reviews for my last book and the sale of the film rights to Hollywood, there was no prospect of a commission for the next one. I was caught in the usual dilemma of the nonfiction writer: No publisher will sign a contract and pay an advance without a fully researched outline of the project. But research involves time and travel, and time and travel cost money. That money ought to come from the publisher’s advance—it is what advances are supposed to be for—but in practice you cannot get one without laying out large amounts of your own cash long before you see the check. Which is fine if you have it. It was not the first time I had been in this catch-22 situation, but try as I might I could find no way out of it. I ought, I thought, to give up the nonfiction trade and write novels instead. The trouble was, I was not very good at fiction.

My passion of the moment was the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Others, notably Ludovic Kennedy in his excellent book The Airman and the Carpenter, had proved conclusively that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was innocent of the crime, but no one had yet been able to identify the true guilty party. I believed I had a clue to his identity through newly discovered evidence, but believing it and proving it were two very different things.

For months, I had been chasing phantoms and spending money I could ill afford in pursuit of the final truth. I had even flown to Scotland to interview Betty Gow, the Lindbergh baby’s still-surviving nursemaid, only to have the door literally slammed in my face. In the United States, too, hostility and evasion were greeting every inquiry. I knew I was on the right trail, and that given sufficient time and money, persistence would pay off in the end. Time, I had. Money was a different matter. As the days passed and the crock of gold at the end of my investigatory rainbow grew no closer, I found my eyes drawn more and more to the scrap of paper lying on my desk and the telephone number of Andrew Richard Barnes. Perhaps, after all, it was time to face reality, to put the Lindbergh project on the back burner, and to tackle something that, on the face of it, looked straightforward. Something, moreover, that ought not to cost an arm and a leg to research.

My long-suffering agent in New York was mildly encouraging. My wife, faced with the prospect of her middle-aged husband associating with ruthless criminals, was appalled. Four years of exposure to American television violence did not help. “These people are worse than the Mafia,” she said. “You could get yourself killed.”

With some asperity, I pointed out that I had survived more dangerous assignments in the past. I had been under fire in Biafra, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique. I had been in the thick of the Paris riots in May 1968. By comparison, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with a drug smuggler was pretty small beer.

“You were younger and sillier then,” she said.

That did it. I rooted out the scrap of paper and made the call.

Barnes seemed agreeable enough on the telephone, and more than willing to meet with me. The time and place could be of my choosing. I pondered the question. Aside from the fact that his house in Pennsylvania was a three-hour drive from my home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, did I really want to stick my head in the lion’s mouth at this first meeting? At least my own place boasted three large and faithful dogs of fearful mien, plus, as a last resort, the family firearm. There was the small problem of persuading my wife to accept a drug-smuggler as a houseguest, but I hoped, correctly as it turned out, that curiosity might win the day.

“Come for the weekend,” I said.

During the intervening days, Betty and I speculated on what our guest would look like. Suave and sinister was the consensus of opinion. Probably slim and dark-suited, with a palpable air of menace. We were certainly unprepared for the shy giant of a man who unfolded himself from an ancient Ford Mustang in our driveway on that Saturday in late April.

Andrew Barnes was big. Very big. He looked down at us from a height of six-foot-three, and his chest strained at the buttons of his jacket. There was some surplus fat there to be sure, but a hell of a lot of muscle underneath it. The face was bucolic. It was the sort of face that belonged on an English farm laborer, not on a drug smuggler. The eyes were blue and, God damnit, they had a sort of innocence about them.

Barnes came towards us, a battered leather case in one hand, brushing the hair from his eyes with the other. He wore it long with a pronounced fringe, as though in memory of the Beatles, and I became aware that the dogs had stopped barking. They were crowding round him, sniffing his legs and showing every sign of pleasure as he bent down to pat them. Great, I thought. The one time I invite a criminal to my home, and you silly bastards fawn all over him. But they were right. For all that he had done, and it was plenty, there was no harm, no violence in Andrew Barnes. A dog’s judgment is not often wrong.

We shook hands, and I made a mental note that his grip was firm and dry. The hands themselves, though, were surprisingly small. Smaller than my own. It was as though they had stopped growing in his early teens, while the rest of his physique burgeoned into manhood. It was not the only thing about Andrew Barnes, I was to discover, that betokened arrested development.

His voice, too, was a surprise. I had expected an English accent, perhaps similar to my own. But what came out was a sort of mid-Atlantic twang, neither one thing nor the other, but more American than not. His speech, like his whole manner, was diffident. Courteous and gentlemanly—an odd word to use in this context, but totally appropriate—but with a sheepish air about him. As we stumbled through the formalities and finally sat down in my study to begin the first of many interviews, I came to realize that he was more nervous than I. Every few seconds he would take a comb and pass it through his perfectly ordered hair, like an errant schoolboy facing his headmaster and wondering what to do with his hands.

But he could talk. Oh my, how he could talk. At first, as names and dates and places poured out in an unrelenting stream, I began to wonder if he was not too articulate. Was it possible that this was a well-rehearsed tale being recounted for my benefit, a fictional farrago concocted with the object of making big bucks out of the book? If so, I thought wryly, this guy is singularly ignorant about the rewards of authorship, let alone the Son of Sam laws.

Slowly, I came to realize two things. First, his astonishing power of recall was largely due to the fact that he had just spent weeks and months being grilled by agents from the FBI and the US Drug Enforcement Administration, not to mention sundry lawyers while he stood on the witness stand in Miami.

Second, and more important, Andrew Barnes was using me as a confessor. In terms of his atonement, going to jail and paying the price was not enough. He was inwardly driven to tell the story of his misdeeds in the utmost detail to the widest possible audience. There was no altruism in it. He was not out to educate the young and prevent them falling into the same trap.

At root, he neither knew nor cared whether his revelations would have any effect on the long-term future of the drug trade. All that mattered to Andrew Barnes at this point in time was to get the whole thing off his chest so that he might, one day, make a fresh start. In short, he needed to cleanse his soul.

I am no psychologist, still less a priest, and the reader must judge as the story unfolds whether such a public mea culpa is justified. When it comes to evil intent, having got to know Andrew Barnes rather well, I will vouch for the fact that he is not in the same league as the man he met on a Florida airfield on December 26, 1977.

2

A Deal with the Devil

“Call me Joe,” said the handsome young Colombian who greeted Barnes at Fort Lauderdale airport. It was not his real name. That, he said, was Rubin Montes. That, too, was a lie, but on that day, Andrew Barnes could not have cared less. Barnes was twenty years old with a wife, a baby son, and an ancient C-46 cargo plane that was eating him alive.

He was very, very broke. The important thing about Mr. Rubin Montes was not his name or his veracity, but the fifty hundred-dollar bills he was offering for Andrew’s services, with the promise of much more to come.

It had been a long time since Barnes had held that sort of money. He knew what he had to do for it, and that was fine with him. To fly down to Colombia, pick up a load of marijuana and return, seemed no big deal. Everyone was doing it. True, it was technically illegal, but that only mattered if you got caught. And Andrew, who knew a dozen ways of flying into Florida undetected, had no intention of getting caught. If the morality of drug smuggling bothered his conscience, it was a small voice and quickly stilled. At that moment in time, pursued by creditors and with bankruptcy looming, Andrew Barnes would have struck a deal with the devil.

Which, in a way, is precisely what he did.

The name of the devil’s agent was Charlie Bush, a rogue and scoundrel of the old school. To young Andrew Barnes, the sixty-five-year-old Charlie was a romantic father-figure, a self-taught pilot from the barnstorming days, who made his fortune wheeling and dealing in old airplanes after World War II. He was kind to Andrew, as Fagin was kind to Oliver Twist, and whenever the flier needed help or money, the doors of Bush Aviation on the southwest side of Fort Lauderdale International Airport were always open.

Charlie Bush’s legitimate business was extensive. At any one time, up to two hundred aircraft could be found parked on his half-mile ramp. He repaired aircraft, large or small. He sold them, chartered them, and operated a cargo business back and forth between Florida and the Bahamas and Caribbean. He had six full-time employees, and sometimes as many as thirty temporary workers. For a man partially crippled by polio, it might have seemed enough to keep him busy, without engaging in anything more illicit. But not for Charlie Bush. Charlie, to quote Andrew Barnes, was “a savvy old cat.”

If the young Englishman was suspicious, even before the introduction to Montes, that his benefactor was not all that he appeared, he could hardly afford to say so. His much-needed spare parts, even engines, were supplied on credit. His aircraft was fueled on the promise of payment later. The washing facility was free. Charlie was a crook, but it didn’t show. Not at first. Why, the man was a pillar of the community. He had even signed on to a program that gave jobs to convicts on work release, acting as their parole officer. Why no one in authority ever realized that this was akin to putting a fox in a chicken coop is one of life’s greater bureaucratic mysteries.

Obligation was the name of the game. Charlie Bush had a simple philosophy: Be generous to young pilots and keep them in your debt. One day, the debt can be called in.

For Andrew Barnes, that time came on the day after Christmas 1977. Some weeks before, at the urging of Charlie Bush, he had taken his old C-46 to Canada. It was a journey of some necessity. The C-46 had been grounded with engine trouble, denying Andrew his only means of making an honest living, and Charlie, good old Charlie, had stepped in to help. He had guaranteed a $33,000 note to enable Barnes to buy one reconditioned engine and borrowed the same amount on his own account to purchase a second.

Naturally, he had not done this for nothing: Andrew had to transfer the title of the aircraft to his name, and, just for good measure, Charlie slapped a $60,000 lien on it. The sums did not add up. Andrew nurtured the unworthy suspicion that the old man had pocketed $27,000 somewhere along the line. But he was in no position to argue.

Still, at least the C-46 was finally airworthy again. By now, however, the bank was shouting for its money, and Charlie got wind of the fact that a repossession crew was on its way. He told Andrew to take the airplane to Canada, and take a lawyer with him. There was just one thing he had to do before he went—take a check ride in a pressurized Aero-Commander. Charlie gave no explanation for this odd request, and Andrew did not ask. He went ahead and did it.

The bid to save the C-46 from the clutches of the bank was successful. Barnes obtained a restraining order from the Ontario Supreme Court, and the frustrated repossession crew who had pursued him to Canada were forced to leave empty-handed.

By now it was almost Christmas, and Andrew was anxious to be home with his family. He returned to Florida, arriving in Fort Lauderdale on Christmas Day, to find a message from Charlie Bush.

“Come at once and bring your overnight bag,” it said. “I’ve got some real good flying for you.”

Andrew went next morning. His wife, Barbara, drove him to the airport that day in the decrepit van that was their only transport.

And there he met Rubin Montes.

Montes, to preserve his alias for the moment, had been referred to Charlie Bush by a friend of Charlie’s named Lee Cameron from Burbank, California. Cameron ran his own fixed-base operation in Burbank, flying twin-engine Beechcrafts and DC-3s. Like many others in the aviation business, he knew that Bush was heavily involved with drug smugglers.

Though he had not been convicted at that time (he was to go to prison in 1986, at the age of seventy-four, after being caught with three kilograms of cocaine and $100,000 in his car), Charlie was already selling and chartering aircraft to the smuggling fraternity, servicing them, and providing crews. He was clearly the man to supply Montes’s needs.

The Colombian already had an aircraft: a gaudily painted Rockwell Turbo Commander Shrike, with “Summit Trucking” emblazoned on the side. It was owned by Nestor Castrion, a Colombian of mixed Indian descent and a seasoned drug smuggler whose proudest claim was the paternity of thirty-two children.

Castrion was to accompany Montes on the drug run, taking with him a Christmas cargo of toys for his offspring, but neither could fly the plane. They needed a pilot.

Charlie Bush sold them the services of Andrew Barnes, who had so thoughtfully been checked out on that very type of aircraft a few weeks before.

As far as Andrew was concerned, it was not a hard sell. Charlie knew the state of his finances down to the last blob of red ink. He also had good reason to believe that the young pilot would have little scruple about breaking the law.

Charlie explained the proposition: The load would be marijuana, and he would be paid $50,000. For subsequent trips, there would be an increase of $10,000 each time. The old man pushed a well-stuffed envelope across the scarred desk in his hangar office. “Give that to Barbara,” he said. Andrew took the envelope to his wife, waiting in the van, and told her to count the contents.

The men drove to the other side of the airfield, where work was being carried out on the Turbo Commander. Charlie Bush had cautiously refused to have it standing on his own ramp, in case something went wrong and he should be implicated with the smuggling operation.

There was a fourth man in the group, a certain Larry Greenberger, who was to be responsible for the Florida end of the transaction. Greenberger was to unload the marijuana and drive it away from an airstrip at De Land, some miles inland from Daytona Beach. It was all arranged.

Montes was anxious to be off, but the Turbo Commander was not ready. Mechanics were installing a long-range tank inside the cabin to hold the 120 gallons of extra fuel necessary for the long flight, and the work was taking longer than expected.

Andrew was worried. It began to look as though they would be arriving in Colombia after dark, at which point he would be faced with the problem of landing on a small illegal airstrip of unknown location, length, and surface. It was downright dangerous, and he said so, urging postponement of the trip until the next day. His suggestion was not well received.

Montes and Greenberger began to apply pressure. It had to be today, they said, or not at all. Government officials and the military in Colombia had been bribed to turn a blind eye when the “merchandise” was moved out to the airstrip; the owner of the strip had been paid $100,000. If the flight did not go ahead on schedule, all that would be wasted. Andrew Barnes might not be wasted, but he certainly wouldn’t get paid.

Barnes needed the money enough to risk his life. “To hell with this,” he said. “We might as well go.”

At noon on December 26, 1977, Turbo Commander 126 Alpha Charlie, with Andrew Barnes at the controls, rolled down the runway at Fort Lauderdale and rose into the clear Florida sky. Barnes set his course to the south, engaged the autopilot, and settled down for the seven-hour long haul across Haiti and the Caribbean to Colombia. Rubin Montes sat in the right-hand seat, and the two men talked.

It transpired that this was not Montes’s first attempt to smuggle drugs by air. Not long before, he had flown down to Santa Marta with a Californian pilot who turned out to be a heroin addict. At regular intervals, the pilot would leave the cockpit to take a fix, frequently falling asleep at the controls. By the time they reached Colombia, he was in no condition to find the jungle airstrip and landed instead at the commercial airport in Santa Marta.

This was risky enough, but the pilot compounded the offense by forgetting to lower the wheels, and the aircraft made a belly landing on the main runway. Both men were promptly arrested and had to bribe their way out of jail.

This was not an encouraging story for young Andrew Barnes, already worried by the prospect of making his first arrival in the dark, but by now he was totally committed. There was no turning back.

Seven hours was what it should have taken, but headwinds cut the Turbo Commander’s speed to a scant 175 knots. Barnes flew high, then low, but he could not escape the wind. Long before the Colombian coast passed beneath them, they were flying in total darkness. Montes, sharing the cockpit in the right-hand seat, showed no sign of anxiety.

“It will look like JFK down there,” he told the worried pilot. “No problem; there will be plenty of lights.” He made it sound like a truly professional operation.

Their destination was fourteen miles from the coastal city of Riohacha, on a heading of 220 degrees. Finding Riohacha was easy: The local airfield had a navigation beacon, and soon the lights of the town showed up clearly. Barnes told Montes to use the aircraft’s VHF radio and contact the ground crew at the smuggler’s airstrip. Montes began to call.

There was no reply, nothing but the crackle of static through the headphones.

By this time, Riohacha was behind them. They were boring on into blackness, two hours behind schedule, with no sign of the promised airstrip and no word from the ground. And fuel was running low. Barnes estimated that there was a scant thirty minutes of flying time remaining.

He checked the airspeed indicator and the second hand of his watch. By his reckoning, the strip should be immediately beneath them. All three men peered down. There was nothing.

Tension was now building in the cockpit. Barnes turned to Montes. “Joe,” he said, “your guys aren’t here. You know what happened: They were expecting us at six o’clock, like you said. They probably think we’ve crashed, or we’re not going to make it today. Those guys have just wandered off.”

Barnes reached a decision. His options were diminishing. He could ditch the aircraft in the sea off Riohacha, or he could land at the nearby military airport. Neither prospect was inviting. The seas off Colombia were rough, and with its high wing configuration the Turbo Commander would have all the floating characteristics of a submarine. On the other hand, as Montes pointed out angrily, if they landed on the military field they would face instant arrest. Montes had experience of Colombian jails. “You’re not going to like it,” he said.

“Give me something else, Joe,” said Barnes. For him, survival was now more important than freedom. “We’re running out of fuel, and in fifteen minutes time this crate is coming out of the sky, military airport or not. If we go down over uncharted terrain, we are likely to lose our lives. No, not just likely to lose them, we will lose our lives.”

“Go back out there one more time,” said Montes. He was beginning to sweat.

“You’ve got one last shot at it,” grunted Barnes. “We’ve got just enough juice to squeak out there and take another look.” He reversed their course towards the supposed position of the airstrip, adjusting his mixture controls to lean-off the engines as much as he dared, to get every minute of flying time out of the few gallons of fuel still sloshing in the tanks.

“I’m now seriously thinking about going in the water off the beach,” he said later. “I can see from the lights of the town that there’s a pier there. The thing that makes me nervous about that is that this is an Aero Commander, and that thing goes down like a submarine. The wings are up on top of you, and the fuselage is down low. I didn’t like the idea of setting it in the water. But I didn’t tell him that I was going to land at the military airport if it came to it, and just take my chances.”

Suddenly, the two men saw a light. Not much of a light, to be true, not much more than a flashlight. But it was palpably flashing. Then a second gleam appeared beside the first, flashing in unison as though someone was signaling with the headlights of a car.

“That’s it,” shouted Montes. “That’s got to be it, Andy.”

Almost sick with relief, the young pilot lowered his flaps and landing gear and set up an impromptu circuit, using the lights as a reference point, on the assumption that this was the ground crew marking the threshold of the airstrip.

It was then that he landed in the farmyard. Barnes remembered the moment ruefully. “It was too late,” he said. “I was committed to that landing. I could see it was a truck just before I flared over it, and I thought he was trying to light the strip for us. He was totally oblivious—the truck driver almost had a heart attack. I felt the main wheels hit. I felt for sure we were about to hit trees and all that stuff, but it just didn’t happen. I had my landing lights on. All I can remember is heavy braking and just pulling everything I could to start shutting stuff off. I knew we were low on fuel: It would be unlikely for us to blow up unless we caught a wing tip or something and tore a wing off. But it all happened so quickly that really there was no time for reactions. When I got out of the plane my heart was doing about 200 r.p.m.”

Rubin Montes was the first one out of the aircraft. A sawn-off shotgun had appeared in his hands as though by magic. Nestor Castrion, similarly armed, followed him to the ground. Barnes, the adrenaline still pumping through his veins like high-octane fuel, was shocked at the implication of violence. What the hell was he getting himself into?

“All of a sudden they’ve got guns now,” he recalled. “They’re going out of the door to find out who needs to be taken care of. I was shit-scared.”

The two men disappeared into the darkness, leaving the pilot to inspect the damage with the aid of a flashlight. There was dust and mud everywhere, but all things considered, the would-be smugglers had escaped lightly. Barnes found that the nosewheel tire had been shredded in the heavy landing, rendering it completely useless. There were plenty of popped rivets and some deformation of the fuselage, and the nosewheel structure seemed a little loose.

It could have been much worse. Nevertheless, they were now stranded in the backwoods of Colombia with an unserviceable and illegal airplane, with no flight plan and no entry visas on their passports.

Apprehensively, Barnes calculated the likely length of their prison sentence if they were caught. At any moment he expected to hear the sound of gunfire, but within minutes Montes and Castrion had returned, smiling broadly.

“Everything’s all right,” said Montes. “I talked to the owner of the farm and gave him my ring to make him feel better about the pigs and chickens. He’s going to help us.” He waved his hand to show that the diamond ring he had been boasting about during the trip was no longer there. It had been worth, he said, $20,000.

Twenty thousand dollars buys a lot of cooperation in the backwoods of Colombia. The farmer, it transpired, had a bulldozer. He was willing to use it to convert his road into an impromptu airstrip, promising to have it ready for a dawn take-off.

“We’re not going anywhere without a nosewheel,” Barnes objected.

“No problem,” said Montes. By this time the missing ground crew had arrived, having seen the Turbo Commander circling the area as they returned from Riohacha in a vain attempt to find out why the plane was late. It transpired that three weeks before, another aircraft of the same type had crashed on landing at the airstrip, three miles away. Among the salvaged parts was a perfectly serviceable nosewheel. Barnes worked through the night to fit it. At first light, he was dog-tired and depressed. “I was thinking, boy, why did I get into this mess,” he said later. “I decide I am just going to go home and accept bankruptcy and all that. I really felt like a prick down there.”

The feeling did not last long. At first light, reality set in once more. Barnes could see that the farmer and his bulldozer had done a good job: The impromptu runway was short—only 1,500 feet—but it was just adequate. Within the hour, with a minimum of fuel and only himself and Montes on board, Barnes had taken off in the battered Turbo Commander and made the short hop to the airstrip he had missed the previous night.

This one, the ground crew had assured him, was a different proposition. It was six thousand feet long. Why, they claimed, even a DC-6 had been able to land there. This was no lie. Barnes saw the burned-out wreckage of the big four-engine transport lying in the jungle as he circled to land.

He turned to Montes. “Joe,” he said, “it doesn’t count, just getting in here. Getting out is what matters.”

“They have a weird, perverse sense of humor, those Colombians,” said Barnes. “The guy had been telling me all night: ‘Don’t worry, it’s a beautiful strip over there. A DC-6 has been in there.’ As soon as I got there, I knew what they meant. I was walking around it. Four guys got killed in that DC-6, trying to take off. They just went running on through the bush, and I guess they took a tree through the wing root or something, and the damn thing just blew up. The four guys were buried there—what parts they could find of them.”

Understandably, Barnes failed to share the joke. “I started getting scared now,” he said. “These people were just totally reckless. They had no idea of what an airplane was; they just treated it like a truck. They would just load it up and then expect you to try to take off with it. But there was not much I could do: Everyone was wearing guns around there.”

Barnes looked at the rock-strewn runway, at the wreckage of the DC6, and his own damaged nosewheel assembly. It had survived the landing but was shimmying badly. He pleaded with Montes not to allow the ground crew to put more than a thousand pounds of marijuana on board for the direct flight to De Land.

No one was listening. Bale after bale was stacked in the cabin, until the crew had to use the cockpit door to get in. In all there was about 1,500 pounds. Together with the extra fuel for the long haul back to Florida, that made the Turbo Commander about twenty percent over its permissible gross weight. There would be no hope of treating the fragile nosewheel gently—it would have to be held on the ground until well beyond normal take-off speed. Barnes considered refusing to fly, looked at the Colombians, looked at their guns, and thought better of it. He backtracked to the far end of the strip, revved the engines to maximum power, released the brakes and hoped for the best.

For long seconds, nothing much happened. The overloaded Turbo Commander was reluctant to move. Then it began to accelerate slowly, too slowly, bouncing heavily over the uneven surface. Then, at seventy knots, the weakened nosewheel strut collapsed completely. The aircraft lurched forward and slid on its belly, rocks eating away at the fragile alloy skin until they tore great holes and began bouncing around in the cockpit. For the second time in twelve hours, Andrew Barnes turned off every switch in sight and prayed they would not burn. He was lucky. The Turbo Commander came to rest in a huge cloud of dust, and the shaken crew climbed out as the Colombians advanced mournfully up the strip to unload the cargo once again.

Barnes’s reaction was one of relief. He had been convinced that the aircraft would never get off the ground; now he was rid of it. He watched with satisfaction as Montes struck a match and torched the wreckage. Nestor Castrion, some $250,000 poorer, felt somewhat differently. This was becoming an expensive trip.

And it was not over yet. The three potential smugglers were now stranded in Colombia. Weary, and more than a little the worse for wear, they accepted the loan of a vehicle from the owner of the airstrip and began to drive north towards Barranquilla, six hours away. Riohacha would have been closer, but Riohacha had no hotel and only a vestigial telephone service.

Worse, it was a place where a gringo like Andrew Barnes (a conspicuous six-foot-three and weighing 230 pounds) would be arrested on sight. The police would have no doubt about what he had been up to. Thanks to the generous loading habits of the Colombians, there were a lot of pilots walking around the region without airplanes.

Barranquilla, on the other hand, was a tourist center with a good hotel. An American or Brit could blend into the background. First, however, they had to get there, and the coast road leading north was studded with military checkpoints where identification documents were closely examined. Barnes’s British passport, of course, was devoid of Colombian entry stamps.

“No problem,” said Rubin Montes. This meant, as usual, that there was a problem; they had simply not yet struck it. He produced his own German passport, which had entry stamps galore. “Show them that,” he said. “Only, try not to show them the picture.” It was a reasonable precaution. Montes was short, dark, and slight, with swarthy Latin good looks. Barnes was an Anglo-Saxon hulk. Rarely can two men have looked less alike.

Andrew Barnes took the passport and looked at the name. It was then he discovered who “Rubin Montes,” alias “Joe” really was—his employer was Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas. At that point in time, the name meant nothing. It would come to mean a great deal.

Carlos Lehder had underestimated the diligence of the Colombian military. At each of seven checkpoints on the road to Barranquilla they looked at Andrew Barnes, looked at the passport picture, and laughed. Then they ordered the pilot from the car at gunpoint and searched him thoroughly. He was very scared. Lehder and Castrion were less concerned. They knew the score, and they knew the tariff. Several hundred dollars changed hands at each checkpoint, and the trio was allowed to proceed.

In Barranquilla, they stayed at the Hotel Del Prado, right on the beach, where Lehder rented a big suite on the top floor. Money seemed to be no problem with the Colombian; he was determined to make this operation work whatever the cost, and by now the expenses were approaching half a million dollars with nothing to show for it.

Whatever qualms Andrew Barnes may have had at the outset, and they were probably few, he was now a whole-hearted member of the team. From Barranquilla he telephoned Charlie Bush to tell him that they needed another airplane. And Charlie, as ever, was willing to oblige. For a price.

The aircraft selected belonged to Bob Morgan, another member of the Florida smuggling fraternity, currently serving thirty years in jail. It was a Beechcraft Twin Bonanza—the Excalibur version with 400-horsepower engines—and Morgan, said Charlie, was willing to hire it out for $70,000 for the single trip. It was not exactly a bargain rate: You could buy a secondhand Twin Bonanza for that sort of money. But it probably reflected the risks involved. There was an even chance that Morgan would never see the aircraft again. In any case, Lehder was in no position to haggle. He arranged with Larry Greenberger to take the $70,000 in cash to Fort Lauderdale, and the Twin Bonanza was handed over to Jack Leibolt, a friend of Andrew’s, who was to ferry it down to the Riohacha airstrip.

For once the operation went smoothly. Leibolt, a vastly experienced pilot who had flown with the Englishman in more honest days, arrived dead on time and handed over the aircraft to Barnes. The latter was pleased to see it. He had flown the Beechcraft before and thought it much better suited to this type of flying. It was more heavily built than the Turbo Commander, with plenty of power to handle the load, and had been equipped with bladder tanks to extend the range. Jack Leibolt told him it was “running fine.”

What he did not tell him, and what Barnes forgot to ask, was how to get the extra petrol from the bladder tanks into the aircraft’s main fuel system. A small point, but not without importance.

Leibolt had flown in at sunset and was quickly on his way out of the country via Barranquilla and Aruba. In the morning, as Barnes supervised the refueling of the aircraft, Carlos Lehder arrived with the “merchandise.” This time, it was not bales of marijuana. Instead there were nine suitcases, some duffel bags, cardboard boxes, and an automobile fuel tank.

“What are we taking that for, Joe?” asked Barnes innocently, looking at the tank.

“Well, there’s things inside it,” replied Lehder.

The penny dropped. “We’re going to haul cocaine, aren’t we, Joe?” Barnes said.

“Shsh. Don’t let anyone know.”

Andrew Barnes, for the first and possibly the last time in his smuggling career, rebelled. “I don’t want to haul coke, Joe!” he said. It was not a moral rebellion; he simply knew that the penalties for getting caught would be vastly greater.

“You want to get out of here, don’t you?” Lehder retorted. “If we refuse to haul this load, they’ll probably kill us, so keep your voice down.” Barnes looked at the guns and then at the faces around him. His short-lived revolt was over.

The reason for the switch, Lehder explained, was purely economic. A load of marijuana would have been worth, perhaps, $300,000. They had already spent that much on airplanes, let alone the other expenses. On the other hand, the three hundred kilograms of cocaine now being loaded on board would sell for $15,000,000—$50,000 per kilo on the US wholesale market. That represented a gross profit of $7,500,000 over the purchase price in Colombia. It was not all going to Lehder; for this particular flight he was to be paid $3,000 a kilo for transporting the drug—a mere $900,000. Still, you could wreck a few old airplanes for that sort of money and still come out on top. Naturally, the price for Andrew’s services would also increase. Naturally.

The cases of cocaine loaded that day, each carefully labeled with the name of its Colombian owner, comprised the very first shipment of the Medellín Cartel. The cartel, under Lehder’s guidance, was to become a billion-dollar business and a household name. It was to supply 80 percent of the avid American market for cocaine, causing untold misery, crime, and death. It was to corrupt and kill politicians, judges, and policemen and send ripples that reached into the 1988 campaign for the White House.

And on that day in January 1978, it all came about because a young British pilot, days short of his twenty-first birthday, failed to take off with a load of marijuana. No doubt it would have happened anyway. But that is how it began.

The Beechcraft,