American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  When I told Max I’d lost the load, he freaked. I was calm. I knew from working with Fabito that Colombians were okay if you lost coke. Their cost of making it was so cheap, they could make up the loss with no problem. The Colombians could accept you losing a load if the cops got it. A mistake was fine.

  What wasn’t fine was ripping them off. If you lost a load, you had to get proof that the cops had taken it from you. This was very important. If you could show them a newspaper article proving that the heat took your coke, you’d be okay.

  The hard part was waiting. Since I was new to Max and Rafa, I went to Max’s house every day and waited with him. But there was nothing in the news. When Max got nervous, he’d hyperventilate and get dizzy. He’d have to breathe into a paper bag to keep from passing out. Five days I spent in his dining room. On one side Max had a bag on his face, wheezing into it—then taking breaks to smoke a cigarette. On the other side Rafa was smoking bazooka after bazooka. What a fun couple these two were.

  Thank God for Danny Mones. Soon as I heard from Roger, I had Danny ask some dirty cops he knew to look into police reports. One of the cops found an internal DEA report. There was no news story about kilos falling on Yeehaw Junction, because Roger had dropped them in another part of the state.

  Everybody quieted down when I showed them the DEA report. Rafa was calm, and Max was able to breathe normally again. I gave my pilot Roger credit for escaping. But I was disappointed with myself. I’d run this job like a jackass.

  What my mind kept going to was Max’s special Lincoln Continental. I wanted to meet the guy who’d built it, Mickey Munday. Rafa told me that Mickey had brought in many flights for them. When I brought up the subject of Mickey to Max, he said, “Oh, that guy. He’s just a stupid redneck.”

  It shows how dumb Max really was. After I paired with Mickey, that stupid redneck defeated the whole U.S. government for years and years. Mickey was the most brilliant guy I ever worked with. He was also one of the weirdest. Mickey truly lived in his own world.

  * Barranquilla is a coastal city about two hundred miles from Medellín. Typically, cocaine from Barranquilla was controlled by a smaller cartel that was a rival to the Medellín operation.

  * The King Air was a relatively large and fast turboprop made by Beechcraft.

  * The Customs Service used Cessna Citation jets to interdict smugglers.

  55

  Every kid wants to be a pirate. Look at any map of any coast in the world, and I guarantee you’ll find places named “Pirate’s Cove” or “Smuggler’s Bay.” There’s a romance about it. It’s a fantasy, and I got to live it.

  —Mickey Munday

  J.R.: After the fiasco at Yeehaw Junction, Max told me I should run a load with Shelton, the English idiot. I told Max I wanted to meet Mickey. But Max put me off. I later realized Max was trying to get me to run loads with other pilots because he wanted to push Mickey aside. Max didn’t like Mickey because he was smarter than him. Mickey had a million ideas for smuggling. Max never had a useful idea in his life, except to marry Pablo Escobar’s cousin. Not only did Max like being El Jefe, he thought of himself as the mastermind, and Mickey threatened that idea because he made Max look dumb. I told Max that if he mentioned Shelton Archer’s name one more time, I’d put a bullet in the Englishman’s pea brain.

  The reason my pilot Roger got chased at Yeehaw Junction was that the government had stepped up its efforts to catch smugglers. We were entering a very difficult time. The government was deploying more planes and boats, escalating their “War on Drugs.” The days were gone when you could pay off a few cops and hire fishermen to race speedboats in. It was a new game. Having a smart guy like Mickey became more important than ever.

  I finally met Mickey one day by accident. I came to Max’s farm to look at some guns he wanted to sell me, and as I pulled in, I saw a hick parking a truck. That hick was Mickey. His name was written on the patch of his mechanic’s suit. Mickey was unloading ATVs that he’d souped up for one of Max’s stepkids. That’s what Max had this genius doing for him.

  Mickey was hard to miss. He was over six feet tall, with a thick head of blond hair. Some people called him Red because of his hair color, but it looked yellow to me. I was worried about Max coming out and trying get in my way, so I immediately went over to introduce myself to Mickey.

  MICKEY: The first thing I noticed about Jon was his car. It was a custom AMG that made a 450 SL look like a piece of poop because of its super-high-output engine. I believe you can never have too much horsepower, but I didn’t like Jon’s car. There were only three cars like his in Miami, and all of them were owned by drug dealers. Jon’s car might as well have had a sign on it that said “coke dealer.” That gave me a negative first impression of Jon, but when we talked, I liked him. He spoke like someone more intelligent than the car he drove.

  J.R.: Right away Mickey wanted me to crawl on the ground with him so he could show me the motors he’d souped up on Max’s ATVs. He ended up trying to give me a lesson on the history of the gasoline engine since the beginning of time. I found the guy annoying. He was like a hillbilly professor.

  But I was intrigued by him. He told me how he made his own race boats and airplanes, which would go faster than anybody else’s. He had a funny phrase that was his motto: “If it rolls, floats, or flies, I can make it go faster.”

  Mickey wasn’t a guy I was going to bond with by taking him to the orgy room at the Forge. He was a couple years older than me, but he talked like a kid. He used Boy Scout words like “Gee whiz.”

  Mickey wasn’t a pilot. He had a pilot friend he worked with named Ray Delmer.* But this shows you what a weirdo Mickey was. Delmer was almost Mickey’s age, but Mickey called him Dad. Mickey said, “Dad knows a lot about planes.” At first I thought he meant his father made planes with him, but then I found out Mickey had lost his father. Dad was his friend.

  Mickey didn’t belong in my world. He didn’t do cocaine. He didn’t swear. His favorite thing was to eat milk and cookies that his mom made. Mickey lived with his mom. He’ll tell you today that he had his own apartment back then, but there was no furniture in it. He did his laundry at his mother’s. He ate there. Sometimes he drove her to church on Sunday.

  I’m not saying he was a freak, dressing up in a skin suit made from his mom, like in the movies.† He had girlfriends almost like a normal guy. For a while he had a little skinny girlfriend with blond hair like his who dressed in all-white-jeans outfits. Mickey got white jeans that matched. The two of them would ride up on Mickey’s motorcycle and step off in their white jeans and blond hair. They looked like they might have been out hunting unicorns together.

  Despite the impression he made, Mickey was no pushover. He was not a tough guy with his hands. But I never saw him afraid. He didn’t like violent people, but he wasn’t cowardly around them. He was very stubborn. He was a know-it-all. He could make you mad. I was annoyed by him many times.

  But Mickey and me took the Cartel to the next level. Mickey made a system where however much they tried to stop drug imports, they couldn’t stop him. Mickey didn’t smuggle the biggest loads, but his loads always made it through. Mickey was like the FedEx of drug smuggling. If you saw Mickey on the street, you’d never imagine this guy was the technical mastermind of the Medellín Cartel. That was part of his true genius. This guy beat the piss out of the U.S. government, and he looked like the boy next door—if the boy next door was a little freaky and still lived with his mom at the age of thirty-five.

  * At the request of Mickey Munday, the name of his pilot friend has been changed to the pseudonym Ray Delmer.

  † A reference to Norman Bates in Psycho.

  56

  President Reagan visited south Florida to highlight his campaign against drugs today and vowed to “break the power of the Mob in America.” The president’s trip was designed to draw attention to the success of the task force, which Reagan created last January to curb the flow of illegal drugs. Vice President George Bush hea
ds the task force.

  —“Reagan Pledges War on Drugs,” Daily News,

  November 15, 1982

  J.R.: As soon as I met Mickey, I wanted to work with him, because I could see he was good enough to handle the heat that was coming down on smugglers. I pushed Max into expanding what Mickey did. Max called Mickey our “employee,” but Mickey and I worked side by side, like partners.* Outside of work we almost never socialized because as people we were completely mismatched.

  MICKEY: Kids should know I don’t advocate drugs. I’ve never inhaled a marijuana cigarette or sniffed cocaine. The only addiction I’ve ever had was chewing gum. Through most of my thirties I could not work unless I had a stick of gum in my mouth. Weird, huh? I guess you could say gum was my drug.

  I was raised in a good home. My mother was a schoolteacher and a deacon in the Presbyterian Church. My parents were from Ohio. My mom was a Miss Cincinnati, and my father went to college on a football scholarship. He played professional football for a couple years in Cincinnati, but that wasn’t for him. In the 1940s my parents moved to Miami, and my father started a construction business. He invented a new kind of breeze block—a ventilated brick—that was common in Florida before air-conditioning was in every building. My dad’s design allowed air to blow through the block, but it kept out rain and direct sunlight. The breeze blocks my father made were called Munday Blocks, and they are in hotels and schools across Florida and Latin America. My dad manufactured them at his own shop. He built the house my brother and I grew up in out of Munday Blocks.

  Our house was in an ideal 1950s neighborhood. We were by a canal, and I accidentally-on-purpose fell in the water every day of the week. I made my own boat when I was in elementary school. I loved exploring the swamps. I loved maps.

  My dad’s shop was down the street. There were welding shops nearby, machine shops, electrical shops. I was curious about everything, and I apprenticed in all the shops. I learned all the trades. Before I could drive, I was rebuilding my own cars, motorcycles, and boats.

  My dad was such a neat guy. He loved horse racing. I’ve always wished Jon could have met my father because they both liked horses. My dad didn’t bet like Jon. He bet at the two-dollar window.

  My dad was honest. He was frugal because the construction business was cyclical. He’d always say, “When you have chicken, make sure you save the feathers, because you might have a day where all you have is feathers.”

  When I was young, my dad died from cigarette smoking. I ran his business from the time I was a teenager. But it went downhill. Munday Blocks were labor-intensive to manufacture, and by the late 1960s air-conditioning was killing off the entire breeze block industry.

  I street-raced motorcycles and cars. I love piston engines. I love speed. I became friends with a black motorcycle club because I was the only white mechanic who wouldn’t cheat them. From there I started a custom motor shop.

  My best friend was a guy I must have drag-raced a thousand times. His name was Ray Delmer, but I called him Dad because he taught me more about engines and about life than anybody. After my dad died, I was closer to Delmer than anyone, and it was nice having someone to call Dad.

  Delmer got his pilot’s license about the time Jimmy Carter became president, and the economy turned to poop. My custom motor shop was barely hanging on. Delmer told me that he and other pilots were getting into smuggling. I stayed away from smuggling until one day in about 1978 when Delmer told me that a guy he knew had lost a load of marijuana from his plane. It was now sitting unclaimed in the Everglades. I decided rescuing those marijuana bales would be following my father’s advice to save the feathers off the chicken. I said, “Let’s go get that marijuana.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that. The bales were thrown over a wide area of wetlands. Delmer and I flew over it for a day searching for clues. It was like a Hardy Boys mystery. Eventually I spotted the bales on the ground.

  I learned then that I had a unique ability to find things. It’s more than that. If you show me something on the ground, I’ll find it from the air, and if I see it from the air, I’ll find it on the ground. Later, when I scouted airfields in jungles all over Colombia, that ability came in handy.

  We sold the marijuana bales for $25,000. Back then $12,000 was a year’s income to me. From then on, when it came to smuggling, you could count me in. I learned to fly, but I never got a license. I worked as a kicker, as a mechanic, as a navigator.

  Even though I didn’t smoke marijuana, I saw no reason why the government should tell people what to do with their lives. To me, it was a waste of everyone’s time and money to have the government out there chasing people like me. My word for all the agencies that were hunting us—police, DEA, Customs Service, Coast Guard—was the “Competition.” I dedicated myself to being better than the Competition.

  I learned that success starts with logistics. Most smugglers didn’t have backup plans. I wouldn’t pick one place to land our plane. I’d pick three or four so we’d have alternates. I’d give radios to my crew so they could all communicate. If I needed one radio, I brought three in case the first two had heart attacks. If all the radios died, the people on my ground crew had flashlights and knew basic Morse Code so they could still communicate.

  I picked my crew from friends who worked at repair garages and tire shops and from the black motorcycle club. They were all solid individuals. One of my biker friends liked to fish. I put my prime landing fields by canals. I’d send him out on a bass boat with a pole and a cooler of beer, plus a radio and binoculars so he could watch the access roads and keep an eye on the Competition.

  I’d do everything possible with my planes to increase their capacity for distance, speed, and payload. I’d crank up the horsepower. When you do that, your propellers will cavitate—which is like a car spinning its wheels. You mitigate against cavitation with a longer propeller, but if we put big propellers on little planes, it might make the Competition suspicious. To make the propellers look smaller, I installed tri-blades made for turboprops. You couldn’t tell they were turboprops, and they made my planes appear to have the right proportions.

  To increase my range, I found a company that made rubber fuel tanks for racing cars. They were like water beds. You could fold them up, put them inside the plane, and fill them when you needed to. Fuel is key. You run out of gas in the sky, you can’t put down your kickstand and park on a cloud.

  Putting the extra weight in my planes made them sit wallered down. I put in nitrogen shocks so even fully loaded, my plane would sit high and proud, the way a plane should look.

  Deception was critical. I did everything I could so my planes, my boats, my cars all looked average. Every time I painted a car, I’d tell my painter, “I want you to paint it well, but I want it to look like it’s two, three years old.”

  I also believed in speed on the ground. When my planes landed in the fields we used around Florida, my crew could refuel them in under three minutes. The trunks I built in my cars could hold six 15-gallon jerry cans. I’d carry 180 gallons in two cars. I put four fuel fillers on my planes. When we met the plane, I’d have four people gassing it up simultaneously. It takes forty-three seconds to empty a jerry can. Sometimes we’d fill a plane in just over two minutes. That’s getting up there with NASCAR pit crew speeds, okay?

  My crew carried toothbrushes. We’d clean every crevice inside the plane after we took the cargo out. We carried extra seats to the landing fields and installed them in the cargo area after we emptied the plane. That way, when the plane returned to the airport, it would look like it couldn’t possibly have been flying anything but tourists on a fishing trip.

  The Competition did very little to stop us in 1978. But by 1980, when Dad and I started doing some flights for Max, they were getting better—studying airports, aircraft, pilots, docks. Smugglers had it easy for years, and when the Competition stepped up their game, those guys went down fast. We had to step up our game.

  Max was intelligent, but he didn’t have t
he patience for new ideas. He didn’t want to spend money. When I met Jon, he got involved. He wasn’t afraid to try new ideas. He understood we had to continually improve.

  J.R.: Mickey did amazing things. He ran tourist flights from Miami to the Bahamas. He’d pay women to go on chartered tours. He and his pilot would dress up in uniforms and fly them to a luxury hotel. When the girls checked in, Mickey and the pilot would fly out and smuggle drugs for four days. Then they’d clean the plane, put on their uniforms, pick up the girls, and fly them back to Miami. Mickey called the girls he used the “cover girls.”* Eventually he shut down the Bahama route because they started searching every plane. But Mickey made fools of all the big-shot government lawmen for years. What an evil mind Mickey had, despite his talking like the all-American kid.

  He was always coming up with new ways to trick people. When cops in Dade County got aggressive about stopping cars and searching trunks, Mickey came up with the idea of buying a tow truck company. When we moved cars around the county with drugs in the trunks, we put the cars on flatbed tow trucks. The drivers had work orders. It never occurred to the cops to stop a tow truck and search the car it was towing.

  One of the greatest things Mickey did was situate secret landing fields in the last place anybody expected them—on government property. Mickey brought in most of our coke at old U.S. military bases. What a twisted guy. Don’t be fooled by Mickey’s little happy smile.

  MICKEY: The government locations I found were abandoned Nike missile sites.* These were built with a high standard of quality, from the missile silos to the access roads. They made terrific landing fields.

  When I started exploring the Nike sites, I’d go out with a fishing pole and a small cutting torch in a knapsack. These sites went on for miles, and they had fences everywhere. I rode on a Honda 70 minibike light enough to toss over the fences. That way I could climb over the fences and keep riding.